"Unfortunately, good technical
ability and good business ability do not always grow naturally on the same
figurative tree."
That line by "Mac," (Mac McGregor) is all too true for lot of us, and I definitely
include myself as part of "us." I have often paraphrased the line by Dr. McCoy on
Star Trek as, "Dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer, not a salesman." Part of
the reason RF Cafe has pretty much remained at the same level of income over the
years is due to my unwillingness to make performance guarantees to anyone in
return for pay - other than to not do anything intentional that will harm them.
My advertisers choose to do so based on RF Cafe's reputation for unbiased
(mostly) presentation of information and abstention from the form of political
correctness that sacrifices efforts of hard working people to spare the fragile
feelings of slothful and/or insidious and/or jealous actors. More than one
accomplished businessman has advised me that being more aggressive would pay big
dividends. OK, I'll try that approach: Buy my newest version of RF Stencils for Visio - which includes more than 1000 objects
- and save yourself untold hours of building your own shapes for presentations. While
you're at it, contact your Advertising department and have someone there get in on the remarkably
low cost now before I raise prices due to a flood of inquiries.
Mac's Radio Service Shop: TV and the Little Guy
By John T. Frye
The topic of large TV service operations
vs. the small is a controversial one. In the past we have presented the case for
the large operation (see "Is the One Man TV Shop Doomed?" in the February 1950 issue
and "TV Servicing is Big Business" in the March 1950 issue).
With this article we present the other side of the story with John T. Frye going
to bat for the small operator.
We do not believe that there is any cut-and-dried answer to this question at
the present. Only time will tell which type of operation can make the grade most
successfully.
Barney, the "electronic assistant" as he liked to call himself of Mac's Radio
Service Shop, stepped inside the front door of the establishment and then stopped
dead in his tracks and began to sniff the air like a retired fireman getting a whiff
of shingle smoke.
"Oh-oh, Miss Perkins," he exclaimed accusingly to the office girl, "you've been
splurging on a new perfume again. No, don't tell me what it is. Let me guess. I'm
pretty good at this sort of thing: Hm-m-m-m," he said with his eyes tightly closed
and his freckled face screwed up in a look of intense concentration, "it could be
either My Secret Sin or Mantrap, but I seem to be getting just a soupçon
of Night of Love -"
"I hate to throw your 'soupçon' out of joint," Matilda interrupted with
a giggle, "but you're not even warm. If you will stop making that noise like a punctured
bellows and open your eyes, you will see that what you are smelling is First April
Hyacinths, and they are right here in a vase on my desk."
"Yeah, M'sieu Jacques," Mac yelled from the service room, "quit waving that anteater
proboscis of yours around and come on back here and put your nose to the grindstone
where it belongs."
"Okay, okay!" Barney said amiably as he strolled back into the service department,
"but I have a little matter I want to talk over with you before we start to work."
"Very well, Junior," Mac said as he shot an amused look at the youth, "but don't
think you're fooling anybody. I'm hep to this business of your getting me started
on a long-winded lecture just to stave off going to work; but what is the gimmick
this time?"
"Oh no, Boss," Barney denied with a pained expression. "You've got me all wrong.
This thing really has me worried. Remember those magazines you told me to take home
and read? Well, just before coming to work I finished an article in one of the publications
intended for large service shop owners. This writer said television was finally
spelling out the end of the 'screwdriver mechanics.'"
At first I thought the writer simply meant poorly-trained and sloppy technicians,
but as I read on I found him calling these same people 'individual technicians'
and 'one-man alley operators.' To him, apparently, a screwdriver mechanic and the
operator of a one-man shop were the same person, and he was convinced that these
characters were going to be about as common on the American scene as wild bison."
Mac lighted his pipe before he answered. "This is serious," he said with with
a grin that belied his words. "Did the prophet of doom give any reasons for his
pessimism?"
"Well, for one thing, he said the little-shop operator did not have either the
equipment or the technical knowledge needed for TV servicing."
Mac's eyes swept fondly across the gleaming array of instruments on the back
of his bench as he drawled, "It will take a stronger argument than that to make
me toss in the sponge. You've got to remember that no amount of equipment will make
a mechanic good, but a good mechanic can make a surprising amount of equipment -
especially during these days of high-quality, low-cost service instrument kits and
of many magazine articles that tell how to build broadband scope amplifiers, sweep
generators, marker generators, vacuum tube voltmeters, and so on.
"In spite of what some of the calamity howlers would like you to believe, even
if you buy factory-made instruments, you do not need enough money to make a down
payment on a yacht to buy all of the equipment you require to do a bang up job of
television servicing. The fellow who has, in addition to the usual radio shop equipment,
a v.t.v.m., a good sweep generator, a scope with good gain and frequency response,
and a dependable marker generator is equipped to tackle any TV service job, providing,
of course, that he knows how to get the most out of these instruments; and a fellow
who has either built these instruments or who has selected them after a great deal
of catalogue-thumbing and comparing in an effort to make his limited funds go as
far as possible, is very likely to be able to do just that."
"Yeah, but this writer says the small operator is short on know-how, too."
"That is a generality and is about as worthless as most generalities," Mac said
with an impatient gesture. "Some lone-wolf technicians are technically unprepared
to do TV work, but I know some mighty, mighty dumb ones who work for the big concerns,
too. Come to think of it, where do these big outfits get their technicians? Most
of them are recruited from the ranks of the independent technicians - especially
those technicians who fail in making a go of their own shops. Wonder what magical
quality it is that transforms these former 'screwdriver mechanics' into 'carefully
trained technicians' just as soon as they are put on the payroll of a large concern!"
"For your money, then, a small operator is likely to be just as good a technician
as a fellow working for a big shop."
"Affirmative! In the first place, a man has to have both initiative and self-confidence
to strike out for himself, and these two qualities are the foundation for a good
TV technician. When you don't have anyone else to whom you can pass the buck, you
just have to buckle down and work out your own problems, and that is precisely how
a good technician is made. Then, too, the man who is his own entire technical force
has to be familiar with every phase of television from the antenna installation
right down to the picture tube and the speaker. He is not so likely to be a narrow
specialist as is the case with large company technicians.
"Most important of all, though, the little guy has every possible incentive for
doing the best work he is capable of doing. He knows that his whole business and
all the time and money he has put into it depends upon the quality of the work he
turns out. If the ability to work hard and carefully is in him at all, that knowledge
will bring it out. Doing sloppy work and loafing on the job is about as smart for
the one-man operator as cheating at soli-taire."
"Do you-think a technician can make as much money working for himself as he can
working for a large shop?"
"That is impossible to answer because it depends upon so many variables, of which
one of the most important is: how good a business man is the individual technician?
Unfortunately, good technical ability and good business ability do not always grow
naturally on the same tree, and that accounts for a great deal of the trouble encountered
by the small service shops. This weakness has been recognized, though, and more
and more space is being given in the trade publications to educating the technician
along business as well as technical lines.
"But there is another important fact that no Big Time Operator will probably
ever quite understand: money taken in is not the full measure of the independent
technician's pay. A mind that is filled with inventories, man-hours, depreciation,
ten-day discounts, etc., can never quite grasp the deep satisfaction that a first-class
mechanic receives from doing a fine job of repairing a broken or defective mechanism
or circuit in his own way, on his own time, and with his own tools. There is something
creative about that kind of work that makes it altogether different from doing the
same thing for an employer's pay. A funny thing about an average American is that
he prefers being the whole works of a small machine to being a small cog in a big
machine. As long as this is so, we shall have independent technicians; and I hope
I never see the day when it isn't so."
"Don't you think we ought to have large service shops?"
"Certainly we should have them. Large shops are needed, especially in cities,
to take care of the immense amount of work that must be done and done fast. I have
no quarrel with big shops, but I insist that there is plenty of room and plenty
of work in this country for both the large and small shops. What I hate is this
attempt on the part of a few large organizations - and it is by no means all of
them - to try to 'smear' the independent operator with blanket charges of inefficiency
and dishonesty.
"The auto service industry has been going through this same thing for years.
Every time a new car design comes out, there are a few who cry that this advance
will mean the end of the 'alley garages'; but these small garages are still with
us and will probably be doing business when cars are equipped with atomic engines.
The mechanic who works on my car and truck runs one of these little shops, and I
will stack Homer's mechanical ability, thoroughness, honesty, and essential up-to-date
equipment up against that found in any garage you can name. He is good enough that
his customers patiently wait two or three weeks just to get their cars into his
shop and have him work on it personally.
"I think that what grinds the large operators the most is that the independent
technician usually charges less for his service than they do. They consider this
'price cutting' and say that such a practice sabotages the advancement of the whole
service business. But that really isn't the case. The little guy is simply using
one of his few advantages, low overhead, to offer more attractive rates to his customers.
The big outfit can buy replacement parts cheaper because of the size of their orders,
and they can smother him with their large advertising. budgets, but on top of that
they still want to set his charges for him!
"These outfits would do well to practice a fundamental business rule that the
independents learned long ago: Don't knock your competitor - even your little competitor.
Every time a radioman raises the Pharisee cry that other radiomen are crooks and
stupid blunderers, he arouses doubts and suspicions in the minds of the people concerning
all technicians."
Posted July 15, 2024 (updated from original post
on 9/12/2016)
Mac's Radio Service Shop Episodes on RF Cafe
This series of instructive
technodrama™
stories was the brainchild of none other than John T. Frye, creator of the
Carl and Jerry series that ran in
Popular Electronics for many years. "Mac's Radio Service Shop" began life
in April 1948 in Radio News
magazine (which later became Radio & Television News, then
Electronics
World), and changed its name to simply "Mac's Service Shop" until the final
episode was published in a 1977
Popular Electronics magazine. "Mac" is electronics repair shop owner Mac
McGregor, and Barney Jameson his his eager, if not somewhat naive, technician assistant.
"Lessons" are taught in story format with dialogs between Mac and Barney.
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