Time Management For the Gunsmith

It costs money to do business, whether you rent a place and do gunsmithing full time or you work at home part time. And in the gunsmithing business’as in any business’t ime, of course, is money. Let me explain why your time is so important and why you must learn to manage it carefully. First off, you’re only going to live so long. Consequently, you have only so many productive hours in your time bank.

If you evaluate your business (and if it is a business), you’d better have a time-to-income ratio that shows a profit. Consequently, you must keep careful daily records of actual billable hours and part sales in order to have an instant picture of whether or not your time is being converted to dollars sufficiently to make this all worthwhile. Let’s examine a hypothetical eighthour day. If you assume an average of $35 per hour, that would show an income of labor alone of $280 a day or $1,400 per week.

Not bad, provided you have the business, and don’t stop working to talk to customers (which you must do sometimes). In previous articles, I’ve talked about the gunsmith’s "mystique." By my definition, mystique is part of the game" otherwise known as public relations" and talking is part of this. How then do you include the talking in the profit picture? There are several ways. First, keep the storytelling to a minimum. This is hard to do.

What’s easier to do is to extend the charges for the job to include both the time spent talking and the time spent doing the job. If four jobs come in that should take an hour each, but you spend an additional hour in talking, you’ve lost $35 if you charge only for the actual work. You can’t make this up unless you understand the situation and do one of two things: Either charge more for each job so that you get paid for the whole five hours at minimum’or stop talking.

Another way to solve this problem’one that I’ve found to work well for me’is: Don’t open until noon. That way, you can use the morning to work without interruption, and then spend the rest of the day working as well as talking as necessary to anyone who comes in. The difficult part of the gunsmithing business is that a person with a broken gun is like a sick person going to the doctor. He’s asking for help. He wants to tell you all his troubles, just as he would with his physician’ especially if he’s anew customer.

You have to listen and hold his hand for awhile, because, after all, he’s turning his beloved gun over to you. It’s like he’s putting himself in the hospital. He has to be assured of your competence, and he has to soak up some of your mystique. In other words, he has to feel confident that you can work the kind of magic it will take to restore his gun to perfect health. So, you’ve lost 15 minutes. Now make it up.

This can only be done by building some talking time into your hourly rate or by adding the talking time to the time you spend on the actual work. Don’t get carried away with the idea that your minimum of $35 (or more) has to be what you go by. What controls the price of repairs is the value of the job. If this job takes 30 minutes and you talked for 15 then your one-hour minimum charge will cover it. Remember, once you fix a gun for $50 or $75, it’s not coming back’not for that particular repair anyway.

You have to constantly look for another job, and every repair job you do is one less that remains to be done. Try not to give estimates’on an old gun particularly. (If you do, refer to my article in the October 07 issue.) If possible, tell your customer you can’t give him an estimate until you have gotten into it, and be sure to have your minimum rates posted on the wall.

If you have to call the customer and tell him he is in for three hours worth of work and he tells you to forget it, you’re covered by your minimum and your time has been protected. None of this is being dishonest, just realistic insofar as being paid for your time. Something else that’s important: Don’t take guns apart in front of your customer. You’ll destroy the "mystique." Tell him you’re busy and will check it out later and then give him a call.

If he can’t leave the gun, fine; he was probably not serious about spending the money to repair it anyway. What I’m trying to do here is to help improve the gunsmith’s lot in life so that when deer season comes around, he has the money to go hunting himself’rather than just helping other people to hunt. Or so he has the

Bluing’Profitable or Not? While we’re on the subject of making a profit, let’s look at a service that’s long been touted as one of the big moneymakers for gunsmiths. In looking at bluing in particular, we can examine some greater truths that should be understood if the gunsmith is to know whether or not he’s operating a profitable shop. Most gunsmiths work for an hourly rate, and we price most jobs at our hourly rate.

There are typical shop rates that vary from area to area depending on the economic climate, and that pretty much dictates what you can charge for rebluing. If gunsmiths ran their businesses like a typical manufacturing company, prices might be quite different. A manufacturer would take into account the original price for tanks, burners, stands, buffing equipment, and would amortize these costs over perhaps a threeyear or five-year period.

He would then arrive at a cost for water, gas, salts, and time for buffing, disassembly, and reassembly. These costs would then give him a "floor cost" per job, and he would add his markup to this. This markup would cover overhead and profit. I don’t believe that many small gunsmithing shops ever do this, and if they did, the price would be so high they probably wouldn’t get many bluing jobs.

In fact, I’m willing to bet that hardly anyone keeps track of the number of guns that can be blued with 50 pounds of extra cash to take the wife out to dinner once in awhile’which can be a lot more expensive than a day of hunting. My writings have been addressed primarily to the owner of the small full-time shop. These small shops make up the bulk of the gunsmithing business in this country. But I’m not ignoring the part-time operator, of which there are thousands.

Most of salts, let alone how long a buffing wheel lasts or how much compound is used. Nevertheless, you have costs associated with bluing. Let’s take an example. Suppose you sell a bluing job for $125. If you figure 20 minutes to a half hour for disassembly and the same time for reassembly, you’ve used up say $35 of the $125 charge. We now have $90 left.

It is not out of reason to assume you will spend at least two hours buffing, that’s $70 more, leaving $20 for the costs of salts, gas, and amortizing your equipment. After all, you can burn out a buffing motor and you certainly wear buffing wheels out. I realize that it’s impractical for the small shop to take the time to keep records like a big manufacturer does. But you must admit that the situation I just outlined doesn’t show any profit.

Of course, if you’re happy with collecting three hours at your labor rate, then there’s no need for further concern. As I see blue jobs, they represent an opportunity to obtain several hours at your established labor rate, but I think we can forget about the idea that bluing is a big moneymaker for the gunsmith’unless you can get a lot more than the typical prices charged. Keep in mind that there’s always a danger in giving someone a set price in advance, even for something as routine as a bluing job.

If what I have to say can still be of help to the part-timer. If you’re apart-time gunsmith, you probably have another job and you’re trying to augment your income. Again, the same rules apply. There’s no point in working nights and weekends unless you can make your time count and unless you’re really adding to your income. And you must make a profit if you’re planning to eventually you miscalculate the time required for metal preparation’s ay it takes three hours of buffing rather than two’t hen you lose.

You can estimate the time necessary for disassembly and reassembly pretty accurately, but looking at a gun is never going to tell you how much actual labor is going to be required for a bluing job. Suppose you based your price on two hours of metal preparation. That’s fine, but you can’t just stop buffing at the end of two hours if the metal isn’t perfect. That won’t cut it; this is a job that has to be done right. What’s the answer?

There are two: One is to be so expert in evaluating the time required to do the job that you can properly price it’ which is virtually impossible. Or you can set your prices to cover yourself and get a return that keeps your hourly rate up. After all, if you quote $75 for a bluing job and I quote $150, I only have to do half as many jobs as you do to make the same amount of money. While we’re on the subject, let me pass on another suggestion about bluing.

Years ago, I stopped offering different grades of bluing at different prices. I do one grade of bluing only’t he best job I can do’ and at one price only’a price that’s high enough to ensure I’ll make a profit. This way, my customer is happy with the job, and so am I. If someone wants a cheap bluing job, I sell him a bottle of cold blue. quit the day job and go full-time.

Of course, if you already have lots of money and you’re the type of hobby-gunsmith who would rather spend your spare time talking instead of working, then my words are wasted. If you’re not, then take a simple sheet of paper, write down the details of each repair, and at the end of every week determine how much profit you’re making’or not making. I