How to price plastering jobs

Comprehensive guide for the Self-employed 

CRUSH 

Your Pricing Strategy 

By Stu Roberts 

INTRODUCTION 

The time has come to smash your job costing, get a grip of overhead, Understand what your skills are worth in the market place and move away from "Going rate" thinking.

Confusion 

Every self employed person on earth at has one stage turned to social media groups to ask the going rate on a certain job for example rendering. Or we will ask other tradesmen to check our price to see if its right. 

This perceived short-cut strategy can be damaging to our business and has the opposite effect because it means we are by passing a crucial component of business operation which is to fully understand our own unique costs and our worth. Instead we try to hand this job over to others 

and ask them to price our work this leads to confusion, lack of understanding and creates a curtain between you and your business insights. 

Why do we do this? 

When we learn our trade we are trained to use our hands but nobody trains us in job costing. So naturally we start off weak in this area unless we take the time to learn the skills and strategies needed to price up our jobs accurately and confidently. 

Much of this comes down to confidence in our own skills and ability. 

MY FOUR PART SKILLS GUIDE 

Often we are unsure where we fit in when it comes to skill level so we have to determine our competence and skill level. 

Always be working toward mastery.. 

Below is my four part skills earning guide taking the average earnings of the experts in your field and working back this can be categorized into 4 competency levels: 

1. Beginner 

If you are newly qualified and confident in some areas but do not yet have the experience or confidence to undertake all jobs then your earnings should be around 25% of an experts earnings

         2. Budding 

Your skills, knowledge and confidence is growing steadily and you can now undertake many different aspects of the job. Your earnings should be around 50% of an experts earnings 

3. Seasoned 

You now have a solid overview of your trade and many years in the game across a multitude of different scenarios and situations there is not much that you can not do confidently if this is you then your earnings should be around 75% of an experts earnings 

4. Expert 

Nobody knows it all and none of us were born with a trowel in our hand. But experts have spent decades refining and mastering their chosen speciality and are dedicated to the craft. You know when you have become an industry expert because beginners, budding and even seasoned plasterers now turn to YOU for guidance and leadership. When you become an expert you can name your price because your are in high demand so 100% earnings belong to you. 

Who decides our earnings? 

Positioning.. 

The market place is brutal on the self employed and will chew up and spit out anybody that does not show competence in their craft. The market will tell you when your price is too high and too low it will be brutally honest with you if your customer service and skillset is below par. The market place doesn't care. Our prices get rejected and we get ghosted because we don't fully understand the sales and marketing process. 

This is why we have to listen and pay attention to our customers. 

The above skillset percentage guide is not solely focused on hand skills but also business and people skills especially if you plan to tap the home improvement and domestic market so getting a grip on communication, sales and customer service is vital if you want to succeed in self employment. If you struggle in these areas then consider joining my Coaching group

Supply & demand.. 

Your on the motorway and you pull into the services to grab a bacon sandwich, you can expect to pay £10 and you can't challenge this or go somewhere else because there's nowhere else to go. This called scarcity. 

If your customers have somewhere else to go, If what you are selling can be sold cheaper , faster, better.. then your customers will be drawn away. 

So we must create scarcity. We can do this by specialising in a specific niche or increasing competence in the delivery of the service fir example if we become cleaner, quicker, deliver a higher level of quality than our competitors this will give us an edge in the market. 

Once we have an edge or a USP we can create a degree of scarcity even in a busy market. Understand your overhead 

The price we put in for each project must cover you. 

Your overhead runs deeper than just your day rate, a bag of skim and some beads. If you are self employed you are in this for the long haul and this is now your career. So we must fully learn the ins and outs of business expenses and factor in things like holidays, admin tasks and future retirement plans. 

Know your margin. 

Inside my self employment coaching group I show members how to track all direct and indirect business costs using completely free software to get a grip on how your overhead effects profit over a 12 month period. 

Reverse engineer your income 

Once we learn how to do this we can then identify the most profitable jobs in our industry and within our service area to custom build a business that serves us and provides a quality of life for our families. 

A clear and accurate analyses of achievable earnings will allow us to create a plan where we can target high profit jobs that allow us to work family friendly hours , get off the tools to work on our business and implement systems and procedures to help us smash self employment.

If this guide has been helpful for you and you want more of this type of stuff then consider joining my Coaching and mentoring group put together for self employed plasterers 

Next up.. Bringing in work

How to get off Checkatrade, Mybuilder and other expensive lead sites..