I'm not too cheap am I?

[Sparky Ninja]

Hello all,

I went to assist one of my former students the other night with a periodic report. He has very little confidence in testing so I've offered to come to his workplace to show him how to carry out testing and how to make observations and getting the report done.
So I met him on site in the heart of London at 5pm as the inspection had to be arranged for after hours. With not being able to take some of the common short cuts with testing, we didn't finish till 2.30am, 3am by the time we cleaned up & left.
Upon completion he was very happy with the amount he has taken in, and he's already asking me if I can come on another job of his.
So all is well, but when I told him the price over the phone earlier he was a little surprised and said he was expecting it to be almost double the price I gave him. (Maybe he was just expressing how valuable it was for him, I'm not sure)

I normally would charge £20 per hour, however as it was out of normal hours I charged time and a half. So £30 per hour.
So I've charged him a nice round £300.00 for 10 hours.

I think that's not bad for one nights work??

If anyone here was to do a periodic through the night, whilst trying to teach someone how at the same time, how much would they charge?

 

[hasel5]

Sounds a bit cheap to me but £300 is not bad money for 10 hrs

 

[telectrix]

personally, i think that's a very fair price. he's happy, you're happy, there are far too many out there would have ripped him off.

 

[Marvo]

From what I've read in this thread it sounds pretty fair to me.

 

[Darkwood]

I think hes charging too little himself if it took 2 of you till the early hours then the job price should reflect so, but depends if you were guiding him with the testing or doing the testing too and reducing the job duration if the later then he needs to charge customer accordingly but if you only there on a guidance context then he needs to understand that he cant charge this to the customer and needs to take the hit financially himself until he is confident to work alone, and yes was reasonable.

 

[rocker]

Am I reading this wrong or would you normally charge 20 per hour to do the inspection yourself?

I don't know as I'm not in London but I would have thought AT LEAST double that and probably more again for central London, and out-of-hours time and a half maybe doiuble time. That's only a guess though, and to be honest I normally do price work, but your hourly rate in London is similar to my hourly rate (for fault-finding) in poxy recession-riddled Newport.

 

[Octopus]

£30 per hour, for out of hours work, in Central London, sounds cheap to me.

 

[cheeky_blue]

I recently did a couple of dist board changes in a college off Russell Square.
Like you, it had to be out of hours, started about 9pm, finished about 4.30am.
Charged 350 for labour. 165 for mate.

 

[accordfire]

Hello all,

I went to assist one of my former students the other night with a periodic report. He has very little confidence in testing so I've offered to come to his workplace to show him how to carry out testing and how to make observations and getting the report done.
So I met him on site in the heart of London at 5pm as the inspection had to be arranged for after hours. With not being able to take some of the common short cuts with testing, we didn't finish till 2.30am, 3am by the time we cleaned up & left.
Upon completion he was very happy with the amount he has taken in, and he's already asking me if I can come on another job of his.
So all is well, but when I told him the price over the phone earlier he was a little surprised and said he was expecting it to be almost double the price I gave him. (Maybe he was just expressing how valuable it was for him, I'm not sure)

I normally would charge £20 per hour, however as it was out of normal hours I charged time and a half. So £30 per hour.
So I've charged him a nice round £300.00 for 10 hours.

I think that's not bad for one nights work??

If anyone here was to do a periodic through the night, whilst trying to teach someone how at the same time, how much would they charge?

Ten hours, central London, out of hours.

£300 isn't unreasonable at all for "assistance" rates - your student should have been charging his test out at quite a bit more though.

Ballpark, for that, if I was putting a subbie on that job, at ten hours, I'd be looking to pay day rate plus half. That would leave me expecting a bill of around £375 or so, probably plus VAT.

So, you're being very fair with him, though I'd question his expectation about you charging twice what you did. If a subby came to me with a £600 bill for ten hours in that situation, I'd be phoning the men in white coats for him. After I'd sent his invoice back with lots of little hahaha's all over it.....