32-20-Blues said:
You couldn't survive on 25 dollars an hour? Even allowing for costs of ten dollars an hour, that's still 150 per day - 750 bucks a week. Who couldn't live on that?
Well, let's see - our shop manager has 5 daughters. If you think that he could afford a basic middle class lifestyle on $750 a week (assuming that your math on hourly rates is right, and it isn't even close), then you obviously have no kids. That wouldn't even pay for food and his mortgage, not to mention a car, electricity etc...
More to the point, you obviously have no idea what it takes to run a business. $25 an hour doesn't even cover the overhead. Also, you are WAY off base in assuming that a one hour setup means you can do 10 a day. That's one hour of billable bench time, but that is not even close to the actual time spent on the job. In addition to that, you have anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour of time spent with the customer when they bring the instrument in, and another 5-15 when they pick it up. That is not billable time, but it still takes time out of the day. And of course, sometimes the setup isn't perfect the first time, and we need to do some adjustments (not all that often, but sometimes). Do you think we should be charging our customers for that time? Because I don't, and we don't. Still more non-billable hours. And of course our most regular customers are also our friends, and when they come in we will chat with them about their lives - that's just good business, not to mention one of the fun parts of the business. Cutting any of that stuff out would make our quality of work suffer, and that is not something we are willing to do.
OH yeah, and who wants to work ten hours a day? (Well, I frequently do, but then I don't have a wife and kids, or even a girlfriend - and I may just have touched on one of the reasons why.) We are open from 9-5:30 on weekdays, and 9-5 on Saturdays. Our employees work during those hours. Oh, and then there is lunch. That knocks another hour or so off the day.
And then there is the amount of time we spend dealing with the actual business concerns. Our shop manager writes the checks for most of the bills, deals with scheduling issues, and does payroll. Which one of our customers should we bill that too? If you are lucky, about half of your total work hours are billable. The other two repair folks are probably closer to 60-70% billable, but between the shop manager, dad, and myself the overall total is about 50%. Bookkeeping, inventory, talking on the phone with potential customers (including quite a few who will never actually be customers, the occasional drunk, and a few who are so fucking stupid it is a wonder they can even string two words together, much complete sentences), sales with customers who are not there for repair work (strings, picks, accessories, guitars, etc.), yelling at solicitors who can't read the
No Solicitors sign on the door, and all the rest of the little day to day concerns with running a business mean that you simply can not actually make your billing rate your gross pay. Anyone who thinks you can simply doesn't understand how it works to run a business.
And then there are overhead costs. Did you know that businesses get charged a higher rate for electricity? And our phone rates are a LOT higher than for individuals (our monthly phone bill for our two lines, DSL, and our yellow pages ad is over $600).
As far as why we do it, why do you think? We love it. In addition to that, we don't make any money on the repair business, but it is a great advertisement for our guitars, and while it is not in and of itself profitable, it pays for the overhead on the building which is the only way that dad and I can make a profit on our guitar building. Also, we love seeing cool guitars, and we would never get to see as many any other way. They come in and out the door all the time. Also, we love our employees, so there is no way in hell we would tell them, "fuck off, your not making us enough money." We are not in this business to become rich; we are in it because we love doing it, but that doesn't mean we should have to live in the fucking poor house. I'm not whining about anything here. I love the life I live, but I do get pissed off when people act like I'm trying to rip off my customers for wanting a reasonable middle class lifestyle for myself and my employees.
Oh, and we don't charge $500 for every fret job, just the ones which take six and a half hours (stainless steel into a twisted bound neck, for instance). The really expensive ones, though, are the old Martin bar frets. A complete refret with those things is gonna be over $1000. Then again, the guitar is gonna be worth it. I think our most expensive refret was a old Martin with a badly worn fingerboard (it was missing about a quarter of an inch of the surface of the fingerboard on either side, which had to be rebuilt), and of course it had bar frets. THAT cost about $2,000, but the customer was ecstatic. Great sounding guitar, too.
Light
"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
Every luthier or guitar tech I know of works in either an independently-owned business as an authorized service center or in a chain store such as Guitar Center. 
