What is a reasonable hourly rate then?
I'm based in the West Midlands, presume the Engineer works from home has a semi/unskilled mate who is paid per job.
I cannot see a great deal of overhead apart from running a van & admi expenses.
I'm not running the profession down we all have to make a living bu I'm not going to line the pockets of unscrupulous individuals
-- handypandy
I hear similar things all the time. Having been in sales for 30 years before becoming a handyman its second nature to me to call people back, turn up when I say I will, give estimates on time. I even call if I'm going to be late.
I do actually get a lot of work, at good prices simply by default.
Seems strange to me - how do you get work if you treat potential customers like that?
Oh lets see; van on lease at £200 a month + tax, fuel & business insurance, public liability insurance, advertising - have you seem what yellow pages charge - £1500 a year for a modest advert?
Accountants fees, bank charges (no free banking with a business acount), depreciation on tools & equipment, funding stock.
And if you are CORGI or the equivilant electrical there are anual fees, cost of training & certification etc.
And a self employed tradesman con only charge that'reasonable hourly rate' when actually working. No pay for sitting in traffic, collecting goods, going on holiday etc.
My cheapest rate for a handyman is £20 an hour. That only applies to a pre booked full day. I can make that work because I operate in a very small densely populated catchment area and charge a higher rate for smaller jobs.
You haven't ever been self employed have you?
The lack of a customer culture in the UK mystifies me. Here's another example; a couple of years ago, I wanted to buy a sports car. I had a budget of some GBP22K, in cash, in the bank. My short list included the Vauxhall VX220 (& turbo version of same). I called my local Vauxhall dealer again and again and again and again. Each time "Wayne", the VX salesman was unavailable. Each time, I left a message. Each time, it was ignored (or forgotten.) So me and my 22K walked away. And not only did Vauxhall not sell me a car, but they made an anti-customer of me.
I got treated similarly by the London Sports Car Centre in St. Albans (owned by HR Owen) when I tried to buy a Lotus Elise from them. At least I got a test drive - from a surly, grudging, disinterested salesman who kept me waiting 45 minutes, despite me having made an appointment. Another anti-customer. More negative publicity.
I bought a TVR. The TVR centre in Barnet couldn't have been more helpful - staying open so I could test drive & generally go over the car. Taking my wife out for a ride. Of course, it's TVR that has now gone out of business. There is no justice.
Anyhow, back to tradespeople. I suspect that most of them have so much business that it doesn't matter how they treat their customers, or how poor the workmanship is. So many people are desperate for someone, anyone, to do their stuff for them that they'll tolerate being treated like dirt just to get that dripping tap fixed.
No wonder we DIY. With a few exceptions (the tradespeople we now use and carefully hoard to ourselves) I could have made a better job for much less money than some of the jokers I've been unfortunate enough to employ in the past.
On Sun, 15 Apr 2007 10:45:12 +0100, "The Medway Handyman" mused:
From the other side of that coin, you price for more work than you expect to be able to do as half the people to call are just idly enquiring, half of those people are just gathering quotes to get the numbers up before giving the work to someone who was already recommended, etc...
I see that Dave has given you some numbers.... but would you want an uninsured person doing work in your house that he could seriously damage it if he made a mistake.
Insurance for such people has gone sky high in the last few years, I imagine that some don't see any change from a couple of grand a year
tim
...and the third half just want a quote for the insurance and will then do it themselves...
Very pretty sons who like a bit of rough?
Owain
No, the mate will be an employee, with employer's NI, employer liability, and annual leave costs to be added in.
Which mount up. When I worked for a council I was told the effective cost of issuing an invoice was £5 taking into account not only my time but the costs involved in running a finance department, IT department, etc.
Why are they unscrupulous?
Owain
Flock of sheep or a rather attractive hound would probably do the job.
Depends on the actual business in question and the way it is operated.
But if you start from the baseline that it is unlikely to cost less than
15K / year to run it, you have a baseline that needs to be recovered on paying jobs to break even. Then add on what you would consider to be a reasonable rate of return for your highly sought after and in demand skill. Allow for the fact that you can only work for a proportion of the days available and will get no income when not employed on billable work.Who he needs to employ, pay employers NI contributions for, fund training, sick leave, holiday etc. So that is likely to be a minimum of another 20K cost to the business.
In this example we are at 35K so far.
If small business owners wanted just to "make a living" then they cold do that by getting a job. Chances are they want to achieve more than that. Does that make them unscrupulous?
Most insurance companies won't allow that. I wanted to replace my bath after I broke it but I had to wait six weeks for a plumber to do it.
Tsk. You've forgotten the Golden Rule.
My gold. My rule.
:o)
On Sun, 15 Apr 2007 13:41:41 +0100, "The Medway Handyman" mused:
Most of the insurance jobs I've done the insurance co has sent a cheque to the customer made out to me so if they want to do the work then fine, the money is still made out to me. :)
I think that this must be a typical GM type of thing possibly coming from their almost automatic levels of business from the company car market when it was more substantial than it is today.
I went into one of the dealers with a similar type of question and the first thing that they asked was whether it was a company car. As soon a I said that it was, they immediately switched into sloppy mode and started saying things like "Of course the company car policy will dictate that you have to have X" or that "the fleet manager will insist on Y"
He couldn't have been more wrong. It was a fairly small company and we didn't have a car policy as such, although by mutual agreement we agreed that we would have no more than three suppliers. I was the defacto "fleet manager" for this.
Assuming people chose evenly among them, this would have been an order for 10 cars. When the guy had finished, I asked to see his manager and explained that his empoyee had just lost them a fairly substantial sale.
He didn't care. I have never bought a GM car since.
Because you can't see the overheads that does not stop them from being there. Have you any idea what the insurance premium for liability is just for the mate? CORGI are a philanthropic organisation, not. etc. etc.
This is the heart of the matter, it is very easy to evaluate the job as just the visible part. The little things like flushing the existing system. Add TRVs (you wont do them in less than 15 mins each and sometimes they can be real bastards). etc. etc.etc.
Wales, or Aberdeenshire?
Owain
Yeah, total.
We do work for hospitals, one customer (Rotherham DGH, ISTR) insisted on 2 megaquids worth of public liability, nobody else anywhere in the country did. So we just took it without looking too hard at the cost.
Turned out last year that after 8 years when the contract was concluded and the machine came out of service we had effectively had
*zero* revenue for making 2 service visits every year for *8 years* to this customer, it had all gone in paying for the enhanced public liability insurance.That's not zero profit, that's zero *revenue* (turnover minus direct costs).
In fact they had made money out of us by charging for car parking.
:-(
DG
Do they have wellies in Aberdeenshire?
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