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Transcript lightly edited for readability — filler and crosstalk trimmed, shop and proper-name spellings corrected (the shop is Guitar Czar; the auto-setup machine is a PLEK). This transcript covers roughly the first 46 minutes (the interview through the deal structure); it continues in the video.
00:05 — Introduction & the 2023 turnaround recap
Ian: Welcome to Loothing for Dollars, everybody — the monthly get-together about the business side of lutherie. Today's a little different: instead of a panel, it's a one-on-one. In my mind this is almost a sequel to a saga that's been unfolding for years. Moses McKinley is joining us to talk about the Guitar Czar repair shop. Welcome, Moses.
Moses McKinley: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me back.
Ian: Moses is no stranger to Loothing for Dollars — we first talked back around 2023. You'd reached out not long after your first business talk for the Looth Group, looking for guidance on a very tenuous set of circumstances at Guitar Czar. It was a turnaround story, and a cautionary tale of how a shop gets into trouble — and how you took the reins to rescue it. It was one of the first real business deep-dives we did with an individual, and people still talk about how much they learned from it. It's in the archives — search "Loothing for Dollars" or "Moses McKinley" and I'll link the prequel. Before we get to today, can you give a quick synopsis of where you found yourself in '22–'23?
04:33 — The October 2021 crisis: 450 guitars in queue
Moses: It was October 2021. My predecessor, who'd run the repair shop for well over a decade, was suddenly gone — they'd let him go — and I basically had to show up and fix all the problems. I'd been a 1099 contract employee.
Ian: You were working there as kind of a mercenary luthier — show up, do your projects, bill what you'd completed, come back days later. Not there daily.
Moses: I'd been there since July 2020, pretty much every day, but I'd become the structural guy — the neck resets, the crazy structural jobs nobody else wanted. I didn't touch the business side until October 2021, when suddenly I was in charge of a shop that was just me and Sebastian, who did some setups and a little soldering — almost a shop gopher, and he'd only been there since April. I walked in, looked at the queue, and there were about 450 guitars. I eliminated about a hundred that weren't really there — duplicates in the system, ones the customer had already picked up — down to about 350, almost all of them physically in the store.
Ian: To put it in context, what you were handed was almost every luthier's nightmare come true, all at once.
08:09 — Cleaning up & hiring: the "Moses School of Luthiery"
Ian: An unbelievable backlog, half of them not even evaluated, customers who hadn't heard about their instruments in years. What was the oldest one?
Moses: The oldest in the shop was from 2016 — roughly five years. It was a nightmare: 350 guitars to finish with almost no help, and now 350 people calling me about them. I sat down with Sebastian, found things he could work on, and the first job was just to clean the shop — there were over a hundred guitars in cases sitting on the floor, taking up half the room. People can go back to the first interview for the photos of that transformation.
Ian: If I'd been handed that, I'd have handed it right back.
Moses: When they asked me to take over, I said no. Then I realized if I said no, they were screwed — no repair shop, a lot of upset people, and the repairs bring people into the store, so sales would drop too. And it was a sizable shop.
Ian: The owners had dedicated about half the square footage to repair, and Guitar Czar was a big store — 30-plus years, 32 I think.
Moses: I ended up hiring a few people and essentially created the "Moses School of Luthiery" — teaching them repair, fixing their mistakes, and handling the customers. I didn't do the bookwork, but I did the scheduling, the prioritization, all the customer relations — ducking all the arrows. It took a couple of years to get through the queue. Some jobs I had to call and say, "You were quoted $50, but that was five years ago, and it was massively under-quoted to begin with" — someone had been working off a 30-year-old rate sheet. One guitar came in for a binding replacement but needed a neck reset and a re-brace, top off. The customer was irate about the wait and the new quote. I had to eat some of that — our labor has value, I won't devalue it, but I'll meet you in the middle. He said, "Don't worry about it, throw the guitar away," which was backwards from everything he'd said about how important it was. But for the most part we honored the old quotes, even when they were half what they should have been.
14:01 — Building out the crew & partnering with Rob Gray
Ian: To the credit of the owners — what were their names?
Moses: Paul and Mason — father and son.
Ian: To their credit, they backed you to the hilt — whatever losses, whatever investment it took. That episode is almost a Harvard Business School turnaround class: billing, personnel, customer relations, every aspect of lutherie that could go wrong did, and the turnaround over those two years was remarkable.
Moses: Funny you bring that up — at the end of that interview you pointed out that I kept saying "when I accomplish this, then I'll finally be in a better spot," and you asked if I realized I'd already accomplished the thing. That was the first time I'd considered it. When the stream ended, I wept at my bench — the hard work had actually paid off, and I'd been so tunnel-visioned on how hard it was that I completely missed it. So thank you for that.
Ian: You set the ship right, then reimagined and redesigned the whole workshop and built up the personnel. How many luthiers at the end?
Moses: Four at the end; seven at the most. A lot of the guys who came through learned the craft and moved on — one's at Mike Lull in Seattle, one at Cream City in Milwaukee, one's a touring guitar tech. Watching them go out and become their own luthiers has been more worth it than anything. Three have been with me a long time: Sebastian (he left briefly, then came to the new shop), Sean — the first guy I hired — and Aiden, who I hired early in 2022. Some of the changeover happened when I stepped back from managing the old store. I'd been approached by Rob Gray of Radical Instrument Products — RIP Custom Guitars. Rob and I went to the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery about a class apart; he's up in Ogden, about 45 minutes away, and he's a true craftsman — phenomenal builds. He asked me to do some of his "select" production-model work part-time because he was too busy; I could do a couple of days a week while still doing Guitar Czar work. It's been about two years now, and it's a blast. When I went half-time, a couple of the guys figured they'd learn less and moved on, and Sean took over the foreman position.
22:43 — Guitar Czar's decline & the closure announcement
Moses: Sean ran the shop until Guitar Czar itself shut down in October of last year.
Ian: That took a lot of people by surprise — Guitar Czar was a widely accepted institution, the guitar place, 30-plus years in the making.
Moses: Those of us who worked there had seen an unhealthy trajectory for a couple of years — the retail apocalypse. A lot of shops went down; Salt City Drums, a staple right next door, shut down not long after. We got word on October 10th that October 25th would be the last day. I was supposed to work with Rob that day, but I called him and said I had to go talk to the guys. I'd actually already moved a bunch of my machinery out — I was getting ready to open my own place again. My past shops had always closed because the buildings got sold and the tenants kicked out so they could tear them down — Salt Lake City in a nutshell. So I went to tell the guys I was opening my own shop but couldn't take them all on; the square footage I'd need, I didn't think I could afford. The plan was a one-man repair-and-restoration shop, and I'd try to place the guys at other shops in town. That was the plan for about a week — until I had a conversation with the owner about the PLEK machine. I said, if you need money quick, you could sell the PLEK for a pretty penny.
26:48 — The retail apocalypse: sales collapse vs repair growth
Moses: They were shutting down because the economics of a brick-and-mortar music store were drowning them. In 2021 they were doing over $100,000 a month in sales; by 2025 it was about $30,000 a month. Repair, though, was consistent the whole time, always on an upward trajectory — not steep, but every month outpaced the one before.
Ian: During the turnaround, the owners looked at the shop the way a lot of music stores do — as a loss leader, a traffic generator for retail, not a revenue generator. But a well-run shop can be the bread and butter, the bones of the business, so you're not chasing all your sales before December. And after your turnaround they saw repair revenue climbing month after month, while retail was just going away.
Moses: Right. Repair did better every year; sales got worse and worse, and the margins got smaller and smaller. Fewer people came in, and what they did buy carried less margin. It got to a point where they simply couldn't operate.
Ian: Was it the retail misery — competing with online prices, with Amazon for Gibsons?
Moses: Absolutely. People would play something for an hour, the sales guy asks what they think, and they say, "I love it — I'm going to order it right now," pull out their phone and buy it somewhere else, a copy that doesn't play as well. Slimmer margins made it even harder, and they had to make the decision to close. It was very much "this is not viable, it's a sinking ship, we'd rather get out immediately." It was heartbreaking — the day they announced it, the store did more business than it ever had; people bought nearly everything. The sales team was gutted: "Where have all these people been the last few years?" So many said, "I used to come into the old location every day — this is my first time here." You have the memories, but those aren't real support. I had the PLEK conversation again, and the owners said they didn't know what it was worth. I said you could probably get $80,000 — it's an older machine, but they're still valuable. They said great, if you can find someone to pick it up. And I turned and walked away.
32:09 — The idea sparks: from buying the CNC to buying the shop
Moses: The first thought in my head was, I'm never going to find a PLEK machine for $80,000 again the rest of my life. Maybe I should buy it — maybe I need to rethink this whole strategy. I went home, talked with my fiancée, made a bunch of phone calls, and jumped through hoops. The store was closing in about eight days, and we had to be moved out seven days after that — a tiny window.
Ian: When did the idea of buying the whole repair business take hold?
Moses: The more I thought about it: if I buy the PLEK, I'll have more work; if I have more work, I'll need someone to run it and more space; if I need more space, I might as well have the right tools; and if I'm going to have literally this shop in a different place, why wouldn't I bring the people I've trained and a business model I know works — just pick it up and set it back down? Pretty easy to connect the dots. So I went back and asked, "How much for everything else in the store?" For them, part of it was a relief — they wouldn't have to move it all — so they'd sell me everything else for an extra $5,000. The thing was, I didn't have the money. I'd sold my car earlier in the year, planning to ride my motorcycle all summer and buy a truck in the fall. Immediately I knew where that money was going — and now I needed about $80,000 more, and still no car. My fiancée and I wrote a business plan over two days. Because I'd been so meticulous about the numbers for so long, I could build out the expected income by category and the costs — not just rent, but shop disposables, tape, razor blades, strings.
35:53 — Securing the loan & negotiating the deal terms
Moses: I had a few people I was talking to about investing or a loan. My fiancée was explaining it to one of her best friends, who said, "I hope you find someone with the money." Back and forth, and eventually the friend said, "I can't offer this money to you — but you can ask me, and we can have a conversation." My fiancée said, "I wasn't aware you were in that position." She said, "I can be." We had that conversation, and on the Tuesday before the store closed — three days after I came up with the idea — they wired me half the money. I agreed to pay the owners about $45,000 and take the entire shop, the customer list, and the name. I'm a completely different company — different EIN, different tax number.
Ian: You created a new business, but the Guitar Czar brand transferred as part of the sale, under your LLC.
Moses: It's actually still the LLC I've had for about 15 years — the same business. Guitar Czar became a DBA, another asset within it. I got the check, and we were still trying to find a place to move to.
39:32 — The mad dash: finding a new location in days
Ian: So you bought all the equipment, fixtures, tools, parts inventory, and the PLEK — was there other machinery?
Moses: A tabletop sander, a spindle sander, a disc sander, a 10-inch bandsaw — little stuff. I already had my full woodworking shop; most of the woodworking tools at Guitar Czar were already mine. We secured the location just a few days before month-end. It was hard to find a place where we could make sawdust, make noise, and that wasn't in a terrible or hard-to-find part of town. I talked to five or six realtors and had several looking; everyone in the shop was driving around daily. Every day, heading to the old Guitar Czar, I'd take side streets on my motorcycle looking for places. I saw the sign for this place, called, and they got right back to me. Another business was already here, about to move out — they had to be out by October 31st, and so did we. They'd bought the building and were moving to the back side, which was good, because the PLEK could come in while they were still here so it could be calibrated and set up. The crazy part: the security deposit was $10,000 — all the startup capital I'd set aside went right out the window. Rob Gray was a huge help here, too; he's got an incredible mind, and when you interview him you'll hear the wildest story about getting into a building. We signed the lease two days before we moved in. On Halloween, October 31st, we rented moving trucks and crammed everything over here. It took about a week and a half to set up enough to use most of the space, then we waited on the business license because we were in a different city.
Ian: How far did you move?
Moses: Only about five miles — but just enough to cross into another city. We were in Murray City; now we're in South Salt Lake City, with Salt Lake City about a hundred yards behind us. If we'd been a hundred yards the other way, I could've kept my old business license. We finally opened on November 21st.
44:18 — Carrying over the Guitar Czar name & the deal structure
Moses: We got help from everyone — Rob, my fiancée, Rob's wife, and the significant others of everyone who works here came to move and organize. We might not have made it through the first few months without Acoustic Music and House of Guitars in town, because for some reason the string vendors didn't take us seriously at first — it took a long time to get our accounts authorized.
Ian: Let's back up to the deal itself. What was the structure you struck with the old owners?
Moses: I paid them $40,000 up front for the PLEK machine, and in exchange they get 5% of revenue until the remainder is paid off.
Ian: Five percent of gross revenue, or of profit?
Moses: Five percent of gross revenue.
Ian: So that's a fixed expense right at the top of your balance sheet…
[Transcript continues in the video from here — the source captions available for this edit end at about 45:59, in the middle of the deal-terms discussion.]