Playbook, plumbing and heating firm
The four numbers a caller is adding up before they ring
Ask a plumber what they charge and the honest answer has four parts to it, which is why so few sites attempt it. The caller is doing that arithmetic anyway, badly, from whatever they can find, and the firm that lays it out plainly gets to skip the first five minutes of every phone call.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for pricing questions holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The first hour is usually priced differently from the hours after it, so an hourly rate quoted alone is not the price of anything.
- Parts sit outside the labour rate, and whether they carry a markup is a question customers ask openly and websites answer never.
- The out of hours figures are a separate card rather than a surcharge, and evenings, weekends and bank holidays are frequently three distinct numbers.
- Installation work is not priced from that card at all, so a good reply has to change method halfway through and say out loud that it is doing so.
How it arrives
- do you charge just to come out
- what is your hourly rate
- is the first hour part of the call out
- do you put a markup on parts
- how much roughly for a new combi
- is the quote free
What has to be indexed for this to work
| A rate card that separates the first hour | The call out charge, what it buys in time, and the rate that applies afterwards. Written as two numbers rather than one, because two numbers is how the invoice will be written. |
|---|---|
| How parts are charged | At cost, at a stated markup, or as a supply and fit price. Any of the three is fine to publish. None of them is fine to leave to the invoice. |
| From prices for installation work, with the survey named | A starting figure for a boiler swap or a bathroom, stated as a from price, next to a plain sentence about what the survey settles that the from price cannot. |
| Whether the quote itself costs anything | Free, chargeable, or credited against the job. A small question, asked constantly, and the answer decides whether somebody fills in the form. |
The reply
There is a call out charge, and our rates page says what it covers in time and what the rate is after that, with separate evening, weekend and bank holiday figures. Parts are charged on top and the same page explains how. A boiler replacement is not priced from that card at all: we publish a from price, and the real figure comes out of the survey, which costs nothing.
It answers the numbers in the order the caller is adding them up, then changes gear openly when the question turns into installation work, which is exactly where a rate card silently stops applying and where most misquotes are born.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any request for a total on a described job, any question about a figure already quoted, and anything about an invoice.
A price for the actual job needs somebody who has seen it. Leave your name, a number and a couple of lines about the work and we will call you back with a proper figure.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- A total for a job described in a chat window.
- That the final figure will match the from price.
- A rate that is not on the published card, including a discount.
- That parts are included, when the card puts them on top.
Questions
- Does publishing the call out charge lose us work?
- It loses the enquiries that were going to end at the charge anyway, which is time back rather than work lost. The ones it keeps arrive already knowing the number, and those are the bookings that do not fall over on the doorstep.
- Can it give a rough price for a boiler swap?
- It can give your published from price, provided it says in the same breath what the survey settles: the flue, the pipework, whether the cylinder stays, the state of the floor. A from price without that sentence becomes the price the customer heard.
- What about jobs at the edge of our area?
- Publish the rule rather than the radius. If there is a minimum charge or a travel uplift past a certain point, the assistant can apply it, and the enquiries that fail it end in one exchange instead of three.
Keep reading
- Everything for a plumbing and heating firmSorting an emergency from a routine job, quoting call out rates, and never suggesting a fix on gas work that only a registered engineer may touch.
- Handling pricing questions in generalPublished price versus the price for this buyer. Bands, ranges and from pricing, and why a firm number for unscoped work is the damaging failure.
- The guarantee length everybody remembers and the condition nobody doesA long manufacturer guarantee normally depends on a service being done and recorded each year. Give the condition whenever you give the length.
- What a customer should know before an engineer sets offA plumbing appointment is a time window, an access requirement and a charge on arrival. All three can be explained without seeing a diary.
- When taking a name is the wrong thing to doA live leak or a carbon monoxide worry cannot wait for an email to be opened. Here the handover is a number in the first line.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.