question about running your own shop

[bsco]

I am curious.....I know some you have full blown shops with employees...but some of you might be like me...a sole operator working out of your home.....do you take anything to repair even if it is something like a $79 stomp box???.....and if so, how do you make any money from it to make it worth your while?? obviously, you can't spend a lot of time on something that does not cost a lot of money........or do you?????.. how do some of you approach this??
Cheers

[nosaj]

I am curious.....I know some you have full blown shops with employees...but some of you might be like me...a sole operator working out of your home.....do you take anything to repair even if it is something like a $79 stomp box???.....and if so, how do you make any money from it to make it worth your while?? obviously, you can't spend a lot of time on something that does not cost a lot of money........or do you?????.. how do some of you approach this??
Cheers

Have a minimum bench fee to cover diagnostics. That's weeds out the tire kickers and gives them an idea of what it would take to fix it.

Jason

[J M Fahey]

It depends a lot on where you live and also what the expected problem is and ease of unit replacement.

In a place like downtown NY, rental and tax is murder, so any real shop must charge $125 an hour, 1 hour minimum, or die. Period.

In a smaller city you might get even with, say, half as much.

Now, will the customer pay $60 to have a pedal repaired?

Is it worth for you to make $10/15 net over 1 or 2 hours?

Because you will "waste" at least an extra hour searching for some part (say a footswitch, pot, knob, battery holder, DC connector, etc.) , ordering it, getting it, etc. or getting a schematic, maybe asking here.

Problem is, products in our Market are way too cheap.

A week ago a guy was asking at DIY Audio about a schematic to build a simple balanced Mic to unbalanced Line preamp to feed his Canon video camera, I suggested he buys this instead, which accepts two microphones, has line inputs, and will later help him mix the audio track for his film ... all for U$64.99 .
Amazon.com: Behringer Xenyx 802 Premium 8-Input 2-Bus Mixer with Xenyx Mic Preamps and British EQs: Musical Instruments



How much will a customer pay for any repair here?

[Mick Bailey]

The main problem I'm faced with is the cost of repair compared to the replacement cost of the item. I've always worked on the principle that a repair that costs more than 50% of the replacement cost is Beyond Economical Repair (BER). That's the rule I apply to general consumer-grade electronics. Sometimes the customer wants the item fixed regardless, because of sentimental or other reasons.

It's often difficult to earn even a burger-flipping rate for a job if you get it wrong. I put a stop-loss on certain jobs on low-value equipment; If I can't get a good idea of where the fault lies within 10 minutes I stop. A lot of inexpensive gear can be very complex and involve non-standard size pots or switches, sockets, or have custom ICs. Finding a supplier and then meeting minimum order or international shipping fees means the repair is inflated even further.

Additionally, every new piece of equipment involves a learning-curve to understand how it works. To repair it means that you may have to know as much as a specialist repair shop for that particular piece of kit, and even then you may not have access to the same level of technical information or schematics. I recently had a Zoom pedal in to look at where only certain patch locations had a hash of digital noise on them. The complexity of the pedal versus purchase price and the time involved couldn't have been an economical fix for me. I bet if it went back to Zoom they would have just swapped the board out. It probably has a $4 factory-gate price.

Fortunately in many cases a fault can easily be traced - broken battery connector, bad joint on a DC connector or socket, or bad electro-mechanical component. These are quick fixes, like the broken jacks on post-Christmas starter-amps.

[bsco]

Thanks guys...I get people giving me all sorts of stuff.....as I work for myself, I try to fix whatever I am given but there were things that I could not get repaired.....and I probably spent way too much time on it before I came to that conclusion....especially the proprietary stuff where schematics are not available and parts are very hard to get....I guess I will have to weed out these time wasters but these people could have more expensive items that they would want repaired later down the road.....and I would not want to miss out on those opportunities....however, having said that, I still find it hard to turn stuff away....I guess I will have to be more open in cutting my loses earlier than later......the bench fee will weed the low end stuff out for sure.....thanks for the replies.....
Cheers

[Jazz P Bass]

To me, a 'diagnostic bench fee' is very kind way of saying "NO".

If they go for it, then there is no loss.

Then it is up to you to know when to bag it if you cannot figure it out.

[52 Bill]

When building a business, you often have to do things that are sometimes contrary to making money.

I personally do not keep up with all of the newest pedals, mixers, whatevers, but with access to a computer I can fairly quickly find out what something is, what it sells for and if service information is readily available. I really can't charge for the Google time, but it all goes to the learning process.

When someone brings in a cheap pedal say, I will tell them that they can buy a new one from the big store down the road for $40 and that I will have to charge nearly that much just to see if it is something fixable. But I also tell them that if I open it up and find that the problem is something really simple, I will fix it for that same price.

If you lose money or just break even on a few small things you still come away from the job with some new knowledge and sometimes a happy and loyal returning customer, who will hopefully bring in their next repair that will make you money.

[Enzo]

This is part of why it annoys me so when someone writes in, "What are the common issues on model XYZ?" They want to know what goes wrong on each model and what to do about it. There is no magic list. Learn to troubleshoot. I am with Bill, I surely do not keep up with the latest stuff. The choice you need to make is to either try and learn a list of parts to replace when you see certain problems, OR you learn to troubleshoot things.

Everything you pick up has a process at its center. Signal goes in one end and out the other. Recognize that and you have it beat.

I don't look at an amp and think OK, LIne 6, what breaks on those? I think, OK, this is an amp. It has inputs, outputs, speakers, power supply. My first job is to decide which of those subsections has the problem. A speaker is a speaker, whether it says Line 6 or Fender on it. I don't need to know anything special to see if a speaker works just from the brand.


The work? You got more than you can handle? I can always decline the repair. Nothing requires me to fix a $40 thing just because it walked in my door. If I am hosed, I won't take in small things as much. But if I am sitting here playing solitaire, why would I not help someone? It isn't about what the thing cost, it is more about what it is worth to the owner. Maybe he can get a new one for $40, but he likes THIS one, and his gig is tonight. It may be worth it to him to pay for a repair today instead of waiting for a new one tomorrow. And in general, it is replacement cost rather than worth. "The amp only cost me $25, I'm not putting $50 into it." OK, the question then is this - can you replace the amp for less than $75?

The customer is King, but he is not "always right." It is OK to say "No". Learn to say it. Learn never to take something apart past the point of getting it back together. Because when you get into something and decide to bail, you better be handing back an assembled unit along with your "No."

[nevetslab]

I have a well-equipped shop at a major sound stage/equipment rental facility in Burbank, trade fixed number of hours for the shop space, and don't pay for power, phone or internet, so the overhead isn't much. I never have put a website together to advertise, which has for sure hurt my income. I am fairly visible to the working clients that use our facility, and pick up work that way, along with some steady clients also in the equipment rental business, and freelance on studio maintenance & room tuning/acoustics work. When times are slow, there's always broken gear needing repairs at this facility.

A down side to running it all yourself is the desk time, tracking down parts & ordering them, trying to build up an order so you don't keep paying for more shipping fees. Tracking down documentation and the never-ending learning curve on gear you've never serviced. I do draw the line on what I will service. No consumer gear, NO TV's, VCR's, CD/DVD players, etc. Pro Audio & Back Line gear only for the most part. Not set up for speaker reconing and don't have the space/time to handle keyboards. I was apprenticing for Tim Conniff's vintage keyboards service that he runs out of his house in Encino, CA a couple days week....a totally brilliant man & great musician (keys, trumpet, flute). Illness in his family has that on hold still.

I'm a terrible business man. I have a passion for this thing we do, and too often say yes to restoration of vintage gear, or turning an old RCA PA amp from the 50's into a botique amp, etc. Projects that will rack up 40-60 hrs sometimes. I never get the labor cost out of those projects. I'll get a decent price for it, and have the satisfaction of putting the care and expertise into a piece of gear worth restoring. Often get work as a result of people seeing those and I get new clients. I love what I do. I'm never out of work, but when I'm working for me, I don't pay myself, and that chunk of time spent is a hard one if it's in a period with no client work and no cash flow available from the equipment rental company.

I do love project work when it pays. Recently indulged in hydrophone preamp design & PCB design/fab for towed hydrophone arrays used in cetacean research around the world, and now getting involved with sea gliders for similar purposes. Totally out in left field, other than working in a different field of acoustics (below the water line rather than above). Somehow you manage to squeeze it in and get the bills paid while people pay you to do what you love doing.

There's always something to learn when gear comes in with an odd problem. I keep detailed service notes and a database log to track it all. I photo-document anything unusual, or just those things that assist in putting stuff back together. Really helpful over the years now...you get to see trends with certain gear. And this forum is just a terrific resource & wealth of knowledge....amazingly brilliant folks constantly contributing their time and effort to assist those honestly seeking knowledge and solutions.

While I could do some of this at home, I commute a fair distance within LA to get to this sound stage complex, so the temptation to get distracted by what's at home is not an issue. Work never stops if there's a computer available.

[bsco]

Thanks guys.....lots of useful info here.....if I was to turn away the small cheap stuff, I would lose a fair bit of work......so I can't turn it all away.....so it looks like I will have to charge a bench fee..(somebody mentioned $60 which sounds good)...and I guess I will have to decide a cut-off time frame....how much, I have no idea as of yet.....


I also spend lots of time on the net searching for info which I can't bill out.....but like somebody else said....it is part of the learning process.....so I guess the only option here would be to take each piece on a case by case basis and then improve or refine the process as I go....

I look at all types of electronic equipment, and for an example, it has been probably 6 months or more since I had a Marshall amp to repair.....One came to the house yesterday.....so it is impossible for me to get to know the common issues that would normally plague this model....and most of the units I repair are the same way......if I do get the same make and model in for repair,they are months apart.....


I started making a repair log some time back for troublesome repairs and have them documented in a binder...somebody has mentioned that here as well.....so I will have to take it one piece of equipment at a time....Thanks to everybody for their input......it has given me some ideas to work with....so, now, it is up to me......
Cheers,
Bernie