Sub-contracting work

[Paul Barker]

I should add all my work is yelllow pages phone book or referal/repeats. I have a website and that pulls in very little. I see the local paper as a short term solution for when there is no work, but since I've never actually run out I've never gone in the local paper.

My general builder mate just has to p[ut an add in for one week and he gets about 6 weeks work from it. Mainly roofing, but extension building and so on.

Please please please do not trust these companies that offer you those wages and guranteed work. There is plenty of guranteed work after 6pm on Friday to 8am Monday, usually 70 miles away and often all through the night. No pay for returns, your problem if you don't carry the part, no mileage money, minimum 3 moinths before you get payed and then after a fight, some jobs they conveniently forget all together. Always they are on the end of the phone when they want you, round robbin of the departments when you want them. also most of their customers are disgruntled and you get it in the neck.

Worst of it is that as your business expands you can't provide a service to your own customers while you are 70 miles away on one of their fools errands.

What finally finished it for me was a badly installed boiler some 5 years old, never been serviced.Problem caused by flue seal probably pinched and misplaced during install. I didn';t have the part at that timne of night, job was a way away, I reported back to company that in my view it was installation fault as they were an insurance company they then wouldn't pay for the job not me not noone. Customer got very irate involved installer who was and is probably the biggest player round here. He took it VERY badly and proceeded to bad mouth me to all and sundry.

Custoimer asked me to quote to fix it, and I told him to take a running jump!

Never worked for that gang again and never shall.

A friend of mine could tell a similar story about subbing to BG. They said you hoild these days for us and we'll fill them. After 6 weeks of keeping certain days free, they rang with a job. He told them where to stick it!

 

[B.O.B DOLE]

Thanks for all your input 0n that i had a feeling they were a bit dodgy!
I guess im just finding it a bit hard to get established. Yellow pages ad comes out first of march so heres hoping

Or is the rest of the country quiet at the moment as well?

done waste of time and money

 

[Paul Barker]

PPS

Just lately fitted a boiler in a bl;ock of flats, some guy approached me and said there were about 15 flats in the building that need new boilers.

I don't want to do them, the original install was not to any standards that ever existed, so to perform the replacement you have to be a magician. I forgot to leave him my card!

 

[Vic Spanner]

Littleroy. I was once myself self employed, and would be interested to know how much work you get out of yellow pages. I use to pay £500.00 and would be lucky to get two jobs a year out of it. What i would say is stick to the local papers and Village magazines but more importantly do a good job dont over charge and you will find word of mouth as the best form of advertising...Good luck,Its now dog eat dog out there

 

[littleroy]

I know it is hard out there. I do the job to the best of my ability and charge what i think is fair, ie. not over charging just because you can! word of mouth is the best form of advertising.
My yellow pages ad comes out the first of march...........heres hoping!


maybe all the media hype over the last few years about a shortage in the trade was just a big noise about nothing???................or maybe i just got in to late?

 

[littleroy]

I know it is hard out there. I do the job to the best of my ability and charge what i think is fair, ie. not over charging just because you can! word of mouth is the best form of advertising.
My yellow pages ad comes out the first of march...........heres hoping!


maybe all the media hype over the last few years about a shortage in the trade was just a big noise about nothing???................or maybe i just got in too late?

 

[corgiman]

No it was a hype about nothing, it was also a complete pack off lies, earn 70 to 100 in a year, I have been in this game, employed, self employed subbing, for dam near twenty years and I never even come close to those figures.

Its was, is and always be a hard game to make ends meet, tell me the job that isnt and i will be there.

Getting work is a bitch, word of mouth is good but how many people want their boiler changed yearly or have a breakdown a month??

I agree with what was said about local papers, they get you work but are expensive to mantain.

Hell o Pages are dam crooks, have a look in your local one and count the amount of advertising space that porports to be seperate companies but are actually the same firm!!!, how many companies put a CORGI reg number but use a totally bogus address on the adverts (i have reported some of these to CORGI, trading standards and Hell o Pages and guess what happen...u got it butkiss!!!)

Also I once, because I am a very sad lonely man, copied all the names of the companies in Central Heating section of my local hell o Pages on to a spread sheet (u know all the ones called 11111aaa.....2200aaa Git Plumbing) and then arranged them in alphabetical order (which is how the Hell O page rep will tell you they get entered in) and low and behold they came up in a totally different order than what they were entered in hell o pages. They must use some kind of archane alphabet that I am not aware of.

Lets face it lads and ladettes we are now living in interesting times

 

[Paul Barker]

Very interesting, so will you come to Scvarborough and do some of my estimates I can't get round do, do the jobs on comission and I'll have time to relist my yello pages in alphabetical order too?

Actually IU could be doing estimates instead of this, but you have to have some chill out time. I just hate working in chill out time, it's so precious.

In all honesty, though I agree in general plumbing is a ball breaker, it's a lot better than nursing, that nearly put me in the asylum...

 

[Paul Barker]

Actually I'm in a great mood because the bathroom suite for next week hasn't arrived so I can do some of the other work I can't get started instead and I have a perfectly good excuse not to be slogging away in someone's pokey bathroom.

 

[corgiman]

Very interesting, so will you come to Scvarborough and do some of my estimates I can't get round do, do the jobs on comission and I'll have time to relist my yello pages in alphabetical order too?

Actually IU could be doing estimates instead of this, but you have to have some chill out time. I just hate working in chill out time, it's so precious.

In all honesty, though I agree in general plumbing is a ball breaker, it's a lot better than nursing, that nearly put me in the asylum...

no need to take the **** mate, even busy plumbers sometimes have to stop and do some admin type work

keeping an eye on this sort of stuff can make or break a firm, and i was interested if anyone else had seen this in the yello pages, nit to give you a chance to big yourself up, i am glad that you are flat out fair play to you!!!

but starting out from ground zero is the toughest thing imaginable, you cannot turn down a farthing, but you will find that this continues and gets worse as time goes on, and as i said this is the hardest time I can remember in the game, might just be a london thing?? maybe you will get all the shandy drinking plumbers heading up north to **** on all your chips in the not to distant future???

 

[Paul Barker]

No offense intended, just having a laugh. Neither was I trying to big myself up.

One of the guys on the training with me only a few years ago, was all full of how he was going to go to London when he was qualified where the streets are paved with gold. Eventually, having had vertually no calls whatsoever, he got a job at Heathrow without his qualification, just the basic pay there is very good by our standards.

Now he is in Nottingham fitting Dolphin bathrooms for about £800 a week.

He hasn't done a gas job for corgi to inspect, he can keep his registration, but might not bother at all.

I went down to Limehouse to fit a boiler for my uncle. (Well first I went to fix his boiler but it was ID from the day it was fitted because of the location. I'd have loved to have taken a picture of the flu terminating inside the wall of his cellar, breathing in and out through an air brick, but as it was my uncle I had to restrain myself).

He said advertise down here, I'll go and see the people, you come down and do the installations. I watched the traffic along the what is it A13? listened to the constant droan noise polution day and night, looked at all the false lives being lived by what we used to call yuppies. BAsically there is a false age, all the people coming into what used to be East India Dock are 20 and 30 somethings, all overdressed for just adding up a few figures, all talking funny, extending their vowls, put on voices to fit into their false society. I saw all the poverty both of lifestyle and real, i.e. no job no decent clothing (anyway your clothes are filthy in one day in London) of the ordinary folk (who by the way in that area are not cockneys any more, they speak with foreign tongues and ran up and down the street jumping on westerners cars on the day the Gulf war broke out). I looked at the transport situation, basically they don't want you owning a car. I looked at the cost of living. I don't need to go on.

M8 of mine down there (Abbey Wood) had an 80k job in puters in the city. I spent a day with him, joined him on the inhuman train and tube journey to work. It is now like Tokyon was in the '70's. How did it get like this?

We lived in Dartford from 80's to 97. We came up to Scarborough 97. London has worstened 10 fold since 97. I was a despatch rider most of that time (actually if I can big myself TOP rider at A-Z City office for a few years). I certainly know London. IMHO it is now a ruined wasteland with no real society, it is an inhumane life for ordinary folk.

I've always said it, said it many times before. The north south divide favours the ordinary folk in the North, In the South, only the high flyers who are a false breed that any day can have the rug pulled away from under them, are the beneficiaries of the so called South East affluence.

We are northern by blood, myself Yorkshire and County Durham, wife pure Yorkshire. We did what seemed necessary to get good work and move to London area, we watched our relatives up here living better lives in better houses with better cars on less money in better jobs which were 15 minutes from home, able to take time out to have families. We watched with great envy while we were dinks strugling to survive both working full time.

One day we said, had enough, opportunity came to move up, we started family and upsized!

You can keep your South East!

 

[Paul Barker]

But on a serious note about establishing a business.

I came this way throug adversity. As a nurse I suddenly became ill with "stress fatigue" which I now know to have been M.E. Coinsidental with this a sister at work playing a political game tod terrible lies about me so the door was firmly shut in my face. Through tragic illness (only M.E. sufferers will apreciate the use of the word tragicc in this case) and human trechory I found myself out of work incapacitated and fast approaching bankruptcy. We maybe lost 50,000 through the experience.

Took work with a gas fitter (working for free to gain experience). Payed for own gas training, whgat was then cat 3 route when they were allowed to give you all the necessary training as long as you had 12 weeks experience. Now that route isn't available. Started working in plumbing with plenty of desperation to claw out of debt, but with the handicap of being a slow recovering ME sufferer. No guaranteed work, no associates, just me and my add in the paper.

A friend from my valve audio hobby said some very encouraging words. He had to leave his job one day and started doing diy work. he said you never know where the next job is going to come from, but one always comes.

You know what he was right. I have never run out of work totally. You get into a home do a good job, for a sensible pay and that generates another job, and on and on...

 

[corgiman]

Blimey thats one hell of a story mate, and must say the thought of getting the hell out of london appeals

still need someone to do your estimating Guv'Nor

 

[Paul Barker]

Even got whole floor of this house we hardly use for you to stay in with own kitchen and bathroom.

Quality of life is up here m8.

That's unless you are one of the ignorant masses who by a new home. Those are battery living up here also. You have to buy one of the victorian mansions built by the rich west yorkshire industrialists as weekend homes on the coast, with a seperate flat underneath for the cook and husband to follow his own trade. Many were turned into flats or old fogeys homes. We have one not quite big enough for old fogeys and too nice to make flats of. Payed 100k in 1999. At that time such a house would have cost 1/2 a million in south east. Don't know why we didn;'t make the move in mid 80's before the yuppies bought up York and drove the prices up. At that time we could have bought two equivalent houses to our one in Dartford for the equity we had in the Dartford house! We missed that boat but made sure we didn't miss the next one, now very glad to have jumped ship from London squalor.

 

[corgiman]

So now you are expanding do you fancy employing a cockney ****** RGI??