Very interesting thread. I've been trying to build up a kind of "database" of jobs and time taken - basically my diary. There is a place for the fixed price jobs, mostly the small ones. I was thinking about having a wee trial of FP in the new year to see how it goes, just trying to come up with price levels that are realistic and cover costs and profit.
The trick would be to get a hold of a large franchises' pricing book to compare. These guys spend thousands if not millions researching how to price jobs and levels. There is a couple of Mr Elec ex franchise guys around here who might be able to shed some light on their pricing.
It's always worth keeping some kind of database. The beauty of putting all that information into something like Outlook is that you'll be able to use the data to keep in contact - say with newsletters, or offers.
As regards Fixed Rate Pricing.....I'm fairly sure Mr Electric's pricing is obtainable somewhere. Without bursting anyone's bubble - fixed rate is normally set by budget, not research. There's no real mystery to it. A Fixed Rate Price is normally calculated as the average price of all that kind of job - e.g. FRP socket outlet = average of last ten or hundred sockets fitted, and so on.
In a previous incarnation, I worked for a big blue multi-national US owned conglomerate - which extensively used fixed pricing across all its divisions. The Fixed Rate pricing was calculated by accounts, on receipt of branch budget forecasts. Simply, the price for Service A, for example, was calculated as the average of all the budget forecasts for that service, plus a margin for infrastructure - no real science at all. Bloody expensive to use though!
As I said earlier, FRP does have a place, and is reasonably easy to implement in those places - but unless you have significant volume of leads, playing the averages, as I showed, is going to cost in terms of profit, and you are always going to be more of a sales machine than an electrician.
FRP is well suited to offers, service agreements, and what you might term "fixed" services - things that don't vary much from one job to the next - inspections, CU changes, and such - you could also budget a given level of cable to fix the price of some other things, such as bonding, or adding a socket - though with cable pricing the way it is, it would worry me - I'd end up absorbing the cost hikes, because my prices were fixed.
At the end of the day, if menu pricing is what works for you though, then great! I just can't see a way to make it work in a successful way in the UK - another difference between us and the US - territories, that is, sales areas, are a lot smaller too - either per head, or per square mile. They have the volume of leads to make FRP work.
Interestingly, when you look at those companies in the UK that do use some kind of FRP - satellite installers, electrical franchises, fire alarm Nationals - they all have features in common - the minimum amount of work to get to invoice (yeah, call it cutting corners), and the fundamental lack of service in the offering.
Like you say though you don't always get it, never mind eh?
