is nobody bothered anymore? (trades people / companies)

Just had a new carpet fitted, good price, only took a week between going to the shop and getting it fitted - happy with the work and the service. I do live in Yorkshire and not London though.
 
To be fair, I've never struggled to get a carpet fitter. Plenty of them about even in the small town I live in and the relatively low cost of fitting massively outweights the cost of attempting to do it yourself unlike other trades.
 
Ayahuasca said:
To be fair, I've never struggled to get a carpet fitter. Plenty of them about even in the small town I live in and the relatively low cost of fitting massively outweights the cost of attempting to do it yourself unlike other trades.
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I think this thread needs a spreadsheet or table that shows how much a trader charges and time it takes vs how much it is to do it yourself and how long at average it would take for a novice DIY er
 
Had 4 vans at home yesterday doing various things. I'm terrible at getting multiple quotes and the like though and tend to rely on good people (through recommendations or personal experience) rather than worrying about the price. It's not that I don't care about the price but if I don't think it's unreasonable I will make the decision to pay for the service and get on with it. In return I expect decent comms, quality work and reliability. So far it's been working with one exception out of 6 "tradie" teams I've used in past 18 months for here.

I'm certain I could have spent less but for me it's a trade off and balancing act with regards stress, time & money and until I'm out of the last one the first two take priority.
 
adam cool dude said:
The thing is those IT jobs will be replaced by AI in the not too distant future or subbed out to somewhere in India. A plumber will not be replaced by AI in our lifetime and therefore can charge what he likes. Sorry to break it to you but a tradesman is generally in a lot higher demand than your general IT bod. Even if you spent years studying.
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I guess that depends on the nature of the IT job to be honest. Data analysis and other "software" based jobs might go with AI, but I'd like to see an AI program turn something off and on again at the wall socket. :p

Although it might be cheaper to fly someone from India to repatch a network cabinet and rack a server than pay someone on site to be fair!

We are all doomed when AI robots come along anyway so I don't think we will care when they kill us and don't want to do our plumbing or painting lol.
 
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I recently needed to get our driveway extended. Around 40sqm of grass removed and replaced with gravel.

Took 6 weeks

7 companies out of which 3 turned up to quote, one messed around so much I nearly threw my phone at him.

Prices were from £3.5k to £5k for the same work.

a lot of messing around to say the least.
 
I think I have a good answer to the question. The issue, at least what I've noticed, is that running a tradesman business is very hard to employ a sizable team. The owner could employ 2/3 people, but the owner will still be the one that does the bulk of the skilled work. So these guys start their company, get too busy with work, but can't hire and make it work that they can book jobs that they don't do anything on, partly due to how much rules, regs, safety etc that you have to know.

And then in top the owner could train a guy, get him good in 1 year or so that the guy can work and even have a team of his own. What will that guy do. Quit and go run his own business when he sees the prices being charged.

The owner cojld also try to subcontract, but everyone is busy, standards are so hard to know what other companies are like.
 
unwashed potato! said:
I think I have a good answer to the question. The issue, at least what I've noticed, is that running a tradesman business is very hard to employ a sizable team. The owner could employ 2/3 people, but the owner will still be the one that does the bulk of the skilled work. So these guys start their company, get too busy with work, but can't hire and make it work that they can book jobs that they don't do anything on, partly due to how much rules, regs, safety etc that you have to know.

And then in top the owner could train a guy, get him good in 1 year or so that the guy can work and even have a team of his own. What will that guy do. Quit and go run his own business when he sees the prices being charged.

The owner cojld also try to subcontract, but everyone is busy, standards are so hard to know what other companies are like.
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Good observations.
 
unwashed potato! said:
I think I have a good answer to the question. The issue, at least what I've noticed, is that running a tradesman business is very hard to employ a sizable team. The owner could employ 2/3 people, but the owner will still be the one that does the bulk of the skilled work. So these guys start their company, get too busy with work, but can't hire and make it work that they can book jobs that they don't do anything on, partly due to how much rules, regs, safety etc that you have to know.

And then in top the owner could train a guy, get him good in 1 year or so that the guy can work and even have a team of his own. What will that guy do. Quit and go run his own business when he sees the prices being charged.

The owner cojld also try to subcontract, but everyone is busy, standards are so hard to know what other companies are like.
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Tradesmen shouldn't scale like this though, IMHO. I had a local electrical firm quote for a consumer unit and heading up the astronomical quote was the words "Sales Person". So their number of £1800 (lol!) was to cover not only the lad doing the job, but also the back office staff that add no value to me.

Best path forward is they should be having apprentices with decent runway; and partnerships with other trades man. The holy grail is having a father/son/daughter combo where the dad is "done" and is just helping out the son/daughter.
 
dLockers said:
Tradesmen shouldn't scale like this though, IMHO. I had a local electrical firm quote for a consumer unit and heading up the astronomical quote was the words "Sales Person". So their number of £1800 (lol!) was to cover not only the lad doing the job, but also the back office staff that add no value to me.

Best path forward is they should be having apprentices with decent runway; and partnerships with other trades man. The holy grail is having a father/son/daughter combo where the dad is "done" and is just helping out the son/daughter.
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When tradesmen are so heavily incumbered for work, it makes perfect sense to hire someone to do the administrative burden - but that person needs paying too and thus the overheads increase.

For every 1/2 day spent travelling somewhere to do a quote, then produce a quote, follow up with invoices, chase late payments etc - that is all time where they aren't actually *doing* work.
 
ci_newman said:
When tradesmen are so heavily incumbered for work, it makes perfect sense to hire someone to do the administrative burden - but that person needs paying too and thus the overheads increase.

For every 1/2 day spent travelling somewhere to do a quote, then produce a quote, follow up with invoices, chase late payments etc - that is all time where they aren't actually *doing* work.
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Exactly.

No one wants to pay those costs, but then who else is available to do the job if the smaller companies don't have time to do these things because they don't hire admin staff, so the builder has to stop building to do admin stuff for free, and then progresses slower on the sites they have already booked.
 
ci_newman said:
When tradesmen are so heavily incumbered for work, it makes perfect sense to hire someone to do the administrative burden - but that person needs paying too and thus the overheads increase.

For every 1/2 day spent travelling somewhere to do a quote, then produce a quote, follow up with invoices, chase late payments etc - that is all time where they aren't actually *doing* work.
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Fair - but the lad quoting in a lot of these cases is the person doing the work (in an ideal world. Nothing more an annoying than discussing a job and the finer details for Joe Bloggs white van to turn up to actually execute the work). So the only division of labour they can achieve in an ideal world is invoicing, payments etc.
 
dLockers said:
Fair - but the lad quoting in a lot of these cases is the person doing the work (in an ideal world. Nothing more an annoying than discussing a job and the finer details for Joe Bloggs white van to turn up to actually execute the work). So the only division of labour they can achieve in an ideal world is invoicing, payments etc.
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Sure, but in a professional business the lad doing the quote would then produce a formalised quote and email it to you (to protect both him and the customer to ensure the proposed work is documented properly) and producing a report like that can take 1+ hour or more, especially if the customer then asks questions and emails bounce backwards and forwards for a few days. Most likely the lad doing the quote called the office after his site visit, verbally gave the details to the admin staff and then they take it from there.

Electricians are in HIGH demand and admin staff are worth "less" when you are talking about a £/hr cost.
 
ci_newman said:
Sure, but in a professional business the lad doing the quote would then produce a formalised quote and email it to you (to protect both him and the customer to ensure the proposed work is documented properly) and producing a report like that can take 1+ hour or more, especially if the customer then asks questions and emails bounce backwards and forwards for a few days. Most likely the lad doing the quote called the office after his site visit, verbally gave the details to the admin staff and then they take it from there.

Electricians are in HIGH demand and admin staff are worth "less" when you are talking about a £/hr cost.
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this is why my electrician checks out after 4pm each day lol because he gets home and does al the admin work which in theory is part of the job he needs to do.
 
jonneymendoza said:
this is why my electrician checks out after 4pm each day lol because he gets home and does al the admin work which in theory is part of the job he needs to do.
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That can certainly work for some, but the only way to "grow" the business and actually earn more is to spend more hours actually doing the skilled labour. So in dLockers example, your electrician could hire a part time admin bod to work 2hours a day to do the admin, then he himself could spend another 2 hours on site earning more.
 
ci_newman said:
That can certainly work for some, but the only way to "grow" the business and actually earn more is to spend more hours actually doing the skilled labour. So in dLockers example, your electrician could hire a part time admin bod to work 2hours a day to do the admin, then he himself could spend another 2 hours on site earning more.
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Probably yea.
 
ci_newman said:
Sure, but in a professional business the lad doing the quote would then produce a formalised quote and email it to you (to protect both him and the customer to ensure the proposed work is documented properly) and producing a report like that can take 1+ hour or more, especially if the customer then asks questions and emails bounce backwards and forwards for a few days. Most likely the lad doing the quote called the office after his site visit, verbally gave the details to the admin staff and then they take it from there.

Electricians are in HIGH demand and admin staff are worth "less" when you are talking about a £/hr cost.
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I agree that makes sense --- maybe I am burnt by a particular lad that was literally a "sales man" fronting a larger company.
 
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