FLAT-RATE PRICING is all around you. It is the common form of commerce for most of the things you buy and almost all of the things you consume.
The doctor who, long ago, took care of your mother and delivered you practiced it. The breakfast at the restaurant this morning was flat-rated. The price was not dependent on the speed or good humor of the cook in the kitchen, the hog market or the attitude of the waitress today. You may tell me that your waitress’s tip is not flat rated, but I will remind you that there is a socially acceptable minimum tip that is flat rated and which you will pay unless you want to risk having your first cup of coffee spilled on you tomorrow morning.
If you are a contractor, and any part of your gross income includes service or other repetitious tasks, your life will be easier, your pockets will be fuller, and both your service technicians and customers will be happier if you flat rate all such work. Not some of it, all of it. Not only work done by your new technicians, but all those opportunities done by all your technicians.
This is my dogmatic statement this month. When I write about flat-rate pricing, it is impossible for me not to be totally dogmatic. There are many areas of business that we all know to be gray areas. Flat-rate pricing is not one of them. You can use flat-rate pricing and have an opportunity to earn what you are really worth for all your effort and all your investment in training and equipment and people. Or, you continue to schedule day laborers and continue to have the customer satisfaction debates as to whether this technician on that date was worth the measly day labor rate that you charged.
I’ve never known a contractor who has changed over to flat-rate pricing properly who has ever been sorry or who would possibly think of going back to any other pricing system. That was a trick statement because it had the word “properly” in the middle. If you do it properly, certain fundamentals must be respected.
Every service job done by every technician must be done under the flat-rate system that you have developed for the pricing and the delivery of your services. Not just some of the common tasks. Not just your newest technicians because “Old Charlie” said if you flat rate his services he will quit (an offer you should seriously consider.)
If you have an “Old Charlie,” it is a credit to your patience that you have retained an employee who has kept you from making your business more profitable. It is not, however, any credit to your intelligence or your business skills.
If you flat rate, you will have fewer complaints from your customers. They will know the charge and have agreed to the terms before the work starts.
If your flat-rate book does not include the particular service job at hand, then the work is done by an on-the-spot bid (a new flat rate) and a signed contract. The information gathered on that job will then be the background for adding this task as a standard flat-rate price in the future.
If your technicians know how to estimate and bid, the odds are very high that you will win more than you will lose in these bids.
I believe the first step in doing flat rating profitably is for you to invest in our set of flat-rate pricing tapes or the DVD version and to view them twice. They’re not a flat-rate pricing system; they’re an implementation discussion.
We do not sell a flat-rate pricing system. You will learn that, for a modest investment of your time, you can build your own system. Having a flat-rate pricing book is not nearly as important in my mind as the prior training and conditioning that you must go through personally, and which you must then carefully explain to your people.
Properly installed, flat-rate pricing will change your life and the life of your employees, always for the better. There will be fewer pricing debates, your profits will be higher, and your technicians’ compensation, based on their performance, will grow. They will never want to go back to selling day labor
If you have never tried flat-rate pricing, or if you have tried it before and it failed, take the time right now to order our high-performance contractor tapes. You’ll learn enough about what you should do or what you did wrong to make these tapes worth much more than their modest price.
HIGH PERFORMANCE CONTRACTING/FLAT RATE
PRICING VIDEO SEMINAR
An excitingly different training program for you and your key employees. Contractors exactly like you have increased their profits quickly using the information provided by these tapes and accompanying manual.
$149 + $11 S&H
Now available on VHS or DVD!
CALL, FAX, OR WRITE:
Schmitt Consulting Group
2141 Schuetz Rd., Suite 201
St. Louis, MO 63146
314/872-9199
Fax 314/872-9399