Fence pricing

[Yorick]

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

That's how bike servicing works

Big dealer, big showroom , big price

[Couchy]

£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.

I'm way out of touch but the rate for a Chartered Engineer was £300 a day, and that's a bloke with a degree, a masters degree, Chartered and with at least 15yrs experience, probably a lot more if he's working as a consultant on £300 a day - although that was some time back.

These two fencing blokes (based on my calculations) wanted £50 an hour each. I reckon it's a 6hr job.
The gardener was charging £40 an hour!

I was chatting to my neighbour the other day and she said he uses a cleaning lady a couple of times a week, apparently she's really good, two of them come and she charges £90 for 3 hours! That's £15 an hour for each cleaning lady - again I'm out of touch maybe but that's expensive.

As an apprentice electrician I was always told that it will be a golden age again for tradesmen within a couple of decades, because there isn't so many about, but there also isn't so many people that will do any sort of physical work anymore, so the rates are high. The only downside with a physical job is you probably don't want to still be doing it in the depths of winter when you're into your 60's.

You’re not that naive, you’ll only get 6 hours or so a day billable, so your £35 is £210. Take 5 weeks holidays out in a year unpaid and you’ve got £49k. A decent van and running costs for the business will be £9k a year with nothing unexpected. So that leaves £40k. No sick pay, no pension paid, and no job security for a few k more than can be earned on the tools as an employee.
As a company we charge more than £35 and it’s tight some weeks for profit.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

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.

That's normal, certainly Cosworth used to do it and so does a friend of mine who builds classic race bike engines, the customers know it as well, the rich teams pay more because they want rapid service, people like me pay a lot less but know we could be waiting a while for work to be done, and there's a load of people somewhere in between.