Jim are you keeping busy at the moment? Your charging more than us, are you TM?
We are getting new work booked in, but as I said getting quite a few people not going ahead due to price and doing it themselves.
Only about 5 free days in the diary before Xmas, but some days only half-booked. It's gone a bit mad the last couple of weeks!
It's just me and my trusty Ninja at the moment
If you are fixated on price, so will your customers be! I price my work to justify both the skill and work ethic I bring to my customers, and the results I can achieve. I then SELL this to them.
My acceptance rate has gone down a bit in the last year or two, sure, but the clients I'm picking up are all extremely comfortable paying my prices. That's because before I've even got any kit out of the van, they have the reassurance that they're getting value for money and are taking no risks.
I issue a guarantee certificate to every customer I quote for. It covers two things, firstly all the normal stuff like quality of work and high standards of service. The second, most important part, is that they do not pay me any money until they tell me they are 100% satisfied with what I've done for them.
I give them the written quote and guarantee certificate together. I show them the price on the quote and then draw their attention to the guarantee, which pulls the emphasis away from the pound signs. I'm by no means a natural salesman, or do I claim to be brilliant at what I do in terms of selling to people, but as time goes on I'm finding it easier to understand how peoples' minds work and just help make the decision a little easier for them
My philosophy is (and this isn't aimed at you by the way) that it's easy to secure work through low prices but something's gotta give if you're doing it cheap!
Sorry for the mini novel
P.S. Mike, that's not a £/m² price, it's what I charge for a "unit" of work, according to the SM system. Example: I've just booked in a small job, bedroom carpet, at minimum charge which equates to a per m² price of £6.25+vat (£7.19 inc vat).
Last week I did a large domestic property and it would work out at around £2.70+vat (roughly £3 inc vat) per m². I'll make a lot more profit out of the lower rate bigger job than doing 4 or 5 of the higher rate smaller jobs in one day. I'll also have a much easier day!
I can't understand why more people don't price like this
