Receiving calls from customers.

[theboyrob]

I charge £40 quid for a callout to someones house or office, and then go from there. Purple shirt land charge £60 round here for diagnosis and the first hour or so and you have to take it to them so i feel £40 is a fair charge.

Id say a good 90% of my customers will use me again and almost all of them know nothing about pcs other than using word and so on, anything goes wrong and they either dont want to, or cant be arsed learning how to fix it.

There will always be people who want things for next to nothing, and there will always be those who are prepared to pay for convenience and curteous service.

I also tend to charge £40 for a full OS reinstall and for that ill take it home, backup their data, reinstall and find the drivers and do a full update and copy back the data. In all usually takes an hour and a half, maybe two. Depends on the speed of the pc with half of that time waiting for the damn update site to load.

I have no problems getting work in, and i dont even advertise as most comes from word of mouth. I also work 2 days a week for a pair of local primary schools doing the usual IT support routine. They are big enough schools to need someone to help out as they have 30+ pcs, but too small to have a full time or even a council contracted techie.

At the end of the day people will pay what the job is worth to THEM. Of course you will always get differeing opinion about what your time is worth but if you provide a service and the customer is happy whats the problem>?


/ps £35 per hour including a callout from a plumber!!?? not round here it damn well isnt! cheapest i could find when we had a leak was £90 callout as it was after 5pm and £45ph after that.

Thats pretty much the same with me, people would much rather pay me £40 for an hour to do the job correctly and check other things while I am there than them spend all weekend trying it themselves and making a hash of it.

Most people are very happy to pay £40/hour if the jobs done to a good standard. You always get the numpties who think its too expensive so I let them go somewhere else as they are not worth the hassle!

 

[Steeps]

I practice plastering with mashed 'taters, a wall can't be much harder than a plate of mash with a knife

(yes I know plastering requires some skill, we've had 2 different blokes in recently for some internal work, one was good and the other was shocking)

 

[AtreuS]

I practice plastering with mashed 'taters, a wall can't be much harder than a plate of mash with a knife

(yes I know plastering requires some skill, we've had 2 different blokes in recently for some internal work, one was good and the other was shocking)

Ive often considered training to be a plasterer. My friend is a decorator who does business;s mainly and according to him the plasterers are ALWAYS in work and earn a packet at the same time. And yes its easy to tell a good plasterer from a bad one, your eyes can see the difference immediately

 

[Sagalout]

With most PC's being less than £800, and lets be honest working on a few years old, lets say £400, the risk of loss is minimal.

And what would you value all your data at? Perhaps all the photos you've ever taken of your kids / grandchildren?

 

[dangerstat]

And what would you value all your data at? Perhaps all the photos you've ever taken of your kids / grandchildren?

No I back it up, and even if I didn't are you suggesting that on average the data on peoples PC's are worth more than their house / car? TBH most people who aren't in IT that I know just have a few, photo's, mp3's and some naughty pictures.

 

[Dano]

No I back it up, and even if I didn't are you suggesting that on average the data on peoples PC's are worth more than their house / car? TBH most people who aren't in IT that I know just have a few, photo's, mp3's and some naughty pictures.

In my experience your average pc user doesn't even know what a backup is and usually stores every photo (this is the main one people always panic about) they've ever taken and all their documents on a pc with no thought as to what will happen if it dies.

 

[CHokKA]

I have worked in the IT industry for many years and have seen prices ranging from £25 right the way up to £75 per hour. Some of the jobs done at the near £75 per hour end have been real abortions too. Unfortunately there are too many people that think they have the ability to troubleshoot issues, and they get in way over their head and at the end of it all the user suffers. I work for a small software company that provides in-house hardware, networking and software support to many customers around the UK, and the amount of time we spend picking up the pieces from a bad repair done by a rogue company down the road charging loads of money for what they class as a repair is crazy. Rebuilding the OS for every single problem that comes up is not troubleshooting. Most, however, seem to think that this is what to do to fix a PC.

I believe that £35 is very reasonable, and as Huddy has already posted up before, he has his own workshop (he had a picture thread not so long ago) and runs his own business from home (in response to Jeff Lynne's ill-informed teenager comments) and evidently knows what he is doing. If he is skilled at troubleshooting and his customers are happy with the service he provides, why shouldn't he be taken by surprise when people act the way he described in his initial call? At the end of the day he is providing a good service, and there are so few people that actually know what needs to be done when fixing a computer. Ghosting a hard disk and cloning it onto a new one is not the be-all-end-all of PC repair, and if that's what people think, then they are severely misinformed. Things get a lot more complicated than that almost all the time and not everyone has the necessary skill and ability to resolve issues past this point.

 

[weringo]

£35/hr seems reasonable, you'd be very lucky to find one for under £50/hr in London.

On the other hand it seems like a lot of money to pay for the job you're actually doing as most of the things people go to PC repair shops for I could effectively do myself untrained. I don't know how much of the £35 you actually see after overheads but I'd happily do the same job for a fraction of that amount.

 

[Burned_Alive]

To add to the skilled/unskilled debate, if not a skilled job, wouldnt it just fall under "semi-skilled"? Unskilled jobs are more like bag packing and pot washing, which can be done by anyone and if it was simple system assembly then this could fall under unskilled also. Anything more advanced that included problem diagnosis and/or troubleshooting would surely be at the very least semi-skilled? Obviously not including diagnosis through scripts, etc like you would find on a 1st line helpdesk. 3rd line and above would be presumeably be considered skilled.

 

[EdGey]

Most of us here were doing complete PC rebuilds at the age of 13 instead of doing our homework. How many 13 year olds are plastering their parents house before doing a bare shell respray of the family car?

Home PC repairs are simple, easy tasks which do not require any specialist training, any certification, or indeed anything beyond an interest in computers and some common sense. The same cannot be said of many other trades.

How many 13 year olds have access and the resources to be able to plaster a room and paint a car?

Compare this number to how many 13 year olds have access to a PC or actually have their own PC. Its about accissability, not skills required.

It doesnt take a lot of skill to repair a pc if you know what you are doing, but then again that applies to everything. I think the main bulk of his work is in the understanding and being able to quickly identify what exactly is wrong with the computer, not just repairing it.

Some problems can take a long time to figure out, Ive seen countless threads on this forum where I and everyone els have tried to figure out and help someone fix a problem and it has taken 3/4 pages to finally get it.

Im sure if your hobby was plumbing, youd be supprised at the price of a plumber.

 

[Jeff Lynne]

In fairness if you clicked on his signature and read his website, you'd quickly find out he's a chap in his 40's who's been in the IT industry for quite some time.

Ahh, didn't see that

 

[Gothic Draconia]

In my opinion, people are confusing being knowledgeable with being skilled. They are not the same thing.

 

[Jeff Lynne]

I believe that £35 is very reasonable, and as Huddy has already posted up before, he has his own workshop (he had a picture thread not so long ago) and runs his own business from home (in response to Jeff Lynne's ill-informed teenager comments)

Not ill informed at all, it was just a stab in the dark because the more that I read the more I was thinking that it was a chancer operation. I've not been on this forum for that long so didn't know the guy was in his 40's and an IT professional.

 

[LordSplodge]

IT workers in overinflated opinion of themselves shocker.

Not just desktop workers...

 

[Jez]

More annoying than desktop workers are people in so called higher up jobs who somehow think that they are the bees knees because they know an unhealthy amount about a certain subject and are on a slightly better corporate banding.

 

[LordSplodge]

There seems to be quite a lot of emotion and negative opinion of PC Repair people.

Yes it is unskilled work if it only involves installing components or simply nuking Windows and doing a re-install or other unskilled tasks such as spyware/virus removal. This doesn't make the work any less important.

Did nobody read Huddy's post where he said the Purple Shirt types (why on earth can't we say PC *****?) charge twice as much and if I am not mistaken Huddy lives down south and everything costs more down there.

As for Huddy's question: People will be ringing other people for quotes and because we are British they just wanted to be polite.

 

[CHokKA]

Not ill informed at all, it was just a stab in the dark because the more that I read the more I was thinking that it was a chancer operation. I've not been on this forum for that long so didn't know the guy was in his 40's and an IT professional.

Well, it's easily done here but it doesn't hurt to ask the OP his situation rather than simply assuming. We all know the saying about assumption...

 

[singist]

As most people here, I help out friends and relatives when I can and generally just charge the parts plus a few quid but I was talking to a student aquaintance tonight who was going to pick up his laptop after having had a new HDD in; he said that diagnosis had cost him £40 and the HDD insertion would be £80. This was a small local firm and he felt that it was a reasonable charge; I suppose the drive will cost about £40 so presuming that it gets Windows installed too, it is not a bad price.

He's a bright guy but knows nowt about computers so is happy to have someone else sort it for the price.

 

[dangerstat]

There seems to be quite a lot of emotion and negative opinion of PC Repair people.

I must admit I read over my posts and think that to refer to people (who genuinely have a clue and do something more than just the basics) who do repair PC's as unskilled is a little harsh. As I guess it's a skill of some sorts, as is running your own business.

Thought still £35 per hour

 

[Dano]

As most people here, I help out friends and relatives when I can and generally just charge the parts plus a few quid but I was talking to a student aquaintance tonight who was going to pick up his laptop after having had a new HDD in; he said that diagnosis had cost him £40 and the HDD insertion would be £80. This was a small local firm and he felt that it was a reasonable charge; I suppose the drive will cost about £40 so presuming that it gets Windows installed too, it is not a bad price.

He's a bright guy but knows nowt about computers so is happy to have someone else sort it for the price.

Was it that simple though?

I have a laptop here waiting for collection (been missed twice now with no call either time to inform me they were not going to make it) that had to have a new drive fitted, I had to let the thing do a chkdsk first (took it 7 hours) so I could burn a set of recovery discs (it made a grand total of 11 coasters before it managed to burn properly due to it being infested with all sorts) that the owner never made, back up as much data as possible while making sure it was virus free and I had to babysit that process due to the amount of damaged files.

Then the drive fitting was a complete dismantling of the laptop rather than one of those nice one or two screw jobs, re-image from the recovery media and then spend the next three hours getting windows and the system software updated, add in security software and restore user files.

Total time spent I'd not like to think about, but he'll tell anybody who asks that it was just a simple case of replacing the hard drive which isn't even close to the truth.

How much is a reasonable charge for that?