[sdiy] making 2 or 3 dollars an hour on synth building?

[Bill Thompson]

Hi Dan,

scoff if you like, but the best education I received, with respect to 
managing the project itself, was five years as a consultant at a Big-5 
(yeah, I know, dating myself, but at least it wasn't Big-8) consulting firm.

That, and my own attempt to establish a business doing studio 
maintenance and design<G>...

To answer your question, it is absolutely possible to make a decent 
living building even large scale custom gear, especially in the 
audio/music sector. But to do so you are going to need two distinct 
skill sets, that of designer/builder, and that of businessman/salesman. 
Sadly they really aren't related<G>!

Not to pick on your project, but you made several statements that 
suggest you are probably better at the former...

1) you need to control the scope of a project no matter how you are 
billing for it. If the client asks for a box that does X, and you agree 
to provide that box for $N, then that's the deal. If they want to expand 
on the capabilities then you want to expand on the price. If you can get 
someone to agree to billing for actual time and materials there's 
slightly less risk, but there is still the opportunity for "scope-creep" 
or "feature-creep", you know, that moment in time when someone says 
"gee, if it can do this then it ought to do that as well!"

example - when I was doing studio maintenance it wasn't unusual to run 
across additional problems when one was in a studio. I had a flat rate 
for tape deck maintenance, I'd go in, and as long as the tape deck was 
running I'd tweak it for one fee. In my agreement I stated that 
regulating the motors was included, but repairing them wasn't. It was 
clear what I was willing to do for a fixed fee. I won't say it never 
happened, but I can't think of an instance when I wasn't asked to fix 
something else while I was in the facility. Sometimes it was a scratchy 
potentiometer or a switch that went 'thump'. In those cases, assuming I 
had met my budgeted time for the tape deck alignment, I'd just take care 
of the problem at no extra charge. Sometimes it was "the entire 
automation system went up in flames last night... can you fix it in the 
next hour?" In those cases I was polite but firm, I would tackle the 
project on a time and materials basis or I could provide an estimate, 
but it was above and beyond the scope of a tape deck alignment.

2) you need to include some way to recoup your development costs. Unless 
agreed upon in advance it is difficult to get a client to pick up the 
tab for your research time, nor should you expect them to. BUT, you 
should not pick up the tab either! If you know something is a one-off 
then it is fair (might still be difficult) to recoup your entire 
development investment on that one-off. Things can get sticky if the 
client expects you to already have the answer<G>!

If you think you can sell only one of a design then the customer has to 
pick up the tab for the work related to that design. That doesn't mean 
you can or should charge a customer for your time spent learning how to 
lay out a PCB. If you are missing some basic skills then you are (I 
believe) responsible to develop those skills on your dime.

3) you also need to include the cost of documentation in the final price.

It's part of the project, and if the client isn't willing to pay for it 
then you probably don't want that business... it'll bite you later.

One of the most difficult lessons for any business person to learn is 
that there is such a thing as a bad customer. Sometimes you really don't 
want the business. It requires a bit of a long term view of the world, 
and you have to forget that old saw "the customer is always right". The 
customer is not always right, but the customer is always the customer.

If you want to make a living building synthesizers your first step 
should be to prepare a business plan. I know it does not sound like a 
lot of fun, but it can be, and even if it isn't, you need to do it!!!!

Figure out what your strengths (and weaknesses) are, and find ways to 
mitigate weaknesses. Perhaps you need to find a partner that can handle 
sales, perhaps you need to find a space to work, maybe you need 3 months 
to do some additional R&D... no matter what, address the potential 
problems from the start.

Figure out what you want to earn, and look at it from several angles. 
What is your time worth? How much do you want to earn? How many billable 
hours can you generate? How many units can you sell? etc.

Figure our what the market looks like! Consider location (the market is 
likely different in NYC and podunk flats<G>). Consider competition. 
Consider external forces.

One last example - when I started my maintenance and design business 
studios didn't think twice about paying my rates, and they weren't all 
that inflated<G>!  Somewhere in the late 1980s everything changed, 
people were no longer investing 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars in 
studios, and they weren't willing to pay a technician a living wage to 
maintain their gear. At the same time manufacturers started making gear 
less maintenance friendly (a JH-16 is a lot easier to work on than an 
ADAT!!!), and they were providing less support (ever look at the ADAT 
manual??) All of these forces were putting my business in danger.

But the kicker (and I'm not making this up) was a studio I visited in 
the mid 1990s. They had seen a picture of a control room in a trade 
magazine and they had duplicated it pretty well, except for dimensions, 
which is bad, and orientation, which is really bad. No exageration, they 
had a LEDE(tm) control room with the live end on the left and the dead 
end on the right, and their mixes sounded terrible, and they didn't 
understand why, even after I explained it to them.

At that point I realized that the market for my services had evaporated 
in my home town.

My next foray was as a contract designer for a large company. It was 
fun, but it wasn't what I really wanted to do. At that stage of the game 
I was antsy to build my "perfect" pedal board, and the company figured 
they could sell maybe a dozen of them. I'm not arguing with their 
analysis nor their decision, but it was time to move on<G>!

I still do some gear maintenance and modification on the side, and it 
helps to support my own habit, but that's about as far as it's going to 
go I'm afraid. If I were more ambitious, and willing to move to a better 
marketplace (at least until I developed a reputation), I believe I could 
still start a business designing and building interesting gear... with 
three little kids in the house I'm perfectly content to design AV 
systems for a well established firm and do the rest on the side. It's 
all about balance, or for the engineers in the crowd, optimization<G>!

I wish you the best of luck!!

Dan Snazelle wrote:
> harry
>
> very good points.
>
> there is a lot to be said for the education from the project...of course. i know my way around electronics a lot more than i did last march.  it is a bit odd because the original design was supposed to be a small desktop box with only a handful of functions. i would have NEVER agreed to something so big back then as i would have been too intimidated. BUT THEN it somehow morphed (without my knowledge ;) ) into a gigantic...60 or 70 control machine with multiple outs, ins, footswitches, etc.
>
> i would say a HUGE amount of time was spent (in fact the most amount) on developing or finding or arranging the initial functionality which the specific client wanted. he was very particular about what the box had to be able to do (and he wanted it to be usable with CELLO, FIELD RECORDINGS< AND GUITAR) and so in the beginning i tried out tons of different breadboard ideas (90 percent of which I did NOT use)
>
> the actual amount of time putting it together and troubleshooting was quite small compared to the time drawing schematics, working with software to get the panel drilled via CNC, etching all the boards, testing circuits, ordering parts, and meeting with the client. ( i didnt start soldering any of the permanent boards till  late september or early october)
>
> i must have printed out thousands of pages of documents on specific sections (binders worth of schematics and cookbooksfull of information on building FILTERS, ENVELOPES, GUITAR SYNTHS,ETC) not to mention all the electro-notes i read.
>
>
> so it really forced me to digest a ton of stuff.
>
> and there is of course the advantage gained of now having some great working knowledge of how to get a system tracking well to a guitar. and i learned a lot from mistakes as well. 
>
> so i think next time (if there is a next time) i will build something smaller. there might even be an interest in taking the tracking and freak sections of the ark and making a little box out of those for people who already have all the other synth functions.
>
> anyway
>
> thanks
> DAN "I WOULDNT QUIT MY DAYJOB" snazelle
>
> :)
>
>
>
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>   

-- 
Bill Thompson
Owner
Audio Enterprise
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Pure mathematics is, in its way, 
the poetry of logical ideas.
~Albert Einstein
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"I am not discouraged because every 
wrong attempt discarded is another 
step forward."
-Thomas A. Edison