[Jroettger]

Thanks for the reply guys. I work totally alone without my wife's help. It's all mine. I've tried hiring people but in my experience the people who succeed at hiring people always have to let go of the quality and settle for medium level craftsmanship. In order to hire someone great one would have to charge the highest prices in the city (at great peril and stress level) and sacrifice time to being a business manager. They say in every business you can only offer two of the following: quality, price, service. Right now I have great quality and reasonable price (still very expensive though because of the extra labor factor in engraved work) with lousy service. To hire someone great would mean out this world prices leaving me to only work for the very wealthy and not the middle class which I trust better and who are less scarce. The hardest part is when old customers come in and you could used to get them an estimate in a day, a design in a week and a finished piece in 3 to 4 more weeks. It's hard for them to accept that now you need several months to get your best work done. One of the problems too is that with my ever growing engraving business people come in and drop stuff off that doesn't need any complex estimating or upfront design work. All of that stuff goes to the front of the line because it's less complicated, mostly lettering or pattern engraving on rings and I just pull the prices off my established cost sheet.
Yeah jewelry does run on a fast schedule.