Piano Man

REVIEW SUMMARY
Business. Piano Distributors, Palmettos
Industry. Musical instruments, retail
Key. Company sees a potential end to the recession in a 15% rise in quarterly sales.
By the Numbers. Click here.

Bill Boyce ended a blissful eight-year retirement filled with boat rides and barbecues to open a piano store in Sarasota in 2001.

It was an industry he was intimately familiar with, having run four successful piano and keyboard instrument stores in his native North Carolina from 1969 until 1993. But the past decade — Boyce's encore performance — has proven to be one long, hard tutorial in how to survive a wretched economy.