residential service change estimating

there's a labor cost sticky thread in the business section of this website take a look at that to see if that can help you analyze your cost.

Yeah as long as you have an hourly rate number that covers your costs and makes you decent money.. I usually apply that to the job.

Material + Estimated Hours + Buffer (call it markup, profit, safety whatever) and that's my flat rate price. So it could be something like:

$700 (Material) + $720 (Labour) + $500 (Buffer) = $1920 Flat Rate Quote

Once you start doing more jobs you'll get better at estimating the time it takes and customer PITA factor. And be confident in your numbers, some people will give you a hard time and try to question you down.. just stick to the number. If they're a pain in the ass already, it'll only get worse and you either don't want to work for less for them (should charge more) or you don't even want to work for them.

If you go too cheap, you'll become known and referred to as the cheap guy and people will always want it cheaper until you can't take it anymore, give up and go work for someone else.

. how are their devices looking, sell them on some GF I upgrade, tamper resistant receptacle upgrades for the whole house.

does the city make you upgrade to smoke detectors with the service change, our local governments make us do that,

offer them a free gf I receptacle, clean light fixture, or something along with the service change. maybe that might help you sell the job. we have a nice looking flat rate price sheet we leave behind with a customer. get some door hangers made up with your contact info and services that you offer, handout 25 or 30 of them in the neighborhood when you do a service change, or a job at somebody's house. its stupid marketing things that you can do to help you get other job.

Thanks guys for the input

You will only have to organize a couple and you will see the true time invested in the upgrade . Schedule , layouts, inspection , utility , pricing plus time to do actual job and hope utility doesn't cancel because of weather.
I know a guy here who is taking most of the easy money upgrades , cheaper than anyone else in my area by at least $400 .
Figured he would be out by now but he only wants the easy ones and gets them.



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