Is anyone operating on a flat rate business model, similar to HVAC companies?
I would love to speak to you about that.
I don’t know about you, but I constantly get complaints about the cost of our labor & we’re barely getting by.
$349 for TV mount over fireplace. That’s 2 guys/2 hours, assuming everything goes perfectly.

Meanwhile, I get charged $250 to change a $20 capacitor on my HVAC unit & the answer I get is “it’s a flat rate, what the book says”
Or $900 to swap a condenser thats under warranty. It took 1 man, 2 hours. That’s 450/hour. Its no problem for them.

Anyway, I’d love to hear from Julie on this topic.

Jason

Hi, Jason—On your small TV jobs, you should look at Geek Squad and copy their prices. They are not cheap. There’s a flat rate for the very basic install (~$300), and then $99 for each additional element like plugging into the network, and much more for significant items like hiding a cord. Stick to your guns, don’t be afraid to charge it. Charge a “flat rate” but do it with a bunch of asterisks.

We just had our garage door guy come check out a noise. We thought it was a spring, but it just needed some oil. He sprayed some oil. Was in and out in 10 minutes. Charged base rate of $72. I kicked and screamed, but I paid the bill and got on with it.

Otherwise, integrators tend to charge T&M for retrofit jobs since you never know what you’ll run into.

Hope that helps.

So you are keying in on the service side of this trade.  Which indeed needs to be handled differently than the larger project side.  Projects that take months or years require a totally different process for profitability than fraction of a day service calls.  You’ll need to establish some pretty specific goals and unfortunately the only way to make it with competitive prices is to make up for it in volume.  So it’s REALLY tough to make it on a 2 hour service call if you’ve just paid a technician a full day and that was his only billable time.

Of coarse the formula will be unique to each integrator depending on over head.  Some guys run solo and therefor can really cut down on the price for small service calls which makes it even more difficult on an company with even a little over head.

So you’ll need to do some MARKETING if you don’t want to scale down to being a one man operation.  Make your marketing clear, have a goal that is profitable, then like Julie says, have the confidence to go out there and ask for it.

Happy Selling

The flat rate model is always a struggle with this industry because you never seem to know what you are getting into.  Not to mention if the potential customer wants you to look at the project and then supply some sort of an estimate for the work.  Last year I started charging a $99 evaluation fee to look at the project.  If the potential becomes a customer we credit the $99 to the installation.  If not, we are not wasting our time.  I would just hate to say that it takes $400 for instance to install a TV and then find out that the customer wants you to conceal wiring behind a fireplace or something that is going to use a ton of time with a week pay off.  If you plan to adopt a flat rate model I would construct an written agreement that spells out the potential for additional labor cost in such cases.  I have not read the “BOX STORE” agreements for sometime but there is verbiage to address those types of issues.  The biggest selling point that we have is our personal approach to great installation.  I can bet you that the guy you talk to at the box store is not the guy that is going to show up at the home to do the install.  As an industry we really need to explain to the customer the differences and personal approach otherwise we don’t have a chance.