How Many Piano Tuners Are There in Chicago?

By Merit Smith
Vice President

At the risk of sounding like a former president who talked to his eleven-year-old daughter about nuclear disarmament, this article begins with a phone conversation with my daughter. Lauren, a Stanford pre-med student, called me when I was working on a problem for a client.

“Whatcha doin’?” she began.

“Trying to figure out how many undiagnosed diabetics there are in the U.S.”

“Oh, piano tuners.”

“No, diabetics,” I said.

“No, I mean you’re doing the piano tuner problem.”

“What piano tuner problem?”

“Dad, Fermi was famous for doing amazingly accurate estimates from very simple parameters. Like the time he estimated how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. So, Dr. Springer calls making a quick estimate ‘piano tuning.’ I heard about it in a bioengineering class where we had to do a problem set of estimates.

Estimates are neat.” Estimates are neat. I guess I’m lucky they are, because I live in a world of estimates. How long will it take? If we follow that recommendation, what do we get in savings? If that standard of care changes, what does it do to staffing? How many ambulance runs are there in the U.S. each day?

Here are some things to think about when making an estimate:

Don’t guess if you don’t have to. Don’t make an estimate when you can have a fact. Here is where the Internet helps a lot: a three-second search just might find the phone number of the Chicago Piano Tuners Association. Be creative about finding and using published resources.

If you can’t find a fact, find an expert. And when you find one, ask two questions: Do you know how many piano tuners there are in Chicago? The expert may know or be prompted by the question to venture a guess. If he or she ventures a guess, ask how they made the guess. If they don’t offer a number, follow with this question: “If you had to estimate how many piano tuners there are in Chicago, how would you go about it?” If the expert isn’t getting too far with this estimating business, you might not have a real expert, but you might still be able to salvage the situation by asking “Do you know anybody that knows about piano tuning in Chicago?”

Work from big numbers to small numbers. I may not be able to find a local resource or an expert, but I might be able to find a national resource who tells me that there are 48,000 members of Piano Tuners of America. With 300 million Americans, that is about one tuner for every 6,250 citizens. If there are 2,800,000 people in Chicago, we might estimate about 450 piano tuners in the Windy City.

Make an initial guess, then figure out how to refine it. For example, our initial estimate of 450 tuners doesn’t include part-time tuners and doesn’t reflect that some tuners don’t belong to the PTA. So we are getting comfortable that our estimate is on the low side. What to do? Think about what you have to do to tune a piano; you might be able to tune one a night if you were moonlighting or two for each weekend day. So we play around with those numbers a bit and estimate that not more than 5% of total piano tuning can be done in these times. Now we tack on 5% and have a new estimate of 475.

Get a second opinion. At this point, you can benefit from getting a second set of eyes on the problem. Find an expert, knowledgeable person, or at least someone who will listen to you, and take them through your estimate. Now lead with an open-ended question such as “What do you think?” Then ask “Do you think it is high or low?” “Why?” “Can you think of any way to improve it?”

Refine your estimate by honing in on one factor. You might be able to get a better estimate of the Chicago population, for example. You might be able to find out how many part-time tuners there are in the U.S. that haven’t found the PTA. Pick the part of the estimate that you can refine the most in the shortest amount of time.

Test your estimate with other experts and non-experts. Listen to their reactions and solicit ideas as to how they would improve your guess. Don’t be surprised if you talk to 12 people and you get one great idea that will improve it. Keep an open mind or at least be able to fake it.

Expect the number to wiggle around a bit at first. Fairly soon, it will settle around a number or a narrow range of values. Once the estimate is falling into a tight range, you can start to use it.

As you begin to use the estimate, be able to explain how you arrived at it. Have a simple statement about how the estimate was made, and expect to be asked whether it underestimates or overestimates.

If you are using the estimate in an important decision, sometimes it is useful to work backward from the decision to see how good the estimate needs to be. Do this by asking, “By how much would the estimate have to be off in order to make me reach a different decision?” If little differences in the estimate would make you change your mind about your decision, you will need to spend more time improving the estimate. If the accuracy of the estimate doesn’t seem to have much impact on your decision process, then you are ready to decide.

Don’t expect perfection, but do spend a bit of effort on “perfecting” your guess. I know a health plan executive in Michigan who talks a lot about “perfecting the data.” What he means is work with your data and estimates to improve them. As you do, you will get better at making estimates. He thinks, and I agree, that estimating is an executive muscle. The more you use it, the better it gets.

Learn from others. Listen to other executives and managers talk about how they make estimates. If you find someone that has a logical process, common sense, and a track record, get their phone number and talk to them the next time you are making an estimate.

Over time, you can really improve your skills in making and using estimates. You might even establish a reputation as an expert in the obscure art of estimating. If so, when someone asks you, “Hey Charlie, what do you think next quarter’s volumes will be?”, you can smile and say “Oh, piano tuning…”