Why is communication so bad in this country?

Jellybaby_1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123332436#Comment_123332436

That system just gets rid of competition and he can charge what he wants. Doesn't seem fair to the customer surely? He didn't give his rates so absolutely no clarity. I always contact trades in my area so they don't have to 'travel for hours'. It comes with the job to price a job and answer questions. Anyway, if they don't want to travel for hours they should say so.

Mellor

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123331921#Comment_123331921

It's definitely not how it works. Increasing overheads does not mean prices/rates have to increase because the improved admin means increased turnover. And TBH, the fact you don't see that really strengthens the case for getting help with this. Especially as you've said you are struggling with admin

You friend with the solar company. He doesn't employ full time admin because he is tired of doing it. It's because it's more profitable.

that might work with a shop where you can sell more units during the same amount of time but a tradesman is selling time so you cannot sell more of it

Of course you can sell more time. Spending less time on admin and more time of billable work means you've "sold" more of your work day. You want to increase utilisation as much has possible for billable staff.

if you have 1 person working you have say 8 billable hours so say 200 divided by 8 =25 and hour.
if you have that same person plus someone in the office that's say 400 divided by 8 =50 and hour.

The "1 person working" has to do their own admin. So they aren't 100% utilised. They might be 8 hours one day. But lose the whole day the next playing catch up with admin.
Say a small team of 3 all averaged 70% by doing their own admin. If they had an admin staff for quotes, admin, schedules, accounts - that allowed them focus on 100% billable work. The business would have a higher turnover.

the real problem here is that we cannot charge for the non billable hours like quoting, admin, scheduling, accountant stuff ect. if we could then we could use that money to pay admin staff and deliver better service to the customer but they wont pay for that on the small self employed scale

Exactly. So you pay admin staff to do non-billable work. And free up trade staff to be better utilised. It works on any scale, as a billable hour should be worth more than a employees hourly rate.

the_pen_turner

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123334427#Comment_123334427

i dont disagree with any of what you said in principle but it doesnt work like that unfortunitly. what your saying only works if you are doing all those hours during your day and not getting 8 hours work done. the reality is that all those hours are done in the evenongs and at weekends most of the time. almost all of it is on top of the weeks work.

Lumen

The approach I've kind of worked out is to find someone by word of mouth, get them to quote, and then sanity check their price using a phone call with a couple of others.

People are surprisingly forthcoming about whether they think a price is competitive or not, and I can then decide whether the word of mouth premium is worth it. It usually is. I suppose people appreciate knowing what other people are charging.

What I do know is that outside of the people I speak to there are wild variations in price, and involving professionals like QS's doesn't necessarily make things cheaper.

Example: I got a large driveway job done for 20k. Proper job involving deep excavation, drainage, a soak pit, kerbing etc. Someone I know with a similar size driveway was quoted less than 10k. When I told an south Dublin architect (who regularly gets QSs involved to get multiple quotes) what I paid he couldn't believe it was so cheap.

lmk123

my time is too valuable so you can just waste yours instead because I couldn’t be bothered to organise anything.