Can you contact me when you are accepting new bookings or put me on a waitlist?

Unfortunately, waitlists don’t work for us for a few reasons. Let me explain.

The work we do is specialised and done very differently from most others. Each job is unique, often involving complex component-level fault-finding and repair. By definition, this means we never know how long a job will take before we see it.

I work on rare pieces with weird faults, like the Kenwood L-07D turntables you see below. I have hundreds of new and returning customers, each with unique equipment and requirements, so trying to book a ‘slot’ of time in advance for each one, when we don’t even know when we will have one available, is not possible.

In summary:

• We have many existing and potential new customers, each with unique requirements
• People change their minds, sell equipment, move on, disappear, etc
• Equipment faults/requirements/bench times often cannot be predicted
• Managing a waitlist would require an admin person we don’t have
• We always have more work than we can manage without a waitlist, so we don’t ‘need’ one in that sense

The solution is our booking process and booking status table. Each enquirer needs only to check as guided by the information in the table, minimising wasted time, filtering out those who no longer require our services and saving me from potentially hundreds of unnecessary calls and emails.

But Mike, this doesn’t help me!

Actually, it does, because this process helps me, which therefore helps all my customers. It works well for most, but for those who ‘expect’ a waitlist anyway, I apologise for being unable to offer one. Feel free to send an enquiry even if we’re full, because it gets the ball rolling and may help clarify whether a job is something we cater for, and when to call us again.