On Wednesday, July 14, 2021 at 11:45:27 AM UTC-4, Michael Trew wrote:
Haha... in all seriousness, I have been burned by enough people online,
that I do use a phone book when looking for a contractor. I've chalked
up anyone that doesn't advertise in the yellow pages as anywhere from inferior to total scam artist at this point.
I did commercial sound for over a decade without a business phone. I worked for three school systems, some factories and churches. I did the work on site, and only warehouse the supplies out of a couple rooms in my home. It twas all word of mouth, or in
one case a customer of a former employer knew what neighborhood I lived in, so they sent their head of maintenance to look for my unmarked van. The irony was that when I left that job I told the owner that I would not try to take away any existing
customers, but that I wouldn't turn down the work if they knocked on my door. That was the second largest school district in the area. They didn't like the quality of work or the attitude of whoever was hired to replace me. I couldn't find good help that
I would take into a school, so I had no need to advertise. Most work was completed in one trip, unlike my largest competertor who had over 20 crews on the road, but avered a little over five visits to finish a job. Of course, they were billed for each
visit to around $150 per trip. Quite often, they would tell a school board that a systyem was uunrepairable, since they were franchised for most of three states. I got the first school system away from them by picking up a couple pallets of 'unrepairable
equipment' one Friday afternoon, and returning it all to the school board's building the following Monday morning. They had had some of the equipment for over a year, claiming that the parts were on backorder. I had repaired eveything that they couldn't,
and they did over $1,000,000 a year in new sales in the '70s. A well marked building, highly advertised B2B who were well past their prime. It was supposedly managed by a pair of EEs who weren't smart enough to add a pair of amplifiers to the existig
intercom system. It was severly distorted when they turned on the new equipment. The idiots had paralled two new Dukane Amplifiers with the existing RCA, but they weren't smart enough to realize the Dukane amps were 180 degrees out of phase from the
existing RCA amps. Rather than find out what was wrong, they simple cut the spaker wires off the mew amps and left them powered up.
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