I have many years experience with this, have owned a half-dozen shops where perfection was the standard myself. I have also dealt with master craftsmen since the early seventies.
A one man or forty man shop means little until the one man shop builds a reputation. Then the shop rises and falls on his reputation. He can take in a partner and if they both seek perfection it still works. However, any time you have a crew of people working on a project, quality invariably suffers compared to a single master craftsman. Nobody is fully responsible for the work and most of the people doing the work don't have their name and their reputation on the line.
A fine example is the realm of gunsmithing. Quite a few people rise to the rank of master gunsmith, capable of doing world class work. Naturally the world beats a path to their door. A huge backlog and bringing in people to help often follows. Shortly thereafter without fail crap starts going out their door. Sometimes it is a small percentage of their items, sometimes large, but when the master loses tight control, quality suffers. A fine example closer to home is Meucci cues. I owned an early one, a nice cue even if it did have a noodle shaft that took getting used to. When he tried to expand using a crew quality took a nose dive and the result is the 363 threads on this forum.(An estimate, not an actual count
)
There are dozens of other areas I can give examples in including my own auto body shops. One maintained a six month waiting list to bring a car in the door until I sold the business. My problem was simple, if an experienced body person could look at the work from arm's length and see a car had been repaired the person that did the work wasn't qualified to work at my shop. There were limits to how much work three of us could turn out and that was the most people I ever had at one time that could meet my demands. I fired a body shop instructor with over twenty years of experience as an auto body instructor and many years working in the trade. I also fired the former foreman of a large local new car dealership's body shop. Master craftsmen are damned hard to come by.
Compare master craftsmen to the numbers for the powerball. One number is pretty easy to hit. Two numbers can be done. The odds of getting six in one place was one in 80 million. They decided that was too easy and made it much tougher. It may not be as tough to get six master craftsmen in one place without a stinker in the bunch but I have yet to see a six man crew that were all top notch after pushing crews for decades. By far the very best I have ever done was hire 20 out of 24 good workers for a construction project. They were far from 20 masters, just 20 willing to try.
If you do business with a one man shop and that man is a master craftsman, every bit of the work will be done by a master craftsman. If you go to a shop with a master craftsman at it's head and six people assisting him not only is it likely that he won't do all of the work on your project, most likely much of the work will be done piecemeal by multiple workers with none of them accepting responsibility for the final product. "Good enough" becomes acceptable for their part of the project and unfortunately "good enough" rarely is.
One major reason I sold my body shop that was making money by the bucketful and had super financial security was the frustration over finding quality people to assist me. In years I had one other man capable of turning out consistent finished work at the level I demanded. The third or fourth person was usually just there to run parts or help disassemble damaged vehicles. I owned the real estate and had the room to hire six men and to expand my shop to hire dozens. Never happened because I was more interested in being the best shop in the area than the biggest. The man that bought my shop but not my name quickly expanded it into a large shop doing so-so work. No doubt he made a lot more money than I did although I had the second highest shop rate I knew of when I was in business. The only person with a higher rate was an old master with a one man shop . . . .
Hu
A one man or forty man shop means little until the one man shop builds a reputation. Then the shop rises and falls on his reputation. He can take in a partner and if they both seek perfection it still works. However, any time you have a crew of people working on a project, quality invariably suffers compared to a single master craftsman. Nobody is fully responsible for the work and most of the people doing the work don't have their name and their reputation on the line.
A fine example is the realm of gunsmithing. Quite a few people rise to the rank of master gunsmith, capable of doing world class work. Naturally the world beats a path to their door. A huge backlog and bringing in people to help often follows. Shortly thereafter without fail crap starts going out their door. Sometimes it is a small percentage of their items, sometimes large, but when the master loses tight control, quality suffers. A fine example closer to home is Meucci cues. I owned an early one, a nice cue even if it did have a noodle shaft that took getting used to. When he tried to expand using a crew quality took a nose dive and the result is the 363 threads on this forum.(An estimate, not an actual count
)There are dozens of other areas I can give examples in including my own auto body shops. One maintained a six month waiting list to bring a car in the door until I sold the business. My problem was simple, if an experienced body person could look at the work from arm's length and see a car had been repaired the person that did the work wasn't qualified to work at my shop. There were limits to how much work three of us could turn out and that was the most people I ever had at one time that could meet my demands. I fired a body shop instructor with over twenty years of experience as an auto body instructor and many years working in the trade. I also fired the former foreman of a large local new car dealership's body shop. Master craftsmen are damned hard to come by.
Compare master craftsmen to the numbers for the powerball. One number is pretty easy to hit. Two numbers can be done. The odds of getting six in one place was one in 80 million. They decided that was too easy and made it much tougher. It may not be as tough to get six master craftsmen in one place without a stinker in the bunch but I have yet to see a six man crew that were all top notch after pushing crews for decades. By far the very best I have ever done was hire 20 out of 24 good workers for a construction project. They were far from 20 masters, just 20 willing to try.
If you do business with a one man shop and that man is a master craftsman, every bit of the work will be done by a master craftsman. If you go to a shop with a master craftsman at it's head and six people assisting him not only is it likely that he won't do all of the work on your project, most likely much of the work will be done piecemeal by multiple workers with none of them accepting responsibility for the final product. "Good enough" becomes acceptable for their part of the project and unfortunately "good enough" rarely is.
One major reason I sold my body shop that was making money by the bucketful and had super financial security was the frustration over finding quality people to assist me. In years I had one other man capable of turning out consistent finished work at the level I demanded. The third or fourth person was usually just there to run parts or help disassemble damaged vehicles. I owned the real estate and had the room to hire six men and to expand my shop to hire dozens. Never happened because I was more interested in being the best shop in the area than the biggest. The man that bought my shop but not my name quickly expanded it into a large shop doing so-so work. No doubt he made a lot more money than I did although I had the second highest shop rate I knew of when I was in business. The only person with a higher rate was an old master with a one man shop . . . .
Hu
:grin:
