When Curt Altarac took his business from sideline to sole focus, he set up in the iconic garage workshop with a staff of five.

That was in 1999, when he moved to Wilmington after finishing graduate school in Mississippi. After 15 years of consistent growth, the company now employs 24, owns a 40,000-square-foot building, does business all over the world and is eyeing new opportunities.

But Altarac’s company is neither a producer of some innovative gadget nor a tech startup. In fact, some of the techniques his staff employs date to the first half of the 19th century or even earlier. His three-pronged enterprise is all about saxophones, an instrument invented in the 1840s.

Under one roof in southside Wilmington, Altarac oversees MusicMedic.com, Sax ProShop and PadCompany, which play different parts on the same musical score.

MusicMedic.com continues Altarac’s grad school business pursuit, which was providing saxophone repair tools, tool kits and related supplies to factories, music stores and individual sax players who wanted to tinker with their instruments.

Supplying those tools was a natural choice for Altarac, a highly trained saxophonist who learned to repair his own instruments and began fixing those of his middle school students and, later, his grad school classmates.

“I had trouble buying supplies because I wasn’t ordering in enough quantity, so I would buy larger quantities of an item – say, 100 – and sell 50 on eBay to break even. Shortly afterward, I created a repair kit and a website,” he said.

Selling those repair kits through the website generated enough money to see Altarac through grad school. Marketing himself online as a repair shop, he succeeded so well that he started getting requests to do saxophone repairs, requests he could not fulfill while he was in school.

So he told potential customers that he had a two-year waiting list for repairs. That list, which kept growing, gave Altarac a running start when he completed his master’s degree and got into the repair business.

The need to tackle a backlog efficiently helped him and his startup crew to shape the operations of what became Sax ProShop, rehabbing professional-grade instruments belonging to musicians around the world.

“We had to grow in a way that would let us do good work, which led us to an assembly line approach: one team, one goal,” Altarac said, explaining that each employee specializes in one component of the instrument’s overhaul – or uberhaul, as they call it.

“They are more than specialists; they are masters of their craft, but each person does only one part of the entire job. They do it to a very high level, and they are given tools to make their work even better,” Altarac said. “Our philosophy is to make the instrument as perfect as it can be, then maintain it that way. Saxophones can last forever if you treat them right. If you don’t, [repeated] repairs can wear them out.”

Depending on the instrument and its condition, an average uberhaul takes 30 to 60 hours and costs anywhere from $1,800 to $3,500. And a massive restoration could run as much as $8,500, Altarac said.

Altarac said that his clientele is international and includes high-profile saxophonists who fly in to Wilmington to pick up their rehabbed instruments. He also believes his is the world’s largest saxophone repair shop.

“America used to make the best [saxophones]. They used to make them good and fast. Now no one in America is making them, and development has slowed,” Altarac said. “Nobody is designing saxophones anymore. They’re all copies, and sometimes they get copied with a flaw.”

The growing volume of uberhauling used and improving new instruments has created another business opportunity for Altarac: the fabrication of high-quality parts and tools.

That need led to the launch of PadCompany, whose employees make hand-crafted leather-covered felt pads that fit the buttons of saxes and other woodwind instruments.

The pads are sold globally through MusicMedic.com and other instrument vendors, Altarac said.
Keeping his enterprise playing in three-part harmony might seem enough of a challenge for a business-minded saxophonist, but Altarac said he’s not interested in the maintenance aspects of his operation. Maintenance responsibilities are delegated.

“I’ve given myself the job of growing. I only want to do new things,” he said.

That “growing” job description is a broad one. Altarac has made his operations increasingly lean, drawing on ideas and practices from Toyota and from Six Sigma programs.

He also spends significant time on marketing, which involves international travel to Europe and Asia, where he works with factories to improve the manufacture of saxophones and gives clinics on repair.

Growing is also the product of visioning and planning, and Altarac and his staff – most of whom are saxophonists – are laying the groundwork for expanded projects.

They want to get into the manufacture of saxophones, for starters, and are planning a retail component of the business that will enable musicians to come into the facility and try out various instruments.

“It would be cool to bring saxophone making back to America,” Altarac said. “And I think it will be important for Wilmington.”

But high-quality manufacturing requires high-quality resources, so the company is working to achieve control over every part of that process so it can be done faster and more efficiently.

“We are passionate about saxophones,” Altarac said. “We want to be responsible for and control every aspect of our work ... Nobody cares about our stuff the way we do.”