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jaydub

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Just after some advice and insight from other people experience and opinions on this one, I've been thinking about advertising 24/7 on emergency call out service, but I'm a little dubious as to whether it is worth doing...

What are people thoughts on this? I guess the million dollar question, ironically, is can you make good money? Or is it just not worth the hassle?

Cheers
 
To offer this service you need enough people in the company to be able to cover the service you offer and consider the amount you will pay them to be available against the likely income you may generate.
One person cannot be reliably available all the time especially if they are already working, i think three people on the plan is the minimum to be workable for a low number of potential call outs.. You would also need to have the spares and skills available to be able to temporarily repair most possible faults.
I would expect this would only be worth doing if you already have a customer base that operates on a 24 hour basis and needs to maintain operations.
 
As Dave says not worth doing unless there is a few of you. Best way to make money is try to get into Insurance company's, most house insurance will cover 1 Hour emergency call Out so it's just going to a house, making safe and recommending further action. Other ways would be through the emergency services at their buildings, for both of those you are probably going to have to offer electrical and plumbing though.
 
If you're going to advertise a 24/7 service then you need to provide a 24/7 service.
So that'll be no drinking, socialising or having any kind of life outside of normal working hours.
Agreed. You'll need to limit your drinking, socialising and having a life strictly to normal working hours. ;)
 
... I've been thinking about advertising 24/7 on emergency call out service...
I assume that you're talking about an ongoing contract to provide 24/7 cover to a specific customer or location.

I'll do out of hours callout work, but on an ad hoc basis. I quite enjoy it actually, and charge a substantial premium over my usual hourly rate.
 
The 24/7 on call / callout can become more trouble than it is worth someone has already mentioned a minimum of 3 people from past experience I would realistically suggest needing 5 - 6 people. When someone is on call and available they will want an on call payment if they are called out they will as a minimum want £X per hour pay on top if you get a busy night of callouts then this can impact on the next days planned work upsetting possibly regular customers
To make it viable you really need a number of ongoing 24/7 maintenance contracts if you then pick up other callout work then it is a bit of icing on the cake, even with the maintenance contracts you will need some callouts just to make it work and help finance those days when you get no out of hours calls.

I've been there and done it, you try getting someone to be on call on bank holidays and don't forget Christmas and New Year nobody wants to do them
The notion that there is good money to be made is not necessarily true and needs a good bit of number crunching to ascertain the viability of offering a 24/7 service
 
I've held the out of hours phone for 5-6 years now, don't get too many calls, though did have one last Sunday. Most of the calls are no power, can't reset RCD. About time those bloody things were done away with.
 
I've held the out of hours phone for 5-6 years now, don't get too many calls, though did have one last Sunday. Most of the calls are no power, can't reset RCD. About time those bloody things were done away with.

So it is probably not worth the investment to provide a 24/7 on call service
So is that one callout in the last week, last month or last six months as I said in an earlier post you need a number of callouts per month just to keep it all financed, ticking over and make all the inconvenience worthwhile
 
back in the 80's i was sole 24/7 call out eng. for alarm company for 4 years. in all that time i think i had to go out middle of night about 12 times: maybe about 50 calls dealt with over the phone.
 
Just piggy backing off of telectrix post there are a lot of alarm companies out there that offer a so called 24/7 service it happened to a neigh our of mine when was in a contract with a well known company, she rang them out of hours only to be told an engineer would be out the next day and when a family member challenged them about the 24 hour service they replied that they had responded out of hours by answering the phone :(
Back to the op I'm industrial and commercial and am just in talks with my biggest customer who are willing to pay to have my lads sat on standby if it comes off.
It may or may not come off yet but unless it's worth it for me and the lads then I won't be doing it.
 

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