Day rate

[SolarCity]

I think you should all sit at home holding out for £200 plus per day, while you're on the sofa watching Loose women I'll be out there taking that £150 all day everyday. And as for overheads, do you mean the couple of quid a day averaged out over a year? Which we get to claim tax allowance on, unlike every other PAYE worker in the country! Or the tools I bought twenty years ago? We're Electricians not brain surgeons, if you want big money get a big education. To use a nineties expression, "live in the now"!

Good on you. You're right that I'm not a brain surgeon, but I do know my profession and I do know that it is worth more than £150 a day. £150 doesn't get you experience, expertise and quality - It's good for ongoing work but not for running a solar job. In fact it is utterly laughable.

 

[RISElectrical]

Solar job or any other job, £150 is not enough to be running it! End of

 

[SolarCity]

Please explain, as the salesperson who works for my friend, has a remit to get jobs, thats his role, his boss, my friend the PV Director, is more than happy with that?

Your director may well be happy and the salesperson may well be an ethical person.

However, I encounter salespeople every week. Or at least I speak to people that have encountered salespeople, and more often than not - in fact, the vast majority of the time - they have been treated like an idiot, lied to, misled and leant on.

I forever hear the line "He could sell ice to an Eskimo." as if it were a good thing - it is not a good thing. If you have to persuade someone that they really ought to buy something then there is a good chance they didn't want it.

When I see a customer I explain how the system works, survey the job properly and I'm always realistic about what it can achieve - a salesperson can't and more to the point won't offer this.

As a consequence of this, the industry has been well and truly dragged through the gutter - trust is somewhere near the floor and a recent Which? survey shows that less people trust a PV installer than a double glazing firm now!

Remove salespeople from this industry and you will improve it around 5,000,000%.

 

[JulianC]

Hear hear

 

[Brmbaz]

Even if the installer is MCS trained ?

 

[Brmbaz]

Just say an installer installs PV supplied by customer. 6weeks in the scaffold is down. A fault appears, could be a number of issues, scaffold has to go back up,
Say installer finds fault within 2hours.
Say its Fault with panel, does customer believe installer, could of been wiring issue, who pays who
With MCS installers all is covered, we stand all costs should there be a fault.
Hope i made myself clear

Even if the installer is MCS trained?

 

[Brmbaz]

As I posted, it does not comply with MCS rules, so no FIT payments, simple as that.

Also system design can be critical to make a system work properly, in most cases you can not just buy some panels and an inverter, plug it in and away you go.

I remember there being a problem with Sanyo/SMA, and I also remember who worked out what to do to rectify this.
Your £150 man for a day will doubtfully have this type of knowledge, there is a new post just come on here about cable runs to a SB1200, many of us know the answer, and the problems if you get it wrong.
Why not hire out plasterers for £150 a day, that is easy, slap the pink stuff on the wall, job done..,

Yes but a plasterer grafts for putting that pink stuff on

 

[Gavin A]

Yes but a plasterer grafts for putting that pink stuff on

I don't think anyone's denying it, but once the plastering is done, that's pretty much it other than the odd trip to the wholesalers.

A spark will have to submit a notification via their CPS afterwards, which is maybe an hour of paperwork per job, plus a half day on site assessment of 2 jobs once a year with minimal paperwork requirements.

A solar installer who's doing the MCS side of things will have minimum half a day of paperwork for every job they do, plus their CPS assesments once a year, plus their MCS assessment once a year that also involves an absolute mound of paperwork, taking 1 person maybe a week in total, plus all the other stuff previously discussed.

now, if the agency is going to take care of all that stuff and the spark just needs to show up, do the job, and go home and put his feet up, then maybe a £150 day rate could be viable if the work was regular 3-4 days a week. But that's not what was initially discussed.

 

[ktech]

day rate + kit supplied = non starter, forget it your fired.

 

[Earthstore]

Ok, lets get this straight,
You are an Agency, that is thinking of becoming MCS accredited, then you are going to get self employed people to install for you.
So, basically you are going to become a PV company?

Please would you be kind enough to explain how you can make this work, when there are many "good" companies with technical expertise that are ceasing to trade in PV?

I am sorry but there is so much more to PV than I think you may realise, as I have said before, you can not just bolt some panels on the roof, plug it in and away you go.

 

[Gavin A]

he's aiming to undercut us all by using cheap labour on a job by job basis in the busy periods and not having any outgoings in the quiet periods.

I'd suggest we all stop assisting him in this by pointing out the flaws in his plan, and let him find them out for himself.

 

[Jaytbaez]

So let's get this right ....

Earthstore has told you it doesn't meet MCS criteria and so it's not legal,
SolarCity, Gavin A, Julian C, Jason and many others have told you it's not financially viable for an installer
You don't understand the basics of being self employed and associated costs
You seem to struggle to get your head round the concept of sales people getting 1k for bullying people into buying excessively priced systems being morally wrong (it's ok for your Director mate to make £1 million from them but not ok for installers to ask for a decent living wage a bit of profit to see you through the one month in 3 where there's no work.)

From my 60ft yacht in the Caribbean earned by ripping off all my customers last year, it looks to me as though you're going down the right route and I'll look forward to meeting up with you over here when you too have made a fortune on £150 a day.

Yes, one person has said it is, at this time, not legal - I am looking into that.
Yes, some have said it's not financially viable - for them - but some have.
Salespeople are employed by you lot (those who are the owners of the install companies right).
I never said it was ok for my mate to make that money, I merely saqid he did gross that amount, I've nothing against anyone making a living, are you currently? If so great, you'd never need any agency work then, if there was an agency out there for Installers, well done you.

If you have made enough for a 60ft yacht, then you did well out of the Glory days, however, my original post was - those glory days seem to be over, the market is depressed by a few factors, and if someone is sat on their arse, with no work on and no orders in, would they do a job on day rate of £150-200 a day, just given/offered to them, no work done on their part to generate the business, just get in their van, go to the job, do it, do the paperwork, sign it off, and back to their business.

Some on here seem to be attacking me for having the audacity to suggest the industry might be changing and that if so people should adapt if they have to, and who are these installers to think they should automatically earn more than every other trade out there?

By the way, I do know self employed, and have ran several businesses, but I'm 41 and not childish enough to make this a dick fight.

If someone on here, would rather work in Tesco's stacking shelves for £6 an hour, than do what they do best for a fair days rate, then they do not know self employed or have their heads stuck in the sand hoping for the industry to return to an impossibly non sustainable way.

I'm glad however, that some are seeing sense and questioning whether £150-200 a day is not peasant money and have recveid private messages supporting this.

 

[Jaytbaez]

This is the difference between being a spark and a business man essentially and by this I mean no offence.

Taking the £150 a day is fine, gives you a living and maybe £100-£120 in your hand at the end of it. This is great. However imagine you do this for 10 years, you wont grow in a business sense this way. When do you do the paperwork? at night times? If thats the case your hourly rate has just dropped to take this into account. There will come a day that the 10 year old tools need updating, the van needs replacing etc etc etc etc.

If you can get your overheads to a few quid a day then either (a) you have no overheads (b) your overheads arent sufficient to reflect the works you do or (c) your not accounting realistically and will in the future have a huge all at once overhead, I.E. new van.

That is essentially right, not everyone is busy, not everyone currently has a full order book, in the same way a bricky or a 2+1 gang have little overheads compared to a 10 man building firm, then ofcourse the 2+1 gang are more likely if quiet to go out and do some day work.

I never said everyone should accept or should be thinking about day rates as an option, I merely put it out there that if such an agency were to start, would some do it and if so what is a fair rate.

 

[Jaytbaez]

Good on you. You're right that I'm not a brain surgeon, but I do know my profession and I do know that it is worth more than £150 a day. £150 doesn't get you experience, expertise and quality - It's good for ongoing work but not for running a solar job. In fact it is utterly laughable.

Then you are saying that you are worth more than a plumber, bricky, plasterer, teacher! All these trades that have served their time, have experience and are good at their jobs.
Thats fine, good for you, no problem with that.
Not everyone is as precious about their worth.

 

[Jaytbaez]

Your director may well be happy and the salesperson may well be an ethical person.

However, I encounter salespeople every week. Or at least I speak to people that have encountered salespeople, and more often than not - in fact, the vast majority of the time - they have been treated like an idiot, lied to, misled and leant on.

I forever hear the line "He could sell ice to an Eskimo." as if it were a good thing - it is not a good thing. If you have to persuade someone that they really ought to buy something then there is a good chance they didn't want it.

When I see a customer I explain how the system works, survey the job properly and I'm always realistic about what it can achieve - a salesperson can't and more to the point won't offer this.

As a consequence of this, the industry has been well and truly dragged through the gutter - trust is somewhere near the floor and a recent Which? survey shows that less people trust a PV installer than a double glazing firm now!

Remove salespeople from this industry and you will improve it around 5,000,000%.

I have no problem with that, I'm sure there are alot of smooth talking salespeople out there who have overpriced a job.
Are there as many decent Installation company bosses who give their salespeople a strict price, not to be gone over, or do these Install owners rebuke their salespeople if they have overpriced, or go back to the customer and apologise and cut the fee?

Come on, most industries have sales people, because most industries need them, the need a mouth, someone to go out and grab business.

And do you know why, because tradesmen, are many times, not very good salespeople, nothing wrong with either, you may be very bright and good with your hands, but useless at face to face meetings and actually making a deal.

Think of the many service industries out there, mos have a sales/marketing aspect of their businesses.

No man can do everything.