Quote:
Originally Posted by Crazy Dazz
When I worked in Professional Practice, there was a very simple rule. You could be paid as much as you want, provided you could charge out at 4 times that rate. For the "Big" firms it was more like 5 or 6.
And God forbid you should ever need a lawyer.
I've got no problem with honest charging, but what I hate is gouging, laziness, and incompetence.
I no-longer work in PP, because I got sick of dealing with the clients. Same Applies. If you don't want to provide Customer Service, don't get a job where its a large part of the role.
If you are going to charge for your expertise, then you need to have it.
It just beggars belief that I can have a contractor quote on a multi-million dollar project, to the dollar, but a workshop can't quote me on a job.
|
There is a very real hesitancy in the automotive aftermarket to provide quotes/estimates for anything or even do emails or anything on paper, the industry operates on phone calls, **** half the time you're flat out getting an invoice for what you've just paid for.
It really ****s me, everyone insists on phone calls to do everything also.
As you can imagine its pretty inconvenient trying to organise work because I'm at work when you want me to call you and then when I'm not at work and available to talk to you on the phone, you aren't at work!
I'm with you there, I'm over laziness and incompetence.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PG2
Billy
While I will admit that I have never worked in a trade (I have the hands to prove it) your calculations may be a little off.
I think you may be getting the 'labour rate' and 'wage' confused.
Out of that labour rate other costs come into it. Sure, as you said, they can turn up in the family car with a couple of tools but there is still a cost to that.
There are other 'labour' costs that need to be taken into consideration such as;
* superannuation
* sick leave and workers comp
* administration time
* warranty (yep, sometimes things go wrong that you need to fix - even if they aren't exactly your fault)
* training
* insurance
* renewal of tools - that family car and blow torch will not last forever.
I am sure that there are other things, but as I said, they may gross $215,000 a year but they don't get paid that.
A garbage person may 'only' get paid $45,000 a year but they get sick leave, workers comp and superannuation on top of that.
|
Insurance was nasty for me, I was under 25 and only had $500,000 worth of cover for vehicles inside my workshop and up to $125,000 for me to drive a customers vehicle.
Wasn't uncommon to have an excavator or someones prime mover in there, that's $400,000 right there for the excavator, only leaves $100,000 for everything else in there
It was about $8000 just for that cover which is a fair amount of money for a small two man business to cough up.
For a PTY LTD company structure you also have to actually pay yourself proper wages + super, annual leave, sick leave entitlements, add in work cover premiums etc and then being a high risk industry the premiums in VIC work on how many accidents your industry as a whole has so you might not do anything wrong but you'll cop it in premiums if the industry does poorly as a whole.
If you're just a partnership rather than a company structure you forgo the above but then if you don't pay the bills they'll take your house if you have assets for the taking
To put it into perspective a full time driver to do deliveries for you on the books costs around $85K/year by the time you take into account wages, super, sick leave, running costs of their car, average use of tolls etc.
The driver doesn't get anywhere close to that $85K in wages
Its one of those industries where everyone used to have in house drivers on the books around the start of last decade then by the end of it everyone had their own ABN, their own car, paying for their own fuel and maintenance and was getting shafted working for these contracting mobs outsourcing to the places who used to have their own drivers on the books.