Working for Plumber247, Homeserve and this type of company

[MickeyC]

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience of working with the national find a local plumber type businesses. Where they seem to have a list of plumbers in each city that they use ? And send them round to do jobs that thay get through the website.

It is my 1st year working on my own, things have been OK but I am starting to get a bit short of work and wondered if they really do provide regular work and also what cut they take ?

Do they pay a good rate ? I charge my time at about 45/hr when I am costing stuff up. Would I get that do you think ?

It looks like they charge the customer up front in some of the websites so not sure how that works if I have to supply the parts ?

Any help / tips words of warning appreciated.

Should I stay well clear ? or is this the answer to my problems ?

Mike

 

[Masood]

I'm signed up with Martin Smith who posted on here a while ago looking for plumbers/GSRs to go on his database. It's not regular work, but a trickle is better than nothing. The main advantage is that he charges the customer a "finder's fee", then the customer pays you direct for your time. If you fit parts out of your van, you charge the customer for the parts on top of your time.

It's all emergency work, so quite a lot of it leads to more work to rectify the root cause of the problem, and Martin has no problem with you taking that work on direct. The downside is that there are calls in the middle of the night, there are a lot of calls for blocked drains, etc. If you can handle the less glamorous aspects of our job, and deal with broken sleep, then it's not a bad deal.

 

[SimonG]

What part of the country are you charging £45 an hour in?

 

[MickeyC]

Thanks for that. Not sure I am a midnight specialist though, I need my beauty sleep. lol. But I need food too so that might be something have to consider.

 

[MickeyC]

I live in South Yorkshire. Not far from Sheffield.

 

[theanalyst]

Best bet is to get on the books of a decent sized company, if you want regular 9-5 work.
You wont be getting £45 per hour though.... If you dropped your rate a bit you would maybe get more work.