There's two types (basically) of guitar techs out there. I'm talking full time techs who do only (or mainly) that for a living.
Salaried employees, who get paid an hourly rate or monthly salary, and includes most in-house techs for small stores, and lately the big chains have made a big push to fill all their stores with "certified" techs (the chain certifies them after a short 2 or 3 day training session, they may or may not have any previous tech experience). Also, guitar techs that tech for acts on the road fall into this category IMO.
Independant contractors, who rent space, either from a chain or a mom and pop store, or go on their own and rent a small space to set up shop for building and repairing. A few independant contractors work from home. You can either rent space for a set fee and just run your business, or you can pay the store a percentage of your earnings, say 20%, and set your prices accordingly, which is what I did.
The salaried employee is a good start to break into the business, if you can find somewhere to hire you, but the pay isn't very good, the hours are long, and you end up doing much more work than you are being paid for, but if you apprach it correctly, you can gain a lot of experience and make a lot of contacts. Some stores have a non-compete clause they want you to sign, so you can't collect and store customer info, then quit on them.
My first tech job was as a salaried tech for a mom and pop store. It was a great experience that taught me a lot and prepared me to move to my next job as an independant contractor. I used space from a chain, inside their store, and got paid per job. I would charge the store, and they would mark up whatever I charged them 20 percent, so a $35 charge would become $42, an $80 would become $96 to the customer, and so on, that's how I rented the space. At one point, I had 70 guitars sitting on shelves in the back waiting to be fixed, I was working 7 days a week, 12 hour days, but the pay was QUADRUPLE what I was making at the small store, for the same type of work, but there was more of it because of the foot traffic.
The economy took a crap, and the corporate office needed to find a way to increase their cash flow, so they looked at what us independant contractors were doing, and decided to train dudes, pay them $9.00 an hour, and put them in the stores hoping they would do the same job, and also requiring them to setup every guitar on the wall and that got sold. They didn't kick us out, but instead started making it difficult for us to make money, by requiring stuff like free setups for the store, and setting limits on the amount of time it took to complete jobs. Same day service was optimal. That made it tough to have a backlog, since you had to argue with the GM every day about your back log, if you had one, even if you told someone ahead of time that their fret dresswould take 3 weeks to complete due to your backlog. I never got any complaints by the way, people understood and trusted my work. The kicker for me came when they decided to give half-price setups to first time buyers, and told me they would only pay me half. Then they told me to do a quickie cheapie setup, just to make the customer happy and get them out the door. Well, I didn't want someone's first experience with me to be a cheapie half-a$$ed setup. It stopped being worth it, and the environment was extremely stressful, so I created a web page, and now work from home. They took a sales guy, sent him out to a hotel for 3 days, and now he's the certified tech, doing mostly store stock, but I guess that's what they want.
I now have steady repair work at home, and also time to build instruments, which I didn't have before. I do mostly big jobs such as fret dresses, refrets, and structural repairs, and the store does string changes and minor setup work, so it actually worked out pretty good, and now I have 2 orders for electric instruments, and 1 acoustic commission, and more pending.
So I guess the point to this long tale, is, if you want to do tech work for a living, get a job in a small store, then work towards being an independant contractor, unless youcan find somewhere to hire you independantly to start, assuming your skills are up to par. My salaried position was invaluable, since I made a lot of mistakes and learned how to run my own business from it before going independant, but you may be different. The hardest part for me was customer service, and pacing.
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