Thank you every one for all your comments, I have learned a lot.....
I've had a few more thoughts.....
Do customers make voice calls to Handymen or do they email instead?
reason I ask is that I am deaf so voice calls would be a *BIG* problem for me as it is not possible to lipread on phones. So I would prefer customers to email me. I'm content to have a 3G enabled Apple Ipad in the van for this purpose.
In a similar vein, many customers have smart phones so they could take pictures of the job and email it to me to make my job of quoting easier and/or more accurate without losing working time driving over to teh potential customer, viewing the job, writing up a quote & posting etc etc.
Also, customers don't like taking whole days off from work waiting for handymen to turn up. So perhaps some kind of automated text messaging service like Taxi's have to say "The handyman is on his way to you, his ETA is XXX mins" Allowing customer to nip home from work, let me in, I do the job, let me out and the customer goes back to work.
Talking of flexibility, what about adjacent neighbours deals. i.e. neither neighbour has a full days worth of jobs. I'd turn up do half day at one house, the other half day at next doors, and charge then a full days rate for both houses and they pay half each? and share half the call out charge? after all, I'd rather work than drive about.
I can go part time with my exisitin gfull time job so I'd have an insurance plan if the handyman thing fell apart.