Flat Rate or Hourly Rates for Classic Amp Work?

[bob p]

When you perform repairs do you charge flat-rate, hourly, or a combination of both?

The reason that I ask this is that we have an active thread where someone has mentioned the liabilities that go with working at home and allowing strangers to come to your house, and I brought up the idea of working as a repair agent for a brick and mortar store in order to avoid those problems.

the problem with working as a repair agent for a 3rd party store, if you bill by parts and time, is that it's hard for the store to give the customer and up-front indication of what repairs might cost. Their job would be a whole lot simpler if they had a menu of flat-rate prices to look up when answering a customer's questions, so I thought I'd ask:

Do any of you provide a flat-rate repair menu for work on classic amps? Or do you prefer to charge for parts and time?

If you do offer flat-rate repairs, what kind of cost structure are you using, and do you think the costs in your local are typical of costs in other locales?

[Enzo]

Flat rates are tough.

I used to have a rate sheet, based on my hourly rate. Mostly it gave minumums. Guitar amps were one hour, mixers were two hours, synths were an hour and a half. or whatever. I also mentioned at the bottom we reserved the right to waive a minimum. meaning if I found a wire had come off a speaker terminal, I could just charge the guy $20 for knowing what to do without charging him $60 for an hour. If I felt like it.

I can also state with reasonable confidence that most guitar amps are repaired within two hours. Hell i could even just state a two hour cap on labor if I wanted. Parts are additional.

In reality, no one sees my log book, I can charge whatever I feel like for a repair. If it looks like I can make money on a repair and still knock a little off a bill, I am free to do so. If someone was a pain in the ass about their amp, I am also free to charge list price for everything.

When you say flat rate, I have to think you mean labor, as parts can be anything from zero to $300. A quad of 6550 and an output transformer, and you have a large repair ticket. The labor might be minimal there but the repair still costs $$$$.

people used to ask for estimates, and I had to explain I can give an estimate but it isn't free. Point of information: I never took in a bench fee. Many shops charge a bench fee when the amp comes in. $35, 40 60, whatever. That was or diagnostics, and would be applied towards repair if the repair was approved. decline the repair, you don;t get the bench fee back. But I never did that, I preferred to have a relationship with the customers, It worked for me. problem with estimates is I have to pretty much do the repair to find out what is wrong with the amp.

So what I preferred to do was establish a budget. And you can do this with the store in place of a flat rate. I talk to the customer and establish that I will diagnose the amp and do any repairs up to some amount, say $100. if it is $100 or less, I will go ahead and do it. If it looks to exceed the $100, I will discuss it with the customer for his approval. The store can have a stated policy that repair up to $100 will be completed automatically. or your version of that.


Pricing can be difficult, and needs to fit the locale. My $60 labor rate I feel was competitive here, but in Manhattan it would be more than twice that. Someplace else, $60 might be too much. I do know that a lot of people shop by the number. If I charge $60 and some other shop in town charges $45, they like that shop better, even though when I go to that shop I see estimate tags on Peavey box mixers with three hours labor, and I have a hard time filling one hour labor on a Peavey solid state amp. Customers see shops as generic, never occurs to then that I might take one hour to do the job while the cheaper shop takes three.

Are you just doing tube amps? Or even just old fender amps? or are you also doing PA mixers and power amps and synths and lighting and...and...and...

[Tom Phillips]

Time & materials based charging for classic amp work. Unofficial sliding scale for big / interesting projects done for good customers / interesting people.
Flat rate for warranty station work in the past but no longer maintain any warranty agreements.

[Enzo]

Warranty flat rates were always free money to me, Pretty much no matter what was wrong, i got $50, and that might be resoldering a jack or replacing one resistor.

[bob p]

Tom, you have a storefront like Enzo?

[Tom Phillips]

Tom, you have a storefront like Enzo?

No longer.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Hey, if you are looking for an amplifier repair shop, the best bet is to find "speaker hospital", they fixed my valve amplifier. Hope this helps!
https://www.facebook.com/SpeakerHospital/

Wow, geeze I wish I'd heard about this before, it would have saved me so much hassle to SHIP ALL MY CUSTOMER'S GEAR TO AUSTRALIA AND BACK.

[Richard]

It would save time as well.

[52 Bill]

C'mon guys, he's new here and it seems all of his posts suggest that stuff be sent to his place of business. Or maybe his friends or family or...

[bob p]

I have used the ignore list for the first time.

[g1]

There is a little triangle at the lower left of each post. It is the "Report Post" function and should be used to report spam.
Otherwise there is no one monitoring for spammers.

[Richard]

Perhaps we should all post to the company's facebook page, seems fair. I'd rather see legit spam (computer generated auto-reply stuff) than these replies. Regular spam is just noise, this feels like I'm being lied to.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Regular spam is just noise, this feels like I'm being lied to.

It's that fake Crocodile Dundee accent that set me off.

Bot or not, the next thing I did is hit that triangle of doom.

Crikeys!

[big_teee]

You guys are Tough!
My spam-dar didn't go off!
T

[Justin Thomas]

Mine didn't initially, but three posts on three threads, all in a matter of minutes, asking us to ship a 50lb amp to Ozzieland? Maybe not spam, but...

I know we occasionally have a new member open up six-year-old thread, usually followed by a profuse apology about making such a rookie mistake. So if maybe we get an "ooops, didn't know most of y'all we're a half a world away!", we'll forgive the SpamTron mistakes...

Admittedly, I <enjoy> reading some of the spam, bot or (quasi?)-human.

Justin