Supplementary Income for Looths?

[Mike Tracz MCT Guitars]

Hello Andrew,

Thanks for sharing your background and goals. You have a lot going for you, and understand the emotions as you play out scenarios. It’s not easy, but small steps may be worth exploring before taking the plunge. Adding more to your plate won’t be easy, but it may feel better than catching up.

Although I’m not a full-time repair or builder, I could share what I get into if it will help you at all.

I’m a designer by day, with a few side hustles nights and weekends. I have been building guitars for 15 years and do some CAD/design work on the side. But you may be most interested in an Etsy shop I started in 2019 that has grown significantly over the past few years. It started with this: what can I do with all the scrap wood and improve my hand skills? I started making combs and hair forks (one version of each)for family and friends. They seemed to dig them, so I opened a shop. I listened to requests and tested variations with Etsy customers and now have ten products in our shop. I wanted to keep to scrap wood, so now I hit up all the furniture shops in the area, and they let me dig through their bins. This keeps me busy, and getting back to guitar building is tough.

I don’t want this to sound like a brag. I guess what I’m saying is, look around at what you have (resources and skills) and what you want to get out of it. I had to be patient and revise my plan quite a bit. I advise looking at things separate from guitars; that way, you don’t get burned out. Please make sure you do time studies and run costs (everything from materials to the time it takes to pack and ship) to make sure you are making money, not investing in another hobby (this is tough for me). Try to link new skills and learning with the venture so that if you only break even initially, you are profiting in other ways.

Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions.

_Mike

mctguitars@gmail.com

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MustCreateThings

etsy.com

MustCreateThings - Etsy

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[Andrew Framsted]

Thanks for sharing your story! I think an etsy store is a great direction to go. Currently, I don’t have anything I’m inspired to create (other than boutique basses) but I need to keep that in the back of my head. My wife runs an etsy shop, so that would help me hit the ground running if I ever wanted to pursue that route. Your input is much appreciated.

[Bryan Parris Parris Guitars]

I’ve got a real unusual path in this. Because I wanted to build something bigger than just me, I opened a shop, hired employees, while I worked a seasonal business hanging Christmas Lights. My reasoning was that if I built a business, rather than a side hustle, when it grew enough for me to be there full-time I could quit everything else then. I could have just gone full-time and been fine (my wife has always stayed home…so I’m our only income), but it would have always been just me. I basically used the revenue to grow the business first, then hired myself.

Like I said, it’s unusual, but that’s the way it happened. 🙂

[Paul M]

I work as a nurse two 12 hour shifts per week. My new job is 7-7, every fourth weekend. I’m in Maine and the pay is very shitty for what I do (if I was in Boston I could make make at least another 1/3). I am able to just barely pay my bills on two days a week, I siphon off a very small amount to my 401k but my bank account is very slowly shrinking.

The work is interesting to me. I’m on the IV team, basically I put in IVs all day, or maintain dressings and sometimes I put in PICC lines (very long IVs that stay in for months). 1/2 my coworkers are all high strung and kinda insane and that stresses me out a lot (the kinda thing where I’m home and I’m having an arguement with one of them, but it’s in my head, and they aren’t there). But it’s not horribly exhausting (like working in the ER was).

Financially it’s not a great move being 48, having no real retirement plan and working 2 days a week.

<div>BUT</div>

It does allow me 5 days a week off, which is a real luxury. My goal is to practice guitar in the morning till 11 and then be in the shop from like 1 till 10pm or so. My focus is on building. I was thinking I would take in repair work to pay for the shop but thus far I find that the repair work stresses me out and gets in the way of the building and that they don’t really work well together. Maybe that will change but I’ve stopped trying to drum up business.

My goal this year is just to build the coolest guitars I can think up. I am lucky that at the moment I don’t need to sell guitars to eat. It would not be possible to experiment and explore. I’m of two minds with the making: players are super conservative generally and want stuff that looks like the old stuff (52′ tele, Hauser Classical, D-18, etc) BUT all those markets are super saturated and there’s absurdly great makers already occupying those spaces. So I’m trying to make stuff that appeals to me as a player and that’s unique without being self-consciously weird. And hopefully great in all ways. Up until the last guitar I made, everything was sort of prototypes to prove I could finish the types of guitars I’m working on (Selmers/Classicals/Fenderish things). But the last one I did I really threw the kitchen sink at with a bunch of ideas I had and it was a success (to me at least). So going forward, I’m hoping to keep taking risks and experimenting while making my own style and seeing if anyone wants to buy them. The nursing job is making that possible. I have no idea if this is going to work in any way or if I’ll be making guitars in 5 years, I find it quite difficult emotionally sometimes. But I’ve wanted to do it forever and so I’m trying to remind myself to enjoy the shop. I’ve worked myself into feeling fairly ill at crunch times and I’m hoping to do that less.

I’m trying to negotiate a new relationship at the same time and explain to my girlfriend that a) I’m really fun and great to be around and b) I’m also super unfun because I want to be in the shop all the time.

Anyway…that’s the story.

[David Ross David Ross Musical Instruments]

I’ve been doing guitar building/repair for about 15 years now, and about 7 years ago I decided to get into making guitar pedals with the intention of creating my own line of products. Today I have two models available on my website with a third (the Submersion) currently going through a funding period on Kickstarter. This for me was a fairly natural progression because it’s tangentially related to what I was already doing. I already had many of the tools needed as well as a working knowledge of guitar electronics. I also liked (and still like) the idea of having a product in addition to offering a service. When one thing slows down there is the other to fall back on. I’ve also considered getting into tube amplifier building and repair since I chose my business name with the purpose of doing multiple things, but I’m not sure about it at this point. In the words of Roy Blankenship, amp repair is “the most amount of knowledge for the least amount of financial return of anything I’ve ever done.” I feel like tube amps are in a weird spot at the moment and I’m curious to see how it shakes out. Anyway, something to think about. If you’re ever interested in learning about guitar pedals, either from a business standpoint or a design/sonic standpoint, let me know, that goes for any of you.

-David

[John Wilmink Thomas Muse Guitars]

Like you, I have a full time job and all of my other time is in the shop, 85% repairs and the balance building. Unlike you, I started loothing as a side gig. I had a colleague at my day job who asked if loothing was my dream. “My dream?” I said “It’s my reality.” Don’t get me wrong, I would love to go full time looth, but in the meantime I get to do both. The day job pays the bills and most of the looth money gets plowed back into the business (amps are testing equipment, etc). I was mostly looking toward that day when I could simply work on instruments and now I am mostly grateful to be able to do both. But guitars are stacking up like cordwood, so who knows.