Back in the mid-80's I did exactly this. I looked at the numbers and reckoned that where I was living at the time (pre-internet) there was only a very slim chance of making a reasonable living inside of a decade and a very high chance of starving to death (ok not literally) within two or three years so I gave up on the idea.ProfChris wrote:
... I say this both because many luthiers seem to be working for very little income, and because most of the posts here never mention financial planning.
If you were planning to set up in business on a purely rational basis then you'd surely want to do some basic calculations, which might look like this
...
Then you ask the question, could I expect to sell that number of instruments for that price? .....
There is also the issue of changing from hobby to job - it may well take the fun and the passion out of it. I've done that and will pass on the t-shirt.
Getting professional advice strikes me as being very sound advice. However, finding the right "professionals" may not be that easy. The number of good advisers world wide for small arts, or crafts businesses must be vanishingly close to zero. I have no idea how to go about looking for one. I also have no idea how I would be able to tell a good adviser from a mediocre or bad one.