That's it, I'm off...

J

JulianC

Can't take the lack of work much more and really do not like what solar pv has become in this country, so I'm out. A couple of loose ends to tie up over the next few weeks then the company will be wound up and I will become a one man band lacky for hire. If anyone in the midlands needs a mate/fetcher/carrier/gopher/butt of jokes/digger of holes or teaboy please bear me in mind. CIS registered, will work for peanuts, especially if no thinking is required.

Thank you all for the input to these forums over the last few years, and for those who have got me out of a couple of holes in the past. I've learned a lot from you chaps and shall probably stick around to keep an eye on what's going on. Good luck to all of you that stick with it. Me, I never was much of a fan of rollercoasters. I'm off to find something that the government doesn't have much of a hand in.....

ta ta

Julian
 
sorry to hear that.

I'm not quite sure what's going on, but we're actually very busy at the moment, although this has only happened in the last few weeks and has taken a lot of work to get to that stage, plus lead generators etc so I'm not entirely sure if we're actually generating profits or not, we at least aren't now losing money. Just to show that there could well be life left in the industry.
 
Good luck Julian.
At least you won't be subjected to real, wreck, recc spot checks that are apparently being carried out to see if we're all working to the latest regs and have update their logo on our websites. fooking cooonts the lot of them.
[h=4]Please ensure you are complying with the following points:
  • Ensure you are displaying the new RECC logo on your website and stationary and NOT REAL
  • Ensure you are using and can demonstrate the use of the latest calculation methods in MIS3002 and MIS3005
  • You should have a waiver in line with RECC code of practice where customers wish work to commence before the end of the 7 day cooling off period
With regards to calculating PV performance estimates we would suggest you contact MCS to ask where you can purchase an “approved” sun path tool as we believe none are currently available that have been formally approved and many available on the market absolutely do not meet the requirements, which begs the question somewhat as to how you are supposed to implement a methodology when there is no access to the required equipment.[/h]
Click to expand...
 
Thanks chaps - much appreciated. The plus point is I'm really looking forward to telling REAL (or whatever they're called) to do one.

dansk said:
i thought you bagged a good council contract?
Click to expand...

So did we. Unfortunately after a couple of meetings all went quiet, calls not returned, emails unanswered. It transpired that the guy heading the project on the council had been suspended (reasons not disclosed) and the whole contract cancelled. Just like that, no explanation, leaving us and 5 or 6 other companies who'd been successful on various other bits of the tender none the wiser. Had we not chased them, I don't think they'd have had the decency and sense to tell us. My local councilor is continuing to harass on my behalf but isn't getting much out of the bellends. We've still not had official notification that the contract was cancelled. Bunch of clueless, incompetent f*ckwits.

Hey ho. Summat'll turn up.
 
Sorry to hear that - and i sympathise - i was on the verge of a local community hall with Leeds council once, held their hand all the way through to be gazumped because some dude on the board knew someone who knew someone that had panels done by another firm - total users.

Good luck mate.
 
Hi Julian, sorry to hear you're packing up. drop me a PM with your contact details.
 
Good luck mate ! Greed and corruption is every where, work your ar5e off on tenders and in the end they go for the usual supplier. Solar was different but those days are gone.
 
To be fair, we had a little chat yesterday and we think the time may well coming up for us too.

We lost out to a job in the week on a rosemary tiled roof with a very awkward scaffold. We were beaten by miles - £4,900 AFTER VAT.
On an install on Wednesday, the customer told us she used us because she liked us but that we were £400 more expensive than our competition. You'd think that would have perked me up, but I'm more concerned that we can be undercut to much by firms if we are a small family firm.

We aren't making a profit and we haven't done for a long time. We're a little busier than we were last year but nowhere near enough to keep us going. In fact, it is other business ventures which are keeping us going at the moment - I earn as much supplying labour fitting suspended ceilings and partition walls as I do from installing solar.
 
Doing a smoke packet calculation it's costing us about £1500 a year and oodles of hassle to keep solar on - it's not our core business but margins are now getting so tight that come November when our MCS is due for renewal we'll have to seriously consider if it's worth the extra cash. I guess we'll know what the impact of the import duty is by then too.
 
Our mcs is due for renewal on monday so I'm making the payment later today. I have a feeling it will be the last time we renew as there is more money to be earned elsewhere without the high cost and grief.
 
@SolarCity - What size was that job?

In the law of business, turnover is vanity profit is king. If you're not making a profit, then unless there are very extenuating circumstances, then don't do it.
 
SolarCity said:
To be fair, we had a little chat yesterday and we think the time may well coming up for us too.

We lost out to a job in the week on a rosemary tiled roof with a very awkward scaffold. We were beaten by miles - £4,900 AFTER VAT.
On an install on Wednesday, the customer told us she used us because she liked us but that we were £400 more expensive than our competition. You'd think that would have perked me up, but I'm more concerned that we can be undercut to much by firms if we are a small family firm.

We aren't making a profit and we haven't done for a long time. We're a little busier than we were last year but nowhere near enough to keep us going. In fact, it is other business ventures which are keeping us going at the moment - I earn as much supplying labour fitting suspended ceilings and partition walls as I do from installing solar.
Click to expand...
I can't say for sure, but I reckon we'd have been around £4.9k or maybe a little lower for that job.

Not particularly that we want to be that low, but we're fairly relentless about trimming costs, via improving working methods, bringing in lower paid trainees / younger staff to do the donkey work, so not having a £16 an hour spark grinding tiles when a £7 an hour trainee can do it just as well / better, leaving the spark to spark, and not having the spark / installer doing all the paperwork when someone on a lower rate could do most of it, leaving the installer to chase down more work / work on more installs per week etc.

Also doing this allows you to work to tighter margins per job because you can carry out more jobs per week, and have more time to chase down those extra jobs.

I don't mean to teach granny to suck eggs, but we're looking like ending up having been booked solid for virtually the whole of june, partly as a result of me taking 2 extra install staff on, on a job by job basis last month at much lower rates than I would charge my time at / my electrician etc which then freed me up a lot more to chase down the sales we'd been missing out on.

It is doable IMO, and sometimes we may only make £500 a job on top of wages, but at least we're now working, back into profit and perhaps most importantly generating more referral work, as the more jobs we have on the more referrals we then get

ps up to the middle of May we were in a pretty similar boat, really struggling after the long winter on top of last year, and we just hadn't been converting enough of our sales leads due to me being on site too much when we were busy, resulting in 1-2 weeks of busy, then dead for 2 weeks as I'd not been around to chase up the leads.

So I would really recommend really going through your figures with a fine tooth comb, as well as your insstall methods to see how you can trim that £400 off those jobs and still make money on them, as these sorts of cheaper prices aren't going to go away, and it's no use putting loads of effort into quotes you're not going to win IMO.

hope you take this advice as intended, it really is tough out there, but there definitely is a lot of work out there to be had if you can price it right and have the time to chase it up as well or better than the smarmy sales guys do.
 
To be fair, I probably wasnt very clear with posts. The £4,900 job was a 4kwp and the one where we were £400 more expensive was the 2.5kwp.
 
Big problem is that most PV equipment is not brands that are household names. This makes it difficult for a prospective customer to differentiate betweem a quality offering and the latest consignment imported by Arthur Daily. It can be hard enough as an installer to keep up. Attempting to explain to a customer the technical niceties is almost self defeating. I tend to ask why they drive a BMW and not a Lada.

This is never going to be easy. Here is something given to me in sales over 30 years ago. It is a quote from the 19th Century Philosopher John Ruskin:

“There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey. It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”

More recently, there is a famous quote from Warren Buffet:
"Price is what you pay, value is what you get".

We loose jobs on price. Like others we are bumping along. We win when we add value, not when we subtract price.
 
The Solar King said:
Big problem is that most PV equipment is not brands that are household names. This makes it difficult for a prospective customer to differentiate betweem a quality offering and the latest consignment imported by Arthur Daily. It can be hard enough as an installer to keep up. Attempting to explain to a customer the technical niceties is almost self defeating. I tend to ask why they drive a BMW and not a Lada.

This is never going to be easy. Here is something given to me in sales over 30 years ago. It is a quote from the 19th Century Philosopher John Ruskin:

“There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey. It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”

More recently, there is a famous quote from Warren Buffet:
"Price is what you pay, value is what you get".

We loose jobs on price. Like others we are bumping along. We win when we add value, not when we subtract price.
Click to expand...

Very true, we could get a cheapo 4kwp system for £3000 and install it for less than £5k but all our installs are with 30miles of base and usually regular customers or friends of existing customers, so we tend to only install the more well known makes (SMA, Fronius, Hyundai, Sanyo, Sharp, K2 etc) there is a local supplier selling ****ey panels & inverters but marketing them as the best things since sliced bread, some installers fall for it but hayho not for us!!!!!
 
We've got 4 solar jobs this month, I estimate that we've made the same amount of profit as another installer in the area would make if they were selling 10 systems. Setting aside the fact that we're working on 4 jobs for the same money - there's doesn't seem to be any other work happening in our area at the minute - by anyone - at any price.

Our jobs have come through customer referrals. I've had some business coaching recently and that's helped me to understand our place in the market. We often begin our conversation with customers with - we're not the cheapest because we don't think the stack em high and sell em cheap is a responsible attitude to take with the electrics in your home. For the first time this month, we went to a job first (so the other installers all followed our lead with installation) had 4 other installers follow us and still won the job & without pressuring the customer into a sale.

I don't know what will happen next month - we've got DIY SOS tying us up for a few days, some of our other work to do - but I'm very clear that I'm not going to sell 4kwp at 5k. I've tried about 1k worth of leads (converted 3 ) and they all want the cheapest price, installation, products which is great for someone prepared to do the work for nothing and accept any future liabilities but it's not where my market is. I guess we're lucky we can chose.
 
Totally agree SRE, I just wish the customers would wake up to the fact that a 5k install is going to be made up of inferior products and short cuts. we have been trading for over 20 years and intend to be around for another 20, but don't want to be going back to failing installs due to shoddy panels and inverters, rather stick to our quality rather than quantity mantra
 
Our 4kW installs are coming out at around 5400 using Samil and anything from Renesola, Canadian, Suntellite. Personally I think this is a good mix in terms of performance and keeping the return for the customer (it is after all an investment product). We strongly impresses the important of panels with an insurance 3rd party guarantee on panels such as with all the above. We very rarely install SMA although this was all we fitted 18 months back. The 10 year warranty on the Samil is a good selling point and they have good reviews, I think possibly the Samil produce more than similar SMA and certainly PowerOne. With any job we always work on 1k profit after parts, scaffold and cost of labour. After all if you are doing your figures correctly you have to take 20% off your profit for tax. Would I install a job based on £500 profit after direct costs, not a chance it's a negative perspective on overall profits and a sure way to be going to a bad place in the future. It's a very competitive market but you have to accept loosing a few jobs to those working on negative profit who will no doubt disappear in the medium term. I think if you can install with a reasonable margin at least you can give that bit more time to customers and should get the rewards later on down the line. If you made £500 on a job would you really be wanting to call by later on down the line to give any unpaid support.
 
Gavin A, sorry mate but I think you must be nuts fitting a job for £500 after wages. That's already £400 after corporation tax. What happens if you get rained off a job and have to pay wages and then go back you will be earning nothing.
 
ktech said:
Gavin A, sorry mate but I think you must be nuts fitting a job for £500 after wages. That's already £400 after corporation tax. What happens if you get rained off a job and have to pay wages and then go back you will be earning nothing.
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yeah, but we have to pay those wages anyway.

and when I say wages, I mean we take all wages including design, survey, admin, post installation paperwork etc etc into account, not just the install wages, along with around £100 contingency, £40 towards van wear and tear etc . We're probably on £1500-2k actually into the company on top of equipment costs on most jobs.

If you're doing £5400 for 4kwp then you must be on the same actual margin or less, just calculating it differently - actually, if those are your prices, then you're probably one of the companies forcing our prices down, though it's a bit of a vicious cycle in that respect.

FWIW, we're mostly selling for around more like £6k, but using power-one or steca, maybe with a lower priced option using the samils, but most go for the medium priced option IME.

And you're calculating tax wrong as that gets paid on overall company profits after all other costs, not the per job profit margin.
 
good luck in the future - drop me a line with contact details and I will let you know if we have work over your way (West Midlands?). Paul
 
Hi Guys
until solar is on green deal I wouldn't keep eggs in the solar basket you will be destined to the kerb.
We moved on from solar doing other renewables and its paid off take the next step and move forward there isnt anyone out there to bail you out from the solar demise
get green deal accredited new doors will open for you, that's if you want to keep your business of course.
 
To be honest, the Green Deal doesn't seem like something that would be for us. I'm much more of a practical guy and paperwork/office work is definitely my weak point. Green Deal seems heavily based on sales too which means that the telesales approach will probably push the tradesmen to one side. I'm a terrible salesman and if it wasn't for word of mouth my business would have gone under years ago. The Green Deal looks massively flawed to me and listening to Cameron balls-out lie about it in PMQs earlier in the week makes me think they are beginning to think it too.
 
@Sedgy34 we are busier this year with Solar than last..... and still have a soild pipeline.

As a compnay you need to know wehre you fit in the market place.
Number 1 question:
Who is your ideal customer?
Number 2 questions:
Why?
Then work out how to acquire them...

We are NOT going down the green deal route, - we've never been a house bashing operation, our clients are highly discerning and never buy on price alone.

We ARE however also doing a lot more than just Solar PV, - we also do Solar Thermal GSHP and ASHP, LED lighting and Volatge optimisation, will be adding Biomass over then next few weeks.

There again our focus is on the commercial sector, we are still very busy with domestic work.

We have applied all of our core expertise the the 'Energy Saving' aka Cost Reduction process for customers.
 
likewise - we're just this week clearing a backlog of around 30 quotes that had built up over June due to how busy we were with installs.

We're mostly domestic still, but have a fair few commercial quotes looking promising, and have 4-5 very promising partnerships starting to bear fruit.

We've just negotiated a supply partnership with solarworld which gives us their very high quality panels at not a lot above Chinese prices, but now have to deliver the volume to justify the pricing....

still juggling the finances after last year mind, but can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
 
I'm impressed that you guys are doing well and I'm trying to follow your lead. Gavin, you're website is one of the best around and I'm looking at doing something similar to your 3 different system approach.
 
and there was me thinking the website was still half finished.... cheers, tis one of the key things I've been trying to focus on in between everything else, as it makes a difference to the impression people get of the company, plus helps with google rankings etc and google rankings is essentially no cost advertising that's far better than any advertising you can pay for.

most of those quotes are from a 3 day exhibition we did last month though mind - IME they're the best way of kick starting things to top up the steady trickle we get through the website etc
 
I'm watching online videos now to try to learn how to edit webpages. I'm thinking of putting a blog on there and linking it to my twitter feed.
 
Save yourself the time Solarcity, use something like WiX or Moonfruit, will cost your a tenner a month but so much easier than mucking around with wordpress or the like:)
 
Just having our site redone as current one is pants. Decided to pay rather than fool around with it as I have in the past. It is being done using a CMS meaning I will be able to easily update it. More significant mods are also part of the deal.
 

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