I agree with John B and another poster.
It just seems to be too much hassle to do Custom orders. Maybe makers should take on one, two, maybe three per year or what ever number that they know that they can produce. The rest should be of the makers design.
Take what you see and if you don't like any, I won't be taking another custom order for a year down the road.
It does seem that if a cue is paid in full, the money gets spent and its out of sight, out of mind for the customer.
But lets think of two or three of the more well known makers. You decide who they might be. They take a certain amount of orders. Are they ever late by a month or four?
Or is it because of their business practices and their word that keeps them on time.
If they are a bit late, they could say, "Dance little customer, dance".
And ya know what, the customers would do the Monkey dance and you would never hear a word of complaint from the customer.
But, I suspect that it is more that the makers word and practices that keep them on time is more than anything in my example.
The makers that I am thinking about have never had a thread started in their name.
On the other hand, there are many lesser known or less famous makers that never have a thread started in their name either.
Certain makers have earned the reputation and they can get by easily with less cues for more money.
That is maybe why if you can't sell your cues for more money and you have to rely on more cues for less money, you should work another job, whether it be full time or part time to get by and use the cue business as more of a hobby and extra income. Then whatever you make off of that is gravy and you give yourself and your customers less head aches in the long run.
Maybe these certain makers just happen to be in the wrong business or that they would mess up any business they were involved in, whether they were building a cue or a house.
I think that all of us have had bad experiences with other non cue related businesses in our lives. Businesses that we would never deal with again.
Just last week, I had a rather unpleasant experience with a place called Outdoor Outfitters.
I told the guy as I was walking out, this is the last time you will see me in your store and by the way, you do realize that Cabella's has a Grand Opening in 2 weeks don't you.
This person was the manager and not some high school student that was apt to flip me off behind my back as I was leaving.
The older I get the more the dynamics of life become clear. Life is brutal.
Justin posted a video about a famous knife maker whose $350 knives were hard to sell when he was alive and are now fetching up to $70,000. Almost nothing involved with fabricating anything for money is what it seems on the surface. And I mean almost nothing.
You have no idea where a guy is at financially, with his health, family or skills. There are very few makers who are "set" financially with stable shops, stable lives and the right amount of income to expenses. The rest are in kind of feast and famine mode all the time. Let anything happen and they have a very hard time weathering it.
Custom making is also very stressful BEFORE you ever start building. Taking the orders, getting the details, then changes, then questions about updates....etc....
Imagine that a maker has say 20 people he is talking to about cues. Say he gets ten emails and phone calls a day that require him to spend 5-15 minutes on. That's 100 minutes a day, randomly dispersed throughout the day that he has to deal with things not directly involved with the actual building of the cue. Then keeping track of all those details becomes harder and harder. If you happen to take a call when you don't have the order sheet in front of you then you have to make a note that may or may not be transfered to the order sheet. if a change is buried in a string of emails then it's easy to lose.
I think a lot of makers just are not prepared for this.
A lot of them want to please all their customers. They really would love to get all the cues done and have only happy customers. But the demands pile up and pretty soon it's overwhelming. Very few people can handle this. I am one of them that cannot. Without help there would be no JB Cases.
I enjoy doing creative things, stretching the limits, inventing new methods. I don't enjoy the "paperwork" and subsequently I procrastinate it severely. I enjoy being able to offer just about anything a customer wants but I don't like to handle the details. I can only imagine what it's like for makers who have no help.
Some guys have a pretty narrow set of things they will do. They handle this stress by limiting the choices. Other guys have a more, take-what-I-give you approach and that can work for some makers. It's really a spectrum where no choice/poor quality/poor service is on one and and unlimited choice/great quality/great service is on the other end.
Obviously in the custom shop game very few survive at the low end and very few have it all together at the high end. The rest are somewhere in the middle and it doesn't take much to nudge them in the wrong direction while it takes quite a bit more effort for them to move up. Same as climbing a hill really, each step is tougher and tougher as you go up but falling down is easy. With a team it's much easier to climb.
I will be extremely happy when the day comes that I don't owe anyone a case beyond the stated delivery time. That will be a huge burden lifted from myself and the few customers who have been generously patient for their dream (delayed) cases.
I feel horrible for anyone facing the sad fact that their money is gone for cue orders placed. That is unfortunately the risk you take with the middle of the pack cue makers who are working alone.
