Hi Marshall, The fortune cookie is work, work, work, work, work. Read, read, read, read, read. Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. Follow my advice in what I did and still do to work my business and it will work. Provided.... That you do what I recommended. Screw the client and they will screw you worse. Word of mouth is a good and bad thing. One person will spread bad news a lot faster than one person will spread good news. It depends on how much energy and TIME that you put into your business and how quickly you learn the basics and how quickly you learn the business aspect of it as to how long it will take to build it up. The more frequent one must return to fix something we already fixed, the longer it will take to build up the business. We must be able to fix things the first time there, not the 3rd, 4th, or never.. These are things that we learn over time and we have all had these situations. The quicker we learn to overcome them, the sooner we make happier customers and happier "us." Other factor's include "location, location, location." If you are in a location where there are not enough pianos to support a business then no matter how hard you try, it will not work. Just like any othe business. Then MOVE. The area must be able to support it. One must push oneself (not saying you do not do this but, I know plenty of techs that do NOT) to get out of bed and proceed forward with pre-scheduling. I guarantee you that if I did not have preset appoinments, I would sleep in every single day of the week. I really would! Knowing this about myself is the reason I preset them. It forces me to get out of bed and go to work. It takes years to build up any business. At least 5 if not 10 years or longer I would say. It does NOT happen over night and there is NOT a magic bullet. The magic bullet is called time, effort, training and energy. This is the same with any business. When my dad retired, my mom had been sick with cancer for 4 years. He spent, especially toward the end of her life, most of his time with her. The business suffered greatly for obvious reasons. When I finally took it over, it had gone to pot. I had to basically start it over as that, was the last thing on his mind. The first, was his dying wife. So, I worked my tail off, going door to door to the old clientele, calling them, sending out letters of introduction, explaining my head off of what took place and what happened and little by little built up a reputation of my OWN eventually landing more and more accounts. Sometimes these accounts were taken away from lousy techs that should never have been tuning in the first place. I glady take these accounts. Do lousy work and they deserve to lose the account IMO. However, I NEVER take accounts from tech friends or GOOD techs. I simply refuse them. They keep theirs, I keep mine. Just a good working relationship between "most" of us here in G.R. Works well for us, always has. That is what I meant by not stepping on other techs toes. From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Marshall Gisondi Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 7:46 AM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: [pianotech] business Hi Everyone, My question is, how long does it take to get from ground zero to the moon where Jer is working so far in advance? :-) I think I'm doing all the right things, yet I'm not booked in advance. I pray every day that God will supply work for the next week and then I do my part of course. I do my best when I tune/service. I even look for ways to add to my income i.e. the piano dismantling job which I had last Friday. Perhaps I've done the things that some might mention to drum jup business, it doesn't hurt to review them again. So my question is, what is the secret to the Chinese proverb Jer in getting more business and booking in advance. Please send the fortune cookie so I can read it. :-) Thanks Marshall Marshall Gisondi Piano Technician Marshall's Piano Service pianotune05 at hotmail.com 215-510-9400 www.phillytuner.com <http://www.phillytuner.com/> Graduate of The School of Piano Technology for the Blind www.pianotuningschool.org <http://www.pianotuningschool.org/> Vancouver, WA _____ The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. Get started. <http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON: WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_3> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100629/3ee738a7/attachment.htm>
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