Pinegrove Music and the day-nine call

The repair room is behind the shop. One full-time luthier, which is me, and one part-time who comes in three days a week. A refret is three weeks. A neck reset can be longer. A setup is a couple of days if the queue is kind.

People who own instruments are not like people who own appliances. They are attached to the thing they have handed you, and three weeks of hearing nothing is a long time to be attached to something you cannot see.

Day nine, every time

There was a pattern I could have set a calendar by. Somewhere around day nine of a three-week job, the owner would ring. Not angry — just checking. And there was nothing to tell them, because on day nine of a refret the honest answer is "it is in the middle of being done", which sounds exactly like "I have not started".

I tried getting ahead of it with a call on day seven. That worked, in the sense that it moved the problem: now I was making twenty calls a week that were also not about repairing anything.

Photographs instead of phone calls

What made the difference was not scheduling. It was that the job card can carry photographs, and the owner can see them on their own page.

Frets out. Board levelled. Wire seated. Three photographs over three weeks, thirty seconds each to take, and the owner watches the job happen instead of wondering about it. I choose which of my notes are visible — most weeks two or three of the dozen — and that is enough.

The other thing I turned on straight away was the promised date that can move. Long jobs slip; that is the nature of them. A date that changes on the owner's page, with the date it changed, is a completely different experience from a date that quietly passes.

What it did to the business

The day-nine call is gone. Not reduced — I can think of two in the last year, both on jobs where I had forgotten to photograph anything.

That is about six hours a week back, which in a one-and-a-half-person shop is a real amount of bench time. I take about a fifth more work than I did, and I have stopped turning down the long jobs, which are the interesting ones and the profitable ones and the ones I used to avoid because of what they did to the phone.

Deposits on anything over three weeks was the last thing I added, and it is the reason there is no longer a shelf of finished instruments nobody has come for. I should have done it a decade ago.