I've been running a small Reverb shop for about two years now, mainly buying beat-up guitars at estate sales and flea markets, restoring them, and flipping them. Business is okay but I'm hitting a wall with sourcing decent candidates and pricing my labor fairly. Curious how others in this niche handle the time vs. profit tradeoff, especially on refrets and structural repairs.
Guitar Restoration
My Reverb business restores old guitars before reselling them
Refrets are the killer for me. I stopped doing them unless the guitar is worth $800+ after restoration. Otherwise the hours just don't pencil out.
How are you sourcing now? Estate sales have gotten brutal in my area, everything gets picked over by the first morning. I've had better luck with local pawn shops that dont want to deal with setup work.
Mostly estate sales and FB Marketplace. Pawn shops here seem to think every Squier is a collector's item, but maybe I'm not negotiating right.
The labor pricing issue is real. I've started tracking hours per guitar in a spreadsheet, and it was depressing at first. But it helped me figure out which repairs to farm out and which to skip entirely. Also, photographing the before/after restoration process has been huge for sales—buyers pay more when they see the work documented.
What's your average turnaround time per guitar? I feel like I'm sitting on inventory too long and it ties up cash.
Documenting the process is smart. I've noticed listings with detailed restoration photos sell faster and hold value better. Buyers are suspicious of flipped guitars otherwise.
Turnaround is my bottleneck too. I've started limiting myself to two active restorations at a time. More than that, and nothing gets finished.
I appreciate the spreadsheet idea. I've been avoiding actually counting my hours because I suspect the number is ugly. Might be time to face it.