Shop@

[kwatt]

Re: Shop@

Oldtog wrote:Ken what is this about subscribers. Please tell more.

All the information is available off the link on the front page, it’s on the site intro (which I do change BTW ;)) or you can read it using this link:

http://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk/modules.p … age&pid=48

Any questions, please ask.

K.

[APG]

Re: Shop@

Hi Kwatt

I am more than willing to stump up. 😀

When, were, how much, what? 😉 Just let me know and a cheque will be in the post.

Haven’t been on the site much lately as we have just started 24hr callout for gas and refrigeration. Everything is a bit mad at the moment

If you could let me know about meeting/get together and I will try and make it. The thought of a pint sounds like a good idea, especially if your paying 😀 😉 😆

Regards
Andy G

[kwatt]

Details of the subscriber stuff is above Andy off the link there and the meeting details are in the downloads in both Word and PDF sections.

24hour callout? Are you mad or just donning the Dick Turpin outfit? 😆

Actually I’d be interested to hear the results of that as it’s years since anyone I know tried it and any that did soon dropped it unless they were doing commercial.

K.

[APG]

Re: Shop@

Kwatt

Where we are there is nothing like it in our area except TRANSCO for the gas side of things. We have thoroughly looked into it, you can only get recorded messages or an answer phone message from the people who advertise in the yellow Pages for a “24 hour service”

How can an answer phone or recorded message be a 24 Hour Service?

It’s worth a try and at the moment it is doing well. We have had a few calls for washing machines at 03:00 in the morning but we tell them at the moment it is only for Gas and Refrigeration. We are charging £79.00 + vat for emergency call out + parts and this week alone have had 12 calls. Engineers are on rotary basis and the phone gets diverted straight to their mobile phones. The only problem I have is making sure we fall into EU Regs on working hours, how many hours they have worked and when they can work again after emergency call out calls. All of our calls are logged, so I know we have recieved that call.

K, try it, what have you got to loose. If you are charging the correct amount to cover everything, what are you missing out on. We started out on saying to customers we do out of hour calls as customers have family and work commitments and it has worked from there.

The biggest Question is, can or will the engineer be willing to take the responsibility of going out that early in the morning or dropping everything to go out to an emergency call??????

I will keep you posted on progress.
Andy (apg Ltd)

[kwatt]

Re: Shop@

I know neither of my engineers would be interested, even for extra cash, as it’s hard enough to get them to do a Saturday never mind booked out of hours calls. The problem for me is that we’re not in a high enough income area to justify it, yeah there would be a few I suppose but not enough to justify the hassle of offering such a service and, since 90{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of the work we do is on contract or insurance there’s no chance with those. The problem being that whether the customer was on contract or not I do actively try to treat them the same and no contract would pay for such a service that I am aware of bar commercials.

Where you are in London-ish area I should imagine that there are those that wish out of hours calls as it’s the only access they can allow, whilst we do get that it’s amazing that customers can let you in when they are faced with no choice, but usually in virtually every case something can be worked out, it’s very rare that it can’t be. But even when an engineer is held up and does work on all I get when I let the customers know is, “oh, but I’m going out at…” etc.! Sometimes it’s soul destroying, you try your best to get them sorted and they put obstacles in the way.

I’ve tried out of hours service before at an extra charge, the public refuse the charges, so we stopped that.

We tried Saturday service, the no-access rate rose by over 40{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d}, we gave that up unless we are busy enough to justify it and need to do it.

Sundays I would not consider as I suspect that would be worse that a Saturday.

I think (but I’m not sure) that the EEC Regs currently limit a worker to 40 hours or so a week and you’re quite correct you have to watch that, there are rules on shift work and patterns as well AFAIK but I’ve never looked into them. To offer out of hours, weekends etc. you would, I think, have to go to working shift patterns which entails unsociable hours payments to the staff. Frankly, IMO, we’re not paid enough in this industry to justify the time, what we’d have to pay staff and the hassle of it all.

But if it works for you then go for it.

K.

[APG]

Re: Shop@

Hi K

If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t but worth a try.

We have one year left on our commercial CORGI certificate and I am in two minds whether to renew it again. If this work picks up, I will renew it and really push for more work as it is good and easy money to earn (costs in rubber gloves though as each engineer has their own box)
Then I will sort out working hours and shifts.

You are right about the engineer side of things. If they don’t want to do the job, i’ll go out and do it. London is only 35 minutes away on the new A13 and by the time they’ve thought about doing the job, I would have done it, got home and boiled the kettle. Attitudes have changed. They want to earn loads of money but do not want to work for it. For some reason they leave school thinking they will walk right into a 30K a year job and have never heard of the words TRAINING or APPRENTICESHIP.

Saturdays not a problem, 98{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of customers are always in. The way round it with us was to tell them at the time of booking the call “Everyone wants a Saturday call, we can squeeze you in but if you go out you will be looking at a NO ACCESS CHARGE of £35.00” This is fair in our eyes as we could have gone to another customer who would be willing to wait in for us to repair their machine and not lost a live job slot.

We have not exercised the charge as yet as customers now phone us to let us know what they are doing. Before the no access charge it was bad, 76{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of customers were in for the repair to take place. It was costing me money to send out an engineer. I have looked at my figures and it costs me £28.79+vat to go to a call. Much improved I do think.

Do you think this is fair?

Sunday for me is paper work day and family day. Nothing will change that unless a job is above £600 (wishful thinking I hear you say)
In an ideal world, it would be nice to go out to 3 to 4 calls a day and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the week. My friend has just done it. Sold up everything, gone to Spain, purchased a nice villa with the swimming pool, 13 acres of land and fruit trees. What is he doing?
Carl is repairing appliances for Thomas Cook, First Choice, etc,etc. I have told him to be very careful as the work is seasonal and to watch the money but he is doing very, very well. So the question I keep asking myself is: what are we all doing wrong, how can we improve just to stay alive in this industry which is not well paid. I have not got the answers but will give it a real good go in the area we have just started.

Regards

Andy G

[kwatt]

Re: Shop@

APG wrote:If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t but worth a try.

Fair enough. 😀

APG wrote:You are right about the engineer side of things. If they don’t want to do the job, i’ll go out and do it. London is only 35 minutes away on the new A13 and by the time they’ve thought about doing the job, I would have done it, got home and boiled the kettle. Attitudes have changed. They want to earn loads of money but do not want to work for it. For some reason they leave school thinking they will walk right into a 30K a year job and have never heard of the words TRAINING or APPRENTICESHIP.

Yep, getting engineers is a real problem and something that has been preying on my mind of late a fair old bit.

I have said for a long time now, but I’ll slap it here in public now, that we can offer all the training in the world, we can offer a career, we can offer vans or anything we like. But, if the money isn’t good enough and the career doesn’t look stable enough then no-one is going to come into and stick with the industry, it’s that simple and we cannot offer salaries that compete with other, comparable, industries.

It’s not well paid at all and, beyond that, you have to crawl about on people’s sticky, greasy floors retriving their knickers and other assorted detriement from pumps etc or fiddle in their smelly ovens/fridges etc. Hardly an appealing career option is it?

Don’t believe me, just look at plumbers, joiners, brickies etc. most of whom are earning £25K+ on average and most are over £30K whilst this industry languishes with salaries, usually at best, in the low £20K’s. Is it any wonder that there’s nobody coming into the industry?

That is so bad that one guy told me that, unless he earned over £20K he was actually better off on the dole! How do get over that? How does offering training resolve that? All they’ll do is do a bit of training to satisfy the government that they tried and go back on the dole again and that does happen.

I took on a great young lad that’s doing really well, he’d been unemployed for over 2 years. So I called up the local employment people and asked if they could offer any assistance in respect of training etc., the answer was a flat “no”! It’s just crazy.

APG wrote:Saturdays not a problem, 98{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of customers are always in. The way round it with us was to tell them at the time of booking the call “Everyone wants a Saturday call, we can squeeze you in but if you go out you will be looking at a NO ACCESS CHARGE of £35.00” This is fair in our eyes as we could have gone to another customer who would be willing to wait in for us to repair their machine and not lost a live job slot.

Yeah, but under contract it’s not just that simple in law as I found out. 🙁

APG wrote:Do you think this is fair?

I think it’s very fair and if you can get it then more power to you.

APG wrote: My friend has just done it. Sold up everything, gone to Spain, purchased a nice villa with the swimming pool, 13 acres of land and fruit trees. What is he doing?
Carl is repairing appliances for Thomas Cook, First Choice, etc,etc. I have told him to be very careful as the work is seasonal and to watch the money but he is doing very, very well. So the question I keep asking myself is: what are we all doing wrong, how can we improve just to stay alive in this industry which is not well paid. I have not got the answers but will give it a real good go in the area we have just started.

Yeah, the killer in this country is the cost of living which is high. I think the only country you could move to and not live any cheaper is Switzerland, or maybe one of the Scandanavian countries. Just look at fuel costs as an indicator of the difference.

I also know people, better paid than me, that have moved off to the US and Spain as they said it was just too expensive to live in the UK.

K.

[Dave_Conway]

kwatt wrote:SSL will be added in the fulness of time.

SSL is now installed and the shop is fully live, purchases can now be made securely either by credit card or nochex.

Dave.

[Martin]

Dave_Conway wrote:SSL is now installed and the shop is fully live

Good news to put the thread back on track. 😉

Martin

[Author]

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