Fence pricing

[Nobby]

Like I said, labour is expensive at the moment and they can pick & choose, then demand big bucks for it.
I had a gas man out last time I was home, I can't remember the exact charge but it was about £80 for literally 15 minutes while he checked something and signed it off.

Gardeners, fencers and general semi-skilled stuff seems to be the services that have most gone up in price, no one wants to do any graft these days and if you're half decent with a shovel or suchlike then there is good cash-in-hand money to be had.

And yet when you seek Legal or Financial advice , they do it for nothing whilst looking at the latest models in the Mercedes catalogue.

[Horse]

then demand big bucks for it.

I had a gas man out last time I was home, I can't remember the exact charge but it was about £80 for literally 15 minutes while he checked something and signed it off.

What, in 15 minutes he received your call, got the necessary qualifications and experience, along buying with any tools he might have needed if repairs were required, sorted a suitable vehicle, travelled to your place (and back) and did his accounts - all for £80 (which would have had deductions for tax, insurance, pension, holiday, further training etc.? Bargain. Literally a bargain.

[The Martian]

The chap doing my folks' fence has stopped taking fencing work on (he does landscaping and garden services); I asked him if it was the increased cost and delay and he said it was the abuse he got from quoting for work (I gather he uses more premium product which hikes the price from suppliers before it gets to him). Tells everyone he is fully booked for fencing and avoids the hassle.

If you have to dig out the old fence before installing new and you do things properly, it's a bloody hard graft doing fencing.. more than a lot of people appreciate. I was offered full time work doing it for a groundworks company I contracted to; I declined.

[Yorick]

We're lucky here. All the good builders charge €20 per hour.

Top mobile mechanics is the same.

My tame govt approved sparky charges the same as we use him a lot.

It's so cheap to live here, folk don't need to rip others off.

[weeksy]

We're lucky here. All the good builders charge €20 per hour.

Top mobile mechanics is the same.

My tame govt approved sparky charges the same as we use him a lot.

It's so cheap to live here, folk don't need to rip others off.

That's kinda the point though. If it's cheap to live, the prices are lower. If it's more expensive then prices are higher.
€20 euro per hour may be cheap to you, but expensive to the guy who works and always resides there. So the price to locals is just as expensive as to locals in UK paying £50 an hour

[Yorick]

We're lucky here. All the good builders charge €20 per hour.

Top mobile mechanics is the same.

My tame govt approved sparky charges the same as we use him a lot.

It's so cheap to live here, folk don't need to rip others off.

That's kinda the point though. If it's cheap to live, the prices are lower. If it's more expensive then prices are higher.
€20 euro per hour may be cheap to you, but expensive to the guy who works and always resides there. So the price to locals is just as expensive as to locals in UK paying £50 an hour

I never paid a tradesman more than I was earning

[The Martian]

If you have to dig out the old fence before installing new and you do things properly, it's a bloody hard graft doing fencing.. more than a lot of people appreciate. I was offered full time work doing it for a groundworks company I contracted to; I declined.

I think that's more what it's about, there are a lot easier works to do in gardens than fencing and I don't think they really want it because there is so much other work about, so they charge a lot if they have to do it.

Digging out the old posts can be a challenge on new build houses where a digger probably scooped out the hole and they had loads of cement to pour in. I pulled out some huge lumps last time to get the old posts out, they were two man lifts.

Did a fence at an ex mod house, took two of us half a day to get one post out as reinforced concrete had been used. Guvnor wasn't pleased and ranted so got him to come down and look for himself.. the rest were cut off and the new posts put in next to the old footings lol

[Mussels]

then demand big bucks for it.

I had a gas man out last time I was home, I can't remember the exact charge but it was about £80 for literally 15 minutes while he checked something and signed it off.

What, in 15 minutes he received your call, got the necessary qualifications and experience, along buying with any tools he might have needed if repairs were required, sorted a suitable vehicle, travelled to your place (and back) and did his accounts - all for £80 (which would have had deductions for tax, insurance, pension, holiday, further training etc.? Bargain. Literally a bargain.

My gas registered plumber charges a flat £35 an hour, I discovered him after an emergency plumber charging £125 an hour didn't bother to turn up.
Training and experience have a value but some of them quote a higher hourly rate than a surgeon.

[wheelnut]

£35 an hour if he can bill for an 8.5hr day is £300 a day, which is a pretty healthy wage.
On a monthly basis after tax (on a 20-22 day month) he's going to be taking home over £4k a month.

If you think it’s that straightforward (and I know you don’t) then you have less of an understanding of how businesses work than I thought you did,

By the time you take into account travel time, travel and vehicle costs, consumable costs, prof fees, perhaps VAt, he’d be lucky to come out with half that before tax.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Direct labour cost is everything! There are no other bills, dunno what you're talking about

Labour rates are a weird one. I sometimes have occassion to use a CAE consultant, properly smart guy who runs a little firm of other smart guys doing the really hard-core sim stuff. His hourly rate is less than the BMW garage he takes his car to!

My time sometimes goes down as £50/hour and sometimes it's £250/hour.

Working out what it actually costs to employ someon is tricky.

[Yorick]

When I was contracting 20 years ago, I was on £50 an hour. Double time weekends. Fuck knows what they charged the customers.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Depends on the job.

Who pays for the Internet connection I use at work for example? I use it obviously, but so do loads of other people. Ultimately it has to come out of the customer's pocket but how is it divided up? That's a minor cost of course, but you get the idea.

You know that they cost you in total, but working out what you should be charging for any one given individual involves a fair amount of arbitrary decision doesn't it? Especially when you do a job like mine which involves very little direct delivery to the customer. There's no box of "this is mr dazzle's work" that gets delivered.

[demographic]

One of my brothers reckons that he doesn't really want a job he just prices it for more money.
Then if the customer still wants it Yay, he's getting good money for it so he doesnt mind doing it so much.
Nothing worse than working on a job you hate with a customer you cant stand for buggerall money.

Also he's pretty wary of the people who ask "How much is it for cash" cos he reckons more of them are the type of prick customer he just doesn't want anything to do with.

I only really work for people I trust and they trust me to do a good job, I have absolutely zero interest in working for the great British public or housebashing. He does a lot of stonework (he's genuinely very good at it) but that's more for doctors and vets cos they're more often the kind of people who can afford the work he does. None of that 3,6,9 stone* thats looks bad from three hundred yards away either.

I just won't work for people who ask for cash discounts, that sets the dodgy customer alarm bells off.
Everyone gets an invoice, it keeps us all more honest.


*Two 3s make a 6 and a 6 and a 3 make a 9, basically its stone for bricklayers.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Yeah that's my point....and the last step is a customer pays for it. Or no-one pays for it and we make a loss!

So its appears in someone's hourly rate/on a part price somewhere.

[Mr. Dazzle]

One of my brothers reckons that he doesn't really want a job he just prices it for more money.

I wouldn't say we do that (or rather, did, I've since changed jobs) but there are deffo customers we charge extra simply because of who they are.

F1 is a prime example, they want everything yesterday and will call you on a Sunday afternoon. The big teams are a bloody nightmare. Most of the parts end up getting tweaked or reworked too simply because of the prototype nature. Therefore they get charged about 50% more for labour and similar for parts...unless we know we'll be making a lot of them on a regular basis.

[wheelnut]

The reason contractors don't want fiddly jobs or half day jobs is for some of the reasons listed above.
But if you think contractors work for all of what they bill and only take home half of the amount they bill, then you've never been a contractor.

You weren’t talking about contractors, you were talking about tradesman changing what you think is an excessive hourly rate.

[Yorick]

I pay the pool cleaner fark all. Ditto the gardener.

I keep the cook happy

[Yambo]

Tnstaafl.

[wheelnut]

A contractor is a tradesman. If he sub-contracts to another firm then we'd call him a subby, but if he contracts direct to client then he's a contractor. If someone says a 'contractor' to me then I think they're talking about a tradesman that contracts with people to provide services.
Obviously it means something different to you.

Yes, it’s a generic term, but I would generally class someone as a contractor if they work for one company for a set length of time billing them from their own umbrella company.

I wouldn’t necessarily call the bloke who I pay a one off cost of £70 to fix my boiler at home a ‘contractor’.

Direct labour costs for my pissant little company run to about 70% of total costs (inc paye etc.) I would think that’s not unusual.

[wheelnut]

He's B2B so I'd call him a subby.
B2C direct I'd just call a contractor.
Just local terms I suppose.

A subby to me me would be someone contracting to a contractor, ie a sub-contractor. That’s how CIS and the new reverse VAT rules see it afaik. The terms are only generally used in the construction industry anyway.

If I was contracting to Balfour Beatty for a new fence then I'd expect a big price, because they've got massive overheads and a little job would cost as much as a big job, but this wasn't that, although I cba to explain who they are.

It happens all the time, I had a lad build my shed because I'd rather have the time to do something else, paid him fairly and because I know he's just a regular fella without much behind him I bunged him a good tip as well. Then I asked him if he could knock me up a new wooden gate, nothing fancy, just something basic, and he ripped the arse out of the price because he obviously thought he was onto a good thing. I sent him one sentence by text saying his services were not required.

Yeah, pretty much. The bigger the mouth to feed, the bigger the invoices are.