Every story is personal and everyone's complex set of needs and goals is a reflection of who they have been, are now, and want to be in the future. It is rare that a person drawn to an essentially solitary pursuit is capable or willing to be a juggling ringmaster with a busy repair shop, rental business, keeping two employees reliably busy, and engaging in various kinds of retail bass selling in a mid-sized shop. It proved to be the case here, as a person who had only been in an employee role in existing shop businesses could hang up his work hat at the end of the work day and go off to a diverse personal life in the evening after an 8 hour day. A more sustainable path might have been to remain a one man shop and not to try to have the retail instrument concerns interrupt his daily work schedule. The extremely demanding time and energy of running a reasonably complex multifunction shop with 2 employees to feed obviously got to be less and less fun. The direction that his future bass luthier life will take is outlined in Jason Heath's podcast interview that has also been posted to YouTube. It should be a more balanced life for him working with a builder in France.
It is rare enough to find work balance in a combined retail and working shop business with 2 part time employees. Sacramento's Jeff Sahs seems to thrive working 6 days per week this way. Jeff loves talking with people and hearing their stories as he works on a bass and produces magical setups that are easy to play and sound great. Jeff is the leading doublebass resource in the Sacramento Valley and has been for nearly 40 years. He can be reached at (916) 739-1962, the shop being located just south of William Land Park. Jeff thrives on human voice contact, so texting or email are pretty useless to him.
