Loothing for Dollars: Workflow Management

Transcript lightly edited for readability — filler, crosstalk and screen-share housekeeping trimmed, tool and proper-name spellings corrected. Speaker attributions added where clear.

00:00 — Welcome & the panel

Doug Proper: Welcome to Loothing for Dollars for the month of June — the monthly get-together where we talk about the stuff you’re not supposed to talk about in polite society: the business side of lutherie, the money side. It’s a place to unpack the things that have nothing to do with sharpening chisels or fixing braces or resetting necks — the nuts and bolts of running a successful business. By no means are we projecting that we know how you should do it; it’s more that we need a place to discuss it among ourselves. If you’re joining us and want to chime in, unmute, raise your hand, or put it in the chat — we want a conversation, not a presentation.

Doug: Today’s topic, for lack of a better description, is workflow management — how work makes its way through your shop. Our panel: Chad Gerbe of Steel City Guitar Works in Bellevue, Pennsylvania — in the shadow of Pittsburgh — a luthier with his head screwed on straight when it comes to business, always somebody with a plan. Mike Hoenerhoff of Elderly Instruments — Chad and I were talking about this subject and I asked who else should be on the panel, and he said “get Mike” — because Mike works in probably one of the busiest multi-luthier shops in the universe, let alone the country. And Bryan Parris of Parris Guitars in Knoxville, Tennessee — a serial entrepreneur running a shop, quite frankly, the way anybody should, and somebody I rely on a great deal on these panels.

04:49 — What workflow management means

Doug: You can consider it more like herding cats in a three-ring circus. It’s one thing to get work into your shop; it’s another to perform it. But getting a guitar out of its case, onto the bench, done, back in its case, and back to the customer is difficult enough one guitar at a time. The increase in the number of instruments you work on is directly proportional to the difficulty of getting instruments out the door: bottlenecks, instruments that feel like they’ve been lying around the shop forever. How do you keep tabs on it, control it, direct it, even account for it? That’s what lots of luthiers struggle with as their backlog grows. We’re going to see four completely different ways of doing it today — and the more we can borrow from each other, the better we’ll all deal with it.

07:45 — A backlog is a virtue

Doug: I’ve preached this a long time: a backlog is a virtue. It’s good to have more work than you know what to do with, because things slow down at points through the year. I’ve heard people say “I don’t like to have more instruments in house than I can finish in a week,” or “no more than one long-term project at a time — it manages my stress.” True — but as a business owner, what raised my stress was realizing rent was due the month after next and there wasn’t a big enough pile of guitars in the shop to pay for it. That caused more stress than the pile ever did.

Chad Gerbe: Right now I have a wait list. At a certain point I had more guitars in my shop than I was comfortable with, plus appointments scheduled for further drop-offs — and that’s directly related to how you take in repairs, how you set appointments, and the technology behind it. I’m also dealing with a shop in my home, and by definition there’s a limit to the space.

Doug: Unless your family doesn’t mind guitars stacked in the family room, the guest room, and behind the refrigerator. There’s usually a ceiling on how many instruments you can take in. We used to deal with that in a smaller shop; the longer we’ve been in business, the more we’ve yielded space to the backlog. We run a sizable backlog and work on dozens of instruments at once.

10:52 — Inside Elderly

Doug: While we’re talking about backlogs — let’s talk about Elderly. When we visited, I thought I knew what a big backlog was. I had never seen the sheer number of instruments being worked on. What does “backlog” mean from your perspective?

Mike Hoenerhoff: There are really two backlogs — the basic-stuff backlog and the really big restoration backlog. For small stuff — anything under about three hours: nut, saddle, setup, prep work, a bridge reglue, minor repairs — in all my time here we’ve never been more than three or four weeks out. At any given time my queue holds three kinds of work: customer repairs, consignment repairs — like a customer repair, except it has to be fixed before it can be sold — and everything the store owns that needs fixing up. That last pile gets divided up somewhat by tech experience level.

Mike: We have eight techs at benches right now — it was nine; we just lost one, so if anyone’s looking for a job, send your résumé to Michigan. Customer repairs get priority. A retail customer at the counter gets the two-to-three-week quote; consignment stuff we might schedule four to five weeks out. The bigger restorations go to those of us who’ve been here longer, and the newer folks do more of the store-stock instruments. This used instrument on my bench is store-owned — I’ve had it two months because it has about thirty cracks in it.

Mike: On intake: whoever takes a repair in at the counter is expected to do that job start to finish — we don’t mail out tasks to different people. Consignments, Steve — our foreman — doles out to whoever would be best at it or has room in their queue. The used store stock, since Steve took over: “It’s all back there. Go grab something and work on it. Just don’t grab something over your head.” He trusts everyone to get at it. And counter duty is basically whoever doesn’t have glue on their hands — once you’ve worked in the room a while you get a sense of the rhythm. My bench is the furthest from the counter, thank God, which is probably why I do so many consignment repairs.

Mike: We do let certain people who are good at certain instruments handle most of that work — but we try not to overdo it, because it creates what management calls silos. We had one guy doing basically all the banjo dowel-stick resets. He liked them, we let him — and now he’s gone, and I’ve done maybe three in my whole time here, so I have to get back into them. Same with Steve Olson, one of the best resonator techs in the world — I told him: don’t touch another resonator until you retire. Make the rest of us do them and critique our work, because we can’t just have you do all of them and then be gone.

Doug: It’s just too easy to let Steve pick it up, though.

20:13 — Parris Guitars: specialized benches

Doug: Bryan, you assign work outward as each guitar comes in — and guitars make their way across multiple benches before they go back to the customer. At Elderly, once a guitar hits your bench you own the job until it goes back in the case; your shop works differently.

Bryan Parris: Right. We’ve got benches set up for certain things — a dedicated electronics bench with mostly the same guy at it every week. Part of that is how I started: it used to be all me, and you can’t just stop everything and open a storefront, so I started the shop with a dedicated setup guy doing setups, fret levels, nuts, saddles — the bread-and-butter — while I ran my other company. Then it got too busy for me to do electronics and pass them over, so I hired an electronics guy. It’s grown from there: now two setup guys, an electronics guy, and a creative-luthier type I’m helping learn neck resets — he does bridge reglues, crack repairs, braces. I have him set up as the structural repair guy. Five of us including me.

Doug: So you take a work order that’s a laundry list and explode it out — this section goes to this bench first, then to that person. Which means you also have to keep tabs on who did what to which instrument, because you’re paying people for it.

25:59 — Paying techs: hourly, commission, honor system

Bryan: They keep track themselves. Everybody but one is paid hourly plus commission on the work they’ve done, so they keep a list — I did this many nuts this week, this many setups. My electronics guy is hourly; that work is hard to break into commission. I keep the base low — they get a guaranteed amount every hour, but I want the incentive to work faster. They love it when there’s an extra line like “$50 to dress fret ends,” because that’s extra commission. I want them paid for taking out the trash, but rewarded for output.

Doug: That’s always been the balance: pay all commission and every chisel in the shop is dull; pay hourly and a rewire takes four days. And your people keep their own lists on the honor system?

Bryan: Very much an honor system. There have been a few times I’ve said “I think you’re billing me too much for this,” because they add up their totals and I apply their percentage at payroll. It gets a little off sometimes, but you hire the right guys and hope they’re honest.

29:26 — The solo shop: 25 guitars at once

Doug: Chad, you’re a solo luthier — we’ve almost got a hierarchy here: solo, two-person (Sharon and me — we used to be seven, but for the last twelve-plus years it’s been the two of us), Bryan’s multi-luthier shop, and then Elderly, the biggest. How many jobs are you balancing at once?

Chad: On average somewhere between 22 and 27 guitars at any time. Simple stuff is simple stuff — a setup or a nut-and-saddle on a Martin that doesn’t need fret work is a couple of days out on a bench, easy to judge. Then there’s the guitar with loose braces, a neck reset, a custom bridge, frets — a long laundry list, almost restoration territory. Deciding what to work on is a balance between the size of the job, how long it’s been in the shop, and to an extent the relationship with the client. I’ve got a couple of larger restorations here that belong to a local guitar store — they collected dust at that store for a while, and they’ve managed to get kicked down the totem pole in my shop too. They’re working their way steadily toward the top now. But when the store brings me guitars that belong to their customers, those get a higher priority than store inventory. If it sat in their back room for four months before it came to me, that doesn’t equate to an emergency on my part.

36:02 — Squeaky wheels, due dates, and the loaner fleet

Doug: When you’re prioritizing, what about the squeaky wheel? I have a little sign I occasionally put out: “In our shop, squeaky wheels get replaced with wheels that don’t squeak.”

Mike: I try not to let it — just because you bug me a lot doesn’t mean I’ll fix your guitar faster. Each of us handles customer service for our own jobs, front to back. It used to be almost like every person in the room was in business for themselves. My customers have my direct line and just call me.

Bryan: In our shop Rance handles a lot of it — he’s behind the bench at the front door, and his customer-service instincts are usually better than mine. It gets under my skin when people call wanting to know when their guitar will be ready — we told you at drop-off that we’d call you.

Doug: We push back a great deal, because we don’t give turnaround times. The guitar tells us when it’s done with us; we don’t tell the guitar. My favorite answer: I don’t mind you checking in — as long as you’re happy with the answer being “it’s not done yet.” The moment you’re not happy with that answer, you can come pick up your guitar — in any stage of completion. I had one customer I handed his guitar back in several boxes, because he became impossible. And there’s a real trap in reacting to a less-than-congenial email by shoving that guitar to the front just to get the guy out of your life — now everything else in the workflow gets pushed back.

Bryan: We don’t let it affect us — but we keep a quick turnaround anyway: I don’t like being more than two weeks out on setups and fret work, and if we slip past it we just work harder, or I come in after hours. The only time we rush is a performing musician who makes money with the guitar — those we’ll turn in a couple of days.

Doug: I have a different attitude: anybody who tells me they need this guitar for a gig is a hobbyist, because every professional I’ve ever worked with has another guitar. I’m one of the few people on the planet who told Paul Simon he had to wait — and he didn’t care, because he has sixty guitars at home. Glen Hansard’s guitar spent eight months here after it was run over by a forklift. “We really want it back before the April 1 opening…” — you can want anything you want. And when someone says they need it for a gig, I ask: what’s the gig? “I play four songs in church Sunday morning.” That’s not a gig — you can borrow a guitar. Which is the other half of it: over the years we’ve built a sizable fleet of loaner instruments. Borrow this one — it plays great, sounds great, gets you through the gig. The whole purpose is that a due date never touches my workflow.

Bryan: One thing that’s helped us: our workflow board is up on a TV screen in the middle of the shop — the TV had a browser built in, so the Trello board is just up there. When people come in I point at the screen: all those people are in front of you. All the guys have it on their phones too, but for a group conversation about what to prioritize, you point at the screen instead of everyone staring at phones. And we keep the shop clean — the only guitars out are the ones being worked on, nobody sees the storage — so the board sets the expectation instead.

48:23 — Doug’s system: paper travelers, toe tags, and lists

Doug: Our process is very pen-and-paper. It starts at the front counter: every guitar gets an intake form with its own work-order number — customer info, serial number, work to be performed, strings, notes, our shop policies, and the customer’s signature authorizing the work. And if you’re not using a whiteboard to draw pictures for your customer, start — a picture is worth a thousand words and it makes you money. The intake form gets copied twice: a yellow copy is the customer’s claim ticket; a white copy goes to my office. The tag itself goes on the case and stays with the guitar for its entire stay.

Doug: For a brief period forty years ago I worked in the defense-electronics industry, and some of this comes from there — what we called a traveler that moves with the job through the shop. The office copy gets entered into QuickBooks, which generates the work order — it prints “pending” on it — and that pending work order becomes the traveler that goes out to the shop and tells us what has to be done to each guitar. We keep two books: the book of pending work orders — instruments waiting to come out — and the book of benched work orders — instruments currently in process. When a work order moves from one book to the other, it also goes up on the workboard, so we can see at a glance every instrument currently on the benches. Once a work order enters the shop we mark it with a pink highlighter — our euphemism is “it’s been pinked” — which is the visual cue that it’s accounted for: out of its case, on the board, in the workflow.

Doug: Every instrument out in the shop wears a toe tag — a piece of drafting tape with the customer’s name and work-order number. That number is the sole identifier for every guitar out here. We tried computers in the early ’90s — an IBM 386 in the shop, dBase IV — and we spent more time hovering around the computer recovering what somebody inadvertently deleted than working on guitars. So we settled on lists. Our whole life is lists, all QuickBooks-generated. The pull sheet at each bench is every instrument in the front room that hasn’t been pulled yet; pull a guitar, cross it off. Sharon keeps her list; when she finishes something that needs me next, she puts it on my list — work-order number, customer, task. Then we have community lists per job type: the fret level-and-crown list, the refret list — customer, fret size, whether the frets are pulled, the board’s leveled, the slots are cut, the frets are in. If I’m in the mood to hammer frets, I go to that list and see who’s next. Same for neck resets — ten in progress, and at a glance I can see how far each one has gotten: neck pulled, angle set, shims cut. And the touch-up room has its own list — what’s been sprayed, how many coats, what’s next.

Chad: It’s a nice system for batching — you can see at a glance if you’ve got nine neck resets and four of them are ready to have dovetails fit.

Doug: That’s exactly how we work. If I’m fretting, I’m fretting thirty guitars at once — I’d rather spend two hours hammering frets across guitars than twenty minutes on one and then switch gears to trim ends, then switch to leveling, then to crowning. I’ll get fifteen guitars’ worth of wire bent, cut, and sitting in fret bays, then just hammer. When it comes to crowning, I crown for as long as I feel like crowning. Now that I’ve described it out loud it may seem arcane — it kind of seems arcane to me — but it’s the only way we’ve been able to keep abreast of it. The technology grew up while we were filling out lists on paper.

1:13:13 — Chad’s system: Calendly to the magnet whiteboard

Chad: I’ll start from the moment somebody learns who Steel City Guitar Works is, all the way to driving home with their guitar. People find me — internet, word of mouth — and reach my contact page. I used to have scheduling right on the website where anybody could book an appointment; I stopped, because I wanted the ability to screen people and projects. Once we’ve determined they’re a good potential client, I send a Calendly link. It’s a couple of bucks a month and so worth it for keeping my head screwed on straight. I have three event types: initial drop-off and evaluation, instrument pickup, and follow-up adjustment. I set my hours, cap the number of appointments per day, and it all self-populates my Google Calendar — block out a camping weekend on the calendar and Calendly closes those slots automatically. The confirmation email includes the shop address — I don’t publish it since the shop’s in my home — plus “call me when you’re on the front porch,” and a warning that there are two Orchard Avenues in this zip code.

Chad: At drop-off, I bring the guitar to the bench and we go over everything — they tell me what they think the problem is, and then I tell them what the actual problem is. I fill out my estimate sheet: name, address, case type, make and model, last four of the serial, tuning, date in, due date if I’m giving one; the tasks with hours against them; and they sign to authorize the work. Then an app called iScanner photocopies the sheet into a PDF that I email to the client — that’s their copy of the authorization. The sheet itself gets folded into quarters, slipped into a U-sleeve from Uline with a plastic loop lock, and attached to the case handle. That’s my traveler tag — everything in the back room has one.

Chad: Then the whiteboard — the center of my universe. Each magnet strip is one instrument. Top of the board is the top of my priorities; the column runs down, comes back up, runs down again. Magnets move: a setup comes in, I sort it up the list so it doesn’t wait behind Daryl’s smashed-puzzle Martin. The big restorations — the two Macons, the Sonnet, the Parker — carry month labels that are just for me: nobody’s been promised September, but it keeps me accountable. The board’s weakness: if I forget to make a magnet and the guitar goes in the back room, for all intents and purposes that guitar stops existing. Has it happened? Yes. So the habit is: the moment I accept an instrument, a blank magnet goes on the board.

Mike: Do you regularly audit it? Whatever system you use, if you don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist — so how often do you compare what’s actually in that room against the board?

Chad: It would be wise for me to do that once a month. The board holds a deliberately limited set of information — I can’t see from it that Hosea’s Fender bass is getting a refret without cross-referencing the case tag — but it answers: what do I work on today, what should be done in the next couple of days, what goes on the daily to-do list. When the job is done, I go to QuickBooks Online — and aside from the scanned estimate, that’s the first time a digital record of the guitar exists. I record make, model, serial number, the work, and always the action — measured at the 12th fret, top of string to top of fret, low E and high E — so when a customer with three Les Pauls wants them all to play as close as possible to each other, I have the record. The invoice goes by text with a link to the pickup Calendly; they come, they play it, they pay, and the follow-up email reminds them the setup is guaranteed and — if they feel so inclined — invites a five-star review.

Bryan: Only a five-star review. If you’re considering a four-star review, don’t bother.

Doug: On the guarantee — we keep it simple: any job we complete follows with six months of free adjustments. It gives the customer a courtesy window where they don’t feel sheepish about bringing it back — and half the time they bring another guitar with them.

Chad: For a long time mine was 90 days, but I increasingly don’t care — if I did the work, the window for follow-up adjustments is pretty wide. Steve Rositis up in Calgary has a lifetime guarantee on every setup: nine out of ten follow-ups are a thirty-second truss-rod tweak, and you keep that person’s goodwill forever.

Doug: The one change I’d make to your system: create the digital record first, not last — an estimate in QuickBooks at intake that converts to an invoice when the job’s done. Then if a guitar winds up in the back without a magnet, it at least exists in QuickBooks. That’s what our conversion to the work order does — it creates the pending transaction immediately. And I’m paranoid about the digital record for insurance too: my QuickBooks backs up to two drives that swap between the shop and my briefcase every single day, so if the place burns down, I can tell the insurance company exactly what was inside. Also — as soon as you add a second person, the inefficiencies will make themselves immediately clear.

Chad: The way my system works, I am the bottleneck and I am the arbiter — nobody else invoices anything. If I brought somebody on, it’d be a while before I let anyone else in.

Bryan: When I hired my first employee is when I had to move off QuickBooks for invoicing — there was no way to let someone in without giving them access to the whole account. That’s when we switched to Square, with QuickBooks just linked for the records.

1:50:36 — Bryan’s system: Zoho quotes that become Trello cards

Bryan: We hold anywhere from 25 to 80 guitars — I have storage for 80 and I don’t like it when we’re there. We can turn around a hundred guitars a month, so 80 is about three weeks. I don’t like being more than two weeks out on the small stuff; restorations take longer, and finish work is the bottleneck because I’m the only one who does it and I take it home — no spray booth here.

Bryan: The system is Trello. It’s built for workflows and there’s a free version — go to trello.com and play. I’ve used it for years, since my sales days, when a website lead would create a card in a “new lead” column. A Trello board is columns of cards — it looks like solitaire. Ours: New Projects, Waiting for Pickup — we have a remote drop-off site at a music store across town whose web form creates a card automatically — Waiting for Parts, then a list per person: Rance, Josh, Elias, Tony, me. We looked at Shopflow, and it’s awesome, but at the time it didn’t work the way we wanted on iPads and phones — Trello runs on everything, and everyone in the shop has access.

Bryan: The intake flow: we use Zoho for invoicing — Zoho Invoice is free up to a thousand invoices a year; we recently crossed that and moved to the paid Zoho Billing. I create the quote while the customer is standing in front of us — setup, dress fret ends, 9-volt battery — send it, and Zoho automatically creates the Trello card under New Projects with the customer info, the case type, and the crucial thing: a checklist of the line items. Enter information once — that’s really important to me. Back when we used Square plus manual Trello cards we were entering everything twice; Zoho does a much better job of feeding the cards.

Bryan: Then I drag the card to the right list. A basic setup goes to the bottom of Rance’s list — his lists are ordered by date, using Trello’s due-date field for the date it came in. This D-18 jumped the queue because the owner’s taking it to the Steve Kaufman camp. Tony does structural — crack repairs, a refret, a neck reset with a new bridge, a Guild 12-string restoration in really bad shape — and when a quick inlay repair came in I put it at the top of his list so it doesn’t wait three months behind the restorations. You can drag anything anywhere — including punishing a guy for owning a Guild 12-string by moving him down. Everyone checks off their items — the card records that Bryan Parris completed “basic setup,” who moved which card to which column, the whole history, forever. Attach photos so you know which black Les Paul; add comments like “customer requested higher action, 5/64 to 4/64” — that stays there forever, searchable, even archived. Rance does final setups and quality control — walks the checklist and makes sure everything that was supposed to happen happened — then the card moves to Ready to Invoice, and only Rance or I convert the quote and send it, by email and text.

Doug: You could break a refret out into its own checklist — pull frets, plane the board, fix divots — as a second checklist on the card?

Bryan: Yes — you can add multiple checklists per card; I just tried it. And you could run the whole thing standalone: New Projects, Waiting for Parts, Setups, Electronics, Fret Work, Structural, Ready to Invoice — even solo, it’s worth it. My whole crew is on the board as guests, so my $10-a-month Trello Premium covers everyone on their free accounts. That demo board took me fifteen minutes to set up.

Chad: I hate paper and I hate handwriting.

Doug: I love paper. My life is filled with paper.

Bryan: We tell people the shop is paperless — the truth is, when we first opened we bought a printer and never could get it to connect to the iPad. So we just decided: we’re paperless.

2:24:19 — Elderly’s system: Shopflow

Mike: We use Shopflow — the software built at Joe Glaser’s shop — and it works really well for us. Way better than NetSuite, which we used before as the store’s catch-all: an Oracle product that can be anything if you have a programmer on staff, but for us it was pretty terrible and really expensive. Every instrument that comes through the store — bought, consigned, or repaired — goes through Shopflow. It stores customers, and each customer’s instruments, so a repeat guitar is a couple of clicks. You can even flag someone as a “VIP” — in our sphere that means pain in the ass; the name comes up green and you know what you’ve got. But if they see it over your shoulder, they think they’re a VIP.

Mike: Intake: I talk to the customer at the counter, look at the instrument, and then say “sit tight, give me a minute to put this in the system” — and go type it up at my own bench. We used to log in and out of the counter computers, and at some point I realized that’s dumb: typing while the guy tells you about every guitar he’s ever owned is how you mistype things. Everyone writes up their own tickets — every bench has a computer. The ticket prints a work order on one side and a case tag on the other, into an 8.5×11 sleeve attached to the instrument. Tasks come from pull-down menus that only ever had to be typed once — it came maybe 75–80% preloaded and you add your own (we added “setup — ukulele”; they don’t take as long as a guitar). A returning instrument’s ticket can be filled out entirely with the mouse.

Mike: While you work, a timer runs per task. That’s probably the handiest thing — it’s brought a lot of data into how the shop is run. If you’re quoting 30 minutes for a setup and the benches are averaging an hour ten, that’s the fast lane to bankruptcy court, as Doug says. Management keeps much tighter tabs on productivity now — the timers are one of the big metrics. You can add tasks and parts as you find them mid-job. We don’t bill through Shopflow — it talks to Shopify, our point of sale. And when a customer calls asking where their guitar is, I can look at anyone’s bench view: Steve’s working on this Höfner Beatle bass, these bits were done by this guy — it’s in progress.

Mike: The bench view is my queue: customer, serial number, instrument, next selected task, and a dollar total that tells you roughly how much work each instrument needs. Blue means it’s approaching the due date I gave the customer; red means overdue — to be fair, two of my reds are store-owned and two are waiting on parts. For consignments and store stock there’s a different front door: appraisers write it up first in a program called Gorgeous — that’s where the retail side lives: what we paid, what the work will cost, what we’ll sell it for. Repair writes the estimate in Shopflow, sends it back, and if the store buys it outright the instrument goes into the big unassigned queue — the “Elderly queue” — until a tech claims it. It doesn’t show up in my bench view until I assign it to myself.

Mike: And the discipline that holds it together: about once a week I compare everything in my Shopflow queue against everything physically on my rack, and make sure they match. Every problem we’ve ever had here traces to something falling through that crack — Steve assigns something to me in the computer, sets it on my rack, and one of the two doesn’t happen.

Doug: Oddly enough, that’s exactly what our pink highlighter is — the visual cue that a ticket has been accounted for and entered the workflow. You might come up with a visual cue of your own; it could save you the weekly audit.

Mike: On the rack you can tell a consignment at a glance anyway — it’s the one wearing price tags and a pile of appraisal notes. I keep room by the bench for about six neck resets in progress — honestly more than I like; I prefer holding fewer in my head — but having everything tightly close by is what workflow really means at the bench: switching tasks cleanly and quickly.

2:58:18 — Herding 300 instruments: evolution vs design

Doug: I often wondered how eight or nine luthiers choosing their own projects doesn’t just slide off the scale — the sheer number of instruments in that building, retail, consignment, and store-owned, is flabbergasting. We’re a two-person shop with what counts as a sizable backlog for a small outfit — two to three hundred instruments in our stacks most of the time, with maybe 125 to 150 in process at once — and I had no conception of how Elderly’s volume could be herded.

Mike: It’s not something you could set up overnight. It’s just been going on so long — Elderly’s been at it since 1972. The processes evolved.

Doug: That’s the thing — half our systems are the way they are because it’s the only way we could figure out. I almost envy Bryan: when he moved from his house to the storefront and went multi-luthier — Parris has been at it about 14 years, seven in the storefront — he got to sit down and design a system on purpose, rather than have it unfold from “this is the way we’ve always done it.”

Bryan: It’s mostly because we couldn’t get the printer to work. That’s why we went paperless.

3:04:21 — Walk-on: Google Sheets and Taylor’s guitar abacus

Dave (attendee): My wife wants to get involved in the business — she’s the most organized person on the planet and sees the mess I have. She picked that Trello program too. Right now I write tickets in Google Sheets — it doesn’t really organize them; I scroll through and drag the old ones up. I’d rather have more of a first-in-first-out situation. At Taylor we had 200 instruments in at any time — first in, first out, on two-tier aluminum racks. People picked from the first twenty guitars, and first thing every morning we’d slide them all over — a giant guitar abacus — with a huge CRM behind it. Now I’ve got 40 or 50 guitars and too many plates spinning: sometimes I open a case and think, I don’t even remember bringing this in — look it up and it’s been here two months.

Doug: That’s exactly why you need your head wrapped around controlling the workflow. And I would be afraid to assign the organization of my shop over to Claude, quite frankly.

3:07:51 — The wrong Les Paul and the efficiency expert

Doug: One anecdote on constantly reassessing your own procedures. Our work-order tickets go back 35 years — the current numbers are in the 36,000s, counting from 001 in 2002 when we incorporated. The old process: write the ticket, yellow copy to the customer, ticket on my desk, type up the work order the next morning, then punch a hole in the ticket, string it, and hang it on the case — sometimes handing a stack to an employee to go hang. One day he got two Les Pauls mixed up: one was in for a nut and setup, the other for a refret and everything else. The guitar came out, strings came off, the soldering iron was warming up to pull frets — and the tech happened to check the serial number against the work order. It didn’t match. Luckily he hadn’t pulled the frets on the wrong guitar — but there was another Les Paul somewhere in the shop wearing the wrong ticket, and we didn’t know its number or its serial. Seven of us spent half a day going through every Les Paul case in the shop to find it.

Doug: That afternoon I told the story to a long-term customer. He asked: “When you write up the ticket, what do you do?” I walked him through it, and he said: “Why don’t you just make a second copy for your desk, and hang the original on the case right away?” Fourteen years we’d been doing it, and that never dawned on me. I asked what he did for a living. “I’m an efficiency expert. That’s what I do for a living.”

Dave: We had those same folded-paper pockets with the zip tie at Taylor — everything matched to the RA number. And a warning from Taylor, around 2000: the guy checking in guitars used to write funny little notes — and on one he wrote genuinely terrible things about the customer. A new person in customer service accidentally photocopied that note and shipped it back with the guitar, and the owner read it all. Changes were made after that.

Doug: All right — I think we’ll take that as our cue to slam the lid on this one. Thank our guests today: Mike Hoenerhoff, Chad Gerbe of Steel City Guitar Works, and Bryan Parris of Parris Guitars. Thanks, everybody.