Your First 100 Paying Customers
Sep 22, 2023
Your First 100 (Paying) Customers (Piano Tuning and Repair)
Welcome to our Series on Piano Tuning and Repair.
One of the challenges of starting out as a new piano technician is getting your base of customers. Most of a piano technicians business comes from word of mouth, but without a base of customers to spread the word, it is difficult to generate business this way. In this video we talk about a marketing technique to give your new tuning business a kickstart. Feel free to watch our other videos on piano tuning and repair.
If you want to see more of our Piano Tuning and Repair Series, click here to access the entire playlist.
Video Transcript:
Hi, thanks for joining us for another video here from Howard Piano Industries. Today's video we're going to be talking a little bit about a marketing idea that I've heard of over a number of times from different technicians. I hear from a lot of you, a lot of our customers that are looking for a way to get their business started and give them up give them a boost when they're first starting out as a new piano technician. So this is just an idea I thought I'd share with you.
A lot of times it's hard to get started because so much of what we get, as far as new customers, is by word of mouth. That's probably our biggest source of new customers, and obviously if you're just starting out, not many people know about you, so you don't have a way of getting people to talk about you.
One idea I've heard of from others-- and this isn't something I've ever tried when I was starting out, but it's certainly a good one-- is that they offer a discounted price for a certain number of tunings. I'll give an example in a minute here, but basically this is something that will generate some interest, and gets maybe a small base of customers that you've tuned for. Another thing is that it gets you some experience, getting to work on some pianos right away.
You can get the word out in many different ways; I've heard using Facebook or, you know, email your friends, or people that you know. Saying, for example, your first 100 customers-- or first 100 paying customers-- you'll give a discounted price. Say you want your normal price to be $100, okay, you might say, "Well, I'm running a promotion to get a kickstart to my business: I'm gonna offer discounted price of, say $60 for the first 100 customers"
Okay, you might say, "Wow, that's quite a discount. It's a cut in my pay." But you don't want to look at it like that. You want to look at it like, "Okay well if I get my first 100 customers, for one thing I'm gonna make $6,000 from that" (These numbers are can be changed, you can give a bigger discount or less of a discount just depending on where you want your an ultimate price to be at when when you finish that first promotion).
But, you know, you say so first of all you say you can learn you're gonna earn $6,000 on those first 100 customers okay and that's $6,000 that you wouldn't have had, and for probably the bigger thing is you're gonna have a lot of experience! I mean, if you tune a hundred pianos, you're not only gonna see a lot of different pianos, but you're gonna see maybe other issues or problems that you come across. It's not uncommon when you go to tune a piano that it might have something else that it needs it might need cleaning that's another form of income that you can add to that you might come across the number of pianos that need cleaned you know you can add that as an extra service either on that same service call, or you know, schedule for another time. It may need repairs, so you can get some experience on repairs. Those first hundred pianos are real crucial. You can actually get experience in finding and being able to diagnose and fix those problems that you come across.
Of course, the biggest thing is once you've got those first 100 customers, those are gonna be not only hopefully ongoing customers (some people don't tune as regularly as others), but out of those 100 customers you may have possibly half of them or more that get tuned every year. So all of a sudden you have a base of customers, 100 hundred people on your list, and those 100 customers are going to refer your name to others. We have to make sure you have lots of business cards available to hand those out freely to people, especially if it's a piano teacher, or somebody that you know is in the music field that knows a lot of people with pianos.
So that's a good way to get kickstart your business. Again, you know how you get that word out, you know there's a variety of different things you can do. You can do it through Facebook or just talking to people. That's just an idea that for those of you that are just starting out, and wondering, "How do I get my name out there and get business going as a new piano technician?"
