Do you offer discounts on your hourly rate?

Interested in the opinions of other trades here as to whether there are any factors that would make you happy to offer a discount on your day rate?

Suppose you're a one man band, so no employees to worry about, and you have a good rep, long list of clients spread over quite a large area locally because word of mouth is you're good. You mainly do smaller jobs; kitchen here, bathroom there. Someone comes to you and says "I'm building an entire house at the end of your road and I've got more work for you than you can shake a stick at, you'll get paid by the hour cash on demand and I need you on the job full time for X months"

Is there any incentive to offer a discount if it's a bit more like "a full time job" rather than being self employed? Maybe other factors such as "it's a 2 minute drive so I'm not spending an hour of my day sitting in traffic", or "I'm not going to have to chase 20 different clients for payment over the next 6 months or spend hours of my week going out to quote on jobs I might not get" that make it worth cutting your rate?

I tend to threat all jobs the same. I have an hourly rate for small jobs that tend to only take a few small hours and a day rate for ones that are going to be much more time consuming. I do also factor the benefits of less commuter time and travel costs in to them.

There's no guarantee you'll get the work so if you were giving consideration to reducing your rate wouldn't it make sense to suggest it before hand rather than offer it on a promise? If that makes sense.

But then the word of mouth may stop, and once the big job is over you may not have many clients left....

phatboy said:

But then the word of mouth may stop, and once the big job is over you may not have many clients left....

Click to expand...

When I first started up, there was a local installer, good rep, and used to do a LOT of LA installs,running quite a few teams. After all that dried, he was a sole trader, but busy. He then spent over a year doing all the plumbing in 2 hotels being built. Anyway, I was doing a big job and took on a guy to help for a week or so, and we were having a cuppa in the cafe next door.
We sat with the old guy (I was young then), and he moaned on about the big job killing his ongoing business. I had to keep schtum, as I had taken LOADS of his customers, as they were fed up with him not returning calls. I had started up an did a bit of advertising just at the right time to capitalise on his poor customer service. Nice guy though, but been dead a few years now.

It is these sort of things that you have to learn from. I made certain from then that I returned calls asap, regardless of whether I could help or not. Mind, it it amazed me how often I would go home at lunch, get a call list of my wife and phone them. So no more than 4 or 5 hours since the call in. By which time they had found someone else.

Then mobile phones came along

There's a saying "any fool can sell £10 notes for a fiver each."

People will accept your valuation of yourself. If you show that you value yourself as below average, that's what they'll think your worth.

Long since given up getting involved in bidding wars, the only way to reduce the price is to reduce the spec of the job. have basically 3 rates. Like PBD I have an hourly rate, though to be honest I now only have two clients who I do minor works for and that's only very occasionally. I also have a sub-contractors day rate, but again I hardly ever do any of that, mainly only to help other friends in the industry. Most of my time is spent working on fixed quote jobs in between developing the odd bit of property.

I charge an hourly rate for small jobs and a day rate if needed. The day rate is a reduced hourly rate overall but with a guarantee of a full days work I think it offers value to the customer. I do factor in travel time to the day rate.