Pricing for a job need help

[JLHELEC]

Been asked to price for a job, customer is having attic done out so needs a few new circuits up there. Some more context I'm based in South Wales and house is 1950s awkward little.run from the board to up but the new socket's will all be on studs so minimal chasing. I'm so bad at pricing work it literally puts me off taking jobs on. CU is full so I proposed having a new CU dedicated for the loft and going from there.

New CU
X4 socket's one being usb
X2 1 gang 2 way switches
X6 spotlights
X1 optical smoke alarm, to be interlinked with existing smokes, so I gotta dick around with them also.

I was gunna just price materials plus 2 days labour @ day rate but I always feel like iv shafted myself when doing work for day rate as the jobs usually turn out to be -------'s just wondering if any of you lot were in my neck of the woods and interested to see what you'd charge or anyone would charge for that in general

 

[buzzlightyear]

Tell us what you going to charge and we
Tell you if you are near the mark.

 

[Dustydazzler]

If you are not confident, then I always go 'hourly' on small jobs like this

2 days would be tight Imo , it doesn't allow fir any feck ups or delays where you need to return for a 3rd day

I find most customers these days are happy to go with me on an hourly rate

 

[JLHELEC]

I was thinking materials plus 2 days at £250 a day. I don't really know what sparks charge around by me guessing it'd be around 40ph ish, company I work for really really tight lipped on pricing so I'm like a mushroom when it comes to price

Tell us what you going to charge and we
Tell you if you are near the mark.

 

[JLHELEC]

If you are not confident, then I always go 'hourly' on small jobs like this

2 days would be tight Imo , it doesn't allow fir any feck ups or delays where you need to return for a 3rd day

I find most customers these days are happy to go with me on an hourly rate

You can I bet if I say 2 days it'll turn out to be 3 days . Thank you for the advice

 

[Dustydazzler]

You can I bet if I say 2 days it'll turn out to be 3 days . Thank you for the advice

99% of jobs that I have ever undertaken take longer in reality than they did in my head

 

[Dustydazzler]

I was thinking materials plus 2 days at £250 a day. I don't really know what sparks charge around by me guessing it'd be around 40ph ish, company I work for really really tight lipped on pricing so I'm like a mushroom when it comes to price

Way too cheap for a self employed sparks

I would price £50 per hour minimum even in the cheaper areas of the country , you are running a business not a charity

 

[timhoward]

I’d give customer choice of 3 days or hourly rate.
Feed to new board could eat up time if things don’t go well.
Then knowing my luck discovering the landing smoke alarm has a water tank over it so have to find and splice the 3 core.
2nd fixing always takes longer than you think because it feels simple.

Your hourly rate sounds a bit low to me. That’s my ‘working for builder’ rate, add at least a fiver per hour if you are working direct for customer.

 

[Dustydazzler]

I’d give customer choice of 3 days or hourly rate.
Feed to new board could eat up time if things don’t go well.
Then knowing my luck discovering the landing smoke alarm has a water tank over it so have to find and splice the 3 core.
2nd fixing always takes longer than you think because it feels simple.

Your hourly rate sounds a bit low to me. That’s my ‘working for builder’ rate, add at least a fiver per hour if you are working direct for customer.

There are handman people in my area who charge £40-45 per hour just to put up a curtain pole or fix up a bit of coving and they have no qualifications to do this

We have 3-5 years of training and quals to do our job so should charge more than the local DIY handyman Imo

 

[LukeD]

Price 3 day and MIn £300 a day even for Wales !

 

[JLHELEC]

Thank you for the wise words guys. Very much appreciated

 

[Dustydazzler]

Thank you for the wise words guys. Very much appreciated

When I went from employeed to self employed I found pricing properly the hardest thing to get right often pricing way too cheap for the first few years

I started to ask other local self employed trades what they were charging and I was way too cheap and way too busy so put my rates up straight away

 

[LukeD]

Rule one ... When a client thinks you are only there to earn a wage you are in trouble . The price covers , Wage, costs of tooling etc .legal costs . Van costs and pension /saving etc etc . In life the highest chargers tend to be the busiest !

 

[buzzlightyear]

I priced up a job recently to sort out
A job a builder has not finished off electrical work,
Sent a email regarding the work.
Came back to say waiting for another builder to come back to her, price up what needs doing.
Won't hear from them again.

 

[UNG]

Pricing a job when the job can have many variables is difficult.
Looking at the job and pricing it where everything goes to plan with no deviation is bordering on achieving the impossible which very very rarely happens
My old business partner always priced jobs and assessed what he called the buggeration factor or degree of difficulty which was based on things not going to plan or finding that things that were not obvious on a site visit
How many trades are going to be on site all wanting / fighting for the same bit of space at the same time
The smoke detector you mention could take an hour or two but could easily take most of a day if hard wiring by the time you lift a carpet and floorboard or two
The testing and certification is another area that is often overlooked but all adds to the overall time to complete the work
It is all to easy to list the components of the work but without knowing the site layout it is purely crystal ball guesses as to how much you should charge
So much time can be lost because you can't isolate something because someone needs power or you are waiting on the plasterer skiming the walls and ceiling, so 2 - 3 full days onsite then turns into a mix of full days and ½ days and you then need to find other work to fill the ½ days to make your daily rate

For every job that goes to plan with zero problems there will be many more that don't the ones that go to plan can and usually are good earners the ones that don't have to be priced such that if it goes drastically wrong you have at least kept the loss to a minimum

 

[buzzlightyear]

Ist you set the price not a customer
All jobs need to be estimated just in case a hic up. Or you are a blind man going in blind.

 

[WallaceP]

I would say 3 days maybe 4. You will need to allow time for chit chat, nipping out to van/merchants, testing, fuse fairy all these take longer than you think

When doing jobs, time yourself to get more confident in estimating.
if you are going to do that. Don’t just time the time it takes to connect a socket for example start the clock from saying im going to do that socket, so gathering tools, the socket and tidying up.

Another thing to think about is how old the exising fire alarms are and if you should just replace the lot of them at the same time.
Also consider a mains powered fire alarm with radio interlink.

 

[snowhead]

Is this customer someone random or a friend / neighbour / relative.?

If any of the last 3, it should make no difference to the price, mates rates are full rates.

Plus everything above said by others and not to forget that whatever you quote / charge, the customer may want to dispute it when it comes to paying, or even not want to pay at all.

 

[UNG]

I would say 3 days maybe 4. You will need to allow time for chit chat, nipping out to van/merchants, testing, fuse fairy all these take longer than you think

When doing jobs, time yourself to get more confident in estimating.
if you are going to do that. Don’t just time the time it takes to connect a socket for example start the clock from saying im going to do that socket, so gathering tools, the socket and tidying up.

TBH the best indicator I have found is to periodically do a job review every few months and compare the pricing to the actuals of a few jobs to verify that your pricing is in the right ball park, when you throw in travel time on a job it can certainly skew costs and it can mean you alter your working hours slightly, simple things like spending an extra hour onsite can mean you get more work done rather than waste an hour sat in all the rush hour congestion for a 15 - 20 min journey

Another thing to think about is how old the exising fire alarms are and if you should just replace the lot of them at the same time.
Also consider a mains powered fire alarm with radio interlink.

Done this plenty of times and in the last few years the technology has massively improved

 

[Dustydazzler]

Is this customer someone random or a friend / neighbour / relative.?

If any of the last 3, it should make no difference to the price, mates rates are full rates.

Plus everything above said by others and not to forget that whatever you quote / charge, the customer may want to dispute it when it comes to paying, or even not want to pay at all.

Rates are Rates

I used to dread pricing jobs for friends and family as the first thing they ask for is 'Mates rates'