Reading another thread on this topic got me thinking about all the things wrong with charging by the hour.
Yes, 99% of repairers charge by the hour. But change your point of view to that of a customer. Firstly, charging by the hour encourages the repairer to work as slowly as possible. If the repairer wants to treat themselves to something nice but expensive, all they need to do is slow down and take longer over each repair. Yes, I know that sometimes you have enough work that you don't need to stretch it out, but the customer doesn't know that. All they know is that it is in your interest to work as slowly as possible. So why should they trust you?
Secondly, the more incompetent you are, the longer it takes you to do a repair. In other words, the customer pays an incompetent repairer more than a competent one. How is that OK?
Thirdly, charging a customer for your time when you have failed to fix something is profoundly unfair. You see, you might charge the customer for your time, but the customer doesn't want your time; that's not what they are interested in. They want their appliance fixing. They are paying for a repair, not for half a day of you farting about and getting nowhere with it. I once had a really tricky intermittent misfire on a car which I couldn't find, so I took it to a technician who had loads of fancy diagnostic equipment and was considered to be a genuine expert. He had a monthly column in a trade magazine. Anyway, he hooked up the car and messed about for two hours before giving up. He charged me for two hours labour - something like £180, I think. I paid up but felt utterly ripped off. I drove the car there with a misfire. Two hours later I drove the car away, still with a misfire, but £180 poorer. I paid out money and got nothing. I was pretty pissed off.
These issues are all due to the broken business model repairers use. There is a disconnect between what the customer wants and what you provide. No customer wants to buy your time. A customer wants to buy a repair. It is irrelevant to the customer whether it takes you ten minutes or ten hours - they just want their widget to work and to pay what feels like a fair price.
Maybe every job should start with an up-front firm quote to the customer, and should include a no fix / no fee commitment. If that is too restrictive, then give the customer an estimate and say that you will contact them to ask their agreement to proceed if you find you need to charge more for the repair. But again, NO FIX, NO FEE!
What say you?
This is one of the most clueless posts I've seen in a while, I'm assuming this is a full Karen meltdown over something trivial that happened to you but I can't be bothered going through the whole thread looking for the story. Responding in order of insane statements:
- This is just flat out not how business works. I (like most repairers, I'd imagine) have a queue. Customers hate that, everyone wants their thing fixed immediately. Dragging out jobs for more hours would mean less jobs done per day, which means a longer queue for customers, which means lost business. Whether I spend 3 hours on one job or 1 hour each on 3 jobs I make the same, but if I only get one job done in 3 hours then I'm going to run out of shelf space and get lots of "IS IT READY YET" phone calls real quick. Also, you assume two things- first, that repairers are inherently dishonest, and second, that customers will pay whatever they're told without question. Neither is true.
- Again, not how it works. Peoples hourly rate generally reflects experience and reputation. Cheaper labour generally means it's going to take them a lot longer, and it tends to all balance out pretty evenly. I charge many times what I did when I was starting out, but my experience/speed has multiplied similarly. The final bills are basically the same from the customer point of view (adjusting for inflation etc obviously), regardless of what the printed hourly rate is.
- Maybe sometimes, but usually not. You're assuming that the repairer isn't smart enough to find the fault, but this is not usually the case. More often the reason for a no fix is going to be catastrophic damage, parts availability problems, low item value making repair costs impractical, intermittent faults, etc. We don't know this before an item walks in the door. Very simple example from last week- customer brought in a device they blew up with the wrong power supply. I dig through the power section and find the damaged components, clean up the PCB damage and so on. I rig up some bench supplies for testing as this thing has a tonne of supply rails, and it turns out the main processor is dead too. Not something that's available as a spare part (it's an old device that hasn't been made for a good decade or so). Some of the damaged power supply components are also out of production and unavailable. Obviously the unit is a write off at this point given used working units are only worth a few hundred bucks. By what logic do you think I should be out of pocket for my time on this? Yeah it's a no fix, but not through any lack of effort on my part.
- What the customer wants something to cost has no bearing on the actual cost of the repair process. The customer does not get to invent what they think a fair price is, it costs what it costs in terms of parts and labour. A significant number of my customer interactions go like this "Hey, I need my thing fixed. It's just a loose wire, should be an easy one" "Oh, OK, which wire is loose?" "What?" "You said it just needs a loose wire reattached?" "Well, I mean, I assume that's what it is because it doesn't work, should only take you 5 minutes with your tools". Meanwhile in reality the thing doesn't work because it copped a lightning surge and the entire power supply has been blown to smithereens.
- Absolutely not, for the reasons outlined above. Again- in most cases WE DO NOT KNOW what the cost will be in advance. Electronics repair is not as simple as say a tyre shop going "You got a shredded tyre? What size? OK, it's ___ bucks for one of those and ___ to fit it". God, even that simple example often has its own complications (e.g. rim is damaged, one wheel nut is seized, etc). On any given day the phone calls I get will say anything from "I just want it checked over as routine maintenance" to "It literally caught on fire" to "It shuts down intermittently" to "It fell off the truck and is in 8 pieces". Also, I easily get a couple jobs a week that are no fix situations because the "problem" was user error. For example, a common one is a customer saying their amp is cutting out. I test it, it's fine. I pull it apart and inspect it, nothing found. I wiggle connections, test it under different thermal conditions and loads etc, nada. After an hour or so of testing, cleaning, note taking and communicating with them about it they finally tell me their dog chewed one of their cables and ask if that might be the problem. Should I wear that cost given I didn't actually fix anything in the end?
- What say I? I say you live in an alternate reality and have probably never done a real day's work in your life.
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