I'm very interested in how 3PM (sounds like a star wars robot or a time of day, lol) anyway, how he bills his time. Even for small jobs we add an hour in for admin, scheduling, ordering parts etc for that job. Billing one extra hour for a 3 hour job can make a big difference. 

So we would charge say $400 where as someone else may only bill for 3 hours on site but at 150 an hour and end up at $400-450. We had a data company do some cable certifying for us once. They do full cabling also and bill at 75/hr, but they charge for drive time and admin. they had two guys onsite for an hour and we were billed for 4 hours.

Other moving companies I work along side with always have a 4 hour minimum and charge drive time. Jut food for thought

I don't set the rates here but I imagine it's a perception thing, I also think that at one point in time we probably weren't charging for travel at all, or perhaps only one way. We have customers that are 2 hours in each direction (thankfully not many) and charging $400 for travel would cost us clients (which in most cases if they are that far away isn't necessarily a bad thing, we already lost one at travel being $60/hr and him 2 hours away). We bill 2 hours minimum per person on site.

I agree, it makes sense to charge full hourly for travel, it's actually more expensive as we're chewing up gas while travelling, but we've had enough pushback on travel costs that it makes more sense just to raise our labor rates instead.

I ususally don't bring up travel time charges seperately, but roll them into the cost of the job. There is a local plumbing company that says on their radio ads..."WE DONT CHARGE FOR TRAVEL TIME"... It rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Lets see......Best Buy normally charges $399 for a premium hang and bang. Now my slowest guy could do that in 2hrs........= $200/hr.

Am I missing something here. I know different sections of the world will be different but this has been the big box price for quite a while on average.

My wife is a lawyer, it happens but they might not get a reply, it depends on the client and what 'status' they have within the firm (and the aren't calling over a speeding ticket).

I question, what does working for a large firm or a one man shop have to do anything with "quality"???

I have seen many large firms that are hacks and just have the financial backing to make themselves appear professional, but because they are "big" that gives them the right to charge more? If they were efficient and growing properly they would be profiting enough off of the extra bodies that they would be increasing.

OK, thats it! Im now going to charge $350 per hour because Im worth it. To me anyways.

:)

Note to Cory and others regarding efficiency. Have you ever actually calculated the efficiency of your entire staff? I did it in the days of our audio repairs. It should have been near the top of the scale, since there was no travel time, with the repairs being carried in. We found that time drains included: time on the phone, time poring over service manuals looking up part numbers, using the rest room, checking in products/parts that arrived that day, clean up tasks, and the list goes on. These all took away from time spent "repairing things". We have the same types of things now that keep us from installing things.

In the repair industry, even with carry-in service, efficiencies industry wide tended to be 40-50%, which sounds incredibly low, but it is what it is. This meant that if you billed $100 per hour for actual repair time, instead of $4000 in labor income at the end of a 40 hour week, you had $1600-2000. This obviously impacts your ability to meet expenses, much less turn a profit. I suggest that in our industry, with extended periods of research, phone time, travel time, and so on, your actual time on the job is outrageously less than it is (efficiency much lower than you think).

This produces the requirement to either bill for travel time, administrative time... or have an unusually high hourly rate.

I would gamble that, much like the repair industry in earlier days, the majority of shops pull a figure out of the air that "sounds good", or is "all our area will support/clientele will pay". This is not running a business. It often results in 70 hour work weeks and bills still unpaid.

I wasn't talking a out quality, I was talkin about overhead which has to do with coat of doing business which is a big part of determining you hourly rate.

That's the point I'm getting at....if he's charging $165/hr on site, then he technically isn't that high if you put the rest into the mix.

How accurate are you at calculating the total time, estimate vs actual? This is what I worry about with fixed price, that you'll end up underestimating the hours and end up working for free....potentially a lot if the project ends up far more difficult than initially thought. I'm sure we can all cite examples of that...

Maybe the problem is that the rest of us are too low.

You do realize your biggest competitor right in your backyard charges that much.

That is exactly right.  I'm not saying that everyone needs to charge $165.  But if you're in the $65-$85 range you can't possibly be making profit.  You're working for the sake of working.  But then we blame our economis status on external factors that are beyond our control.  The biggest excuse we make is..."my area won't support higher rates"

Did your area support $3.75 gallons of gas?  Then it can support your higher rate.  Some of you guys are charging the same rates that you were charging when gas was $1.29 per gallon.

I raise my rates every year without fail.  The first week of January every year our rates go up.  Period end of story.  I started that a few years back when I was charging $85.00 per hour.  I'm well into the 3 digit hourly rate at this point.  

I was scared to do it at first, but I had to, I'm my own pension plan.

There was one major thing that caused me to start raising my rates.  My father, as some of you know, my father owned an alarm company.  It was a small, successful shop that did good work.  But as hard as my dad worked, it seemed like he was spinning his wheels, sure he had the monitoring accounts, but it was a struggle for him.  Anyway, in my area everyone knew my father, every vendor, every customer rep at every disty.  He practically built those places.  Do ya know how many of them came to his funeral?  ZERO.

Point is, take care of yourself and your family.  Everybody must pay.   

We all want to take care of our customers. We give free labour maybe throwin some small parts we forgot to bill for or needed to solve a problem that came up.

But at the end of the day if you don't charge appropriately you are ding the customer a disservice because you can no longer afford to provide service to their system. They have to ensure at time of install hat they are paying you properly so that you are around in months and years to come to service that system. Even the mighty disappear. A large retail custom shop just closed down here in Toronto. We did some work for a client of theirs from a few years ago that wanted to use the receiver and tv (a kuro) that they had bought there a few years back. Finished the project a few months ago. Got called back Friday 2 hdmi inputs on the tv no longer receive signal and the receiver (which was previously repaired) no longer passes video. They can no longer turn to their original point of purchase. And as much as I want to take care of them I can't afford to do favors especially with equipment purchased elsewhere.

We all want to do nice things and end up giving away too many freebies. That results in a higher overall labour rate because we bill fewer ours and have to charge more. The flip side solution is to strive to bill far more hours without billing more for them.....but this is substantially harder than just jacking up the hourly rate.