New To US Need Some Advice.

DavidC · 06-30-2009, 03:32 PM

You newbies should break off, go back to your corners and don't come back until you learn the art of paragraphs.

I meant to say please.

Good Luck
Dave

ARI001 · 06-30-2009, 04:28 PM

Dave,
I apologize for the lack of grammar. I was not trying to write an English term paper, however now that I know I'm being graded I will try to be more careful.

DavidC · 06-30-2009, 05:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ARI001

Dave,
I apologize for the lack of grammar. I was not trying to write an English term paper, however now that I know I'm being graded I will try to be more careful.

Just that older eyes need some white space to read better.

Think nothing of it, let's just hope the spelling police don't get you in a spell check trap.

Good Luck
Dave

BCConstruction · 06-30-2009, 06:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ARI001

I think maybe you should consider taking a basic business class. If you are in Virginia both Germana and NOVA offer business classes. Why in the world would you start pricing jobs without learning how to do so. There are a lot of factors that go into determining billing rates and methods. The way your company is structured, class of license, type of work you will be doing, risk factor involved (your investment in the job vs. your return- not whether or not you'll fall off the roof), taxes, insurance, workman's comp, mic fees (licensing, bpol, corporate commission, etc.), advertising, office overhead (fixed), maintenance and upkeep of tools and equipment, etc. How much do you need to make vs, how much do you want to make? What percentage of proffit can your company surviv on vs. thrive on (affected by market somewhat)? Then you need to know what are the standardized prices and how do I stack up to that? This is by no means a complete list of factors. If you are incapable of figuring this out on your own you need to do one of the following: 1. Close the business 2. Hire an accountant or book keeper to assist you (this can still be risky if you don't have the basics down as they can embezzle money from you if they have to much access ) 3. Take the time to educate yourself either through classes or reading.
Surely if you are indeed licensed you took the 8 hour mandatory class and learned something right? How did you even pass the exams without knowing how to do this? My advice to you is quit bidding jobs until you learn how to do so properly. There is a lot more involved then simply asking someone what should I charge for this (If you called me and asked "what should I charge to build a garage for someone?" I would tell you something ridiculous like $7500.00 and laugh myself silly when I hung up at the thought of you bidding it at that.) and there are alot of resourses available to you (if you bother to look and/or invest for/in them) to aid you in bidding jobs that you are/may be unfamilure with or have no past history doing. Now quit trying to figure out what we are all charging and figure out what you need to be charging.

OMG what is it with these people and their posts! Ok mate, just so you are aware my business in the UK turned over a lot of money a year and i had no problem running that. Ok the US is slightly different but not that much that i don't know what I'm doing! I asked a simple question of how much do people charge doing what I'm doing. Very simple question and very easy to answer. As most have. But there's always a few who think they are better than you. Yet you cant even put a sentence together and your telling me how to run a business!! I may not be the most clued up tool in the box when it comes to paper work and running a business but i can make it work.

Can the people who have nothing constructive to add to the thread just

.

J F · 06-30-2009, 06:07 PM

Elite_Drywall · 06-30-2009, 07:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crock

If you can do quality work and keep the same attitude that you have,you will get a ton of repeat biz. There's no stopping a guy that is cheap and good. Thats how I started out. Now I'm just expensive and have a bad attitude, but I give a quality result. So 1 out of 3 aint bad.

Shut the **** up!! you are nothing but a ****in hack. "Now im just expensive" lol dumb ass, dont you claim to be able to do a material and labor brakedown in 10 minutes? you are just fool of ****, you claim to do 9 diffrent trades, make up your ****in mind HACK!!

J F · 06-30-2009, 07:16 PM

Crock · 06-30-2009, 07:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elite_Drywall

Shut the **** up!! you are nothing but a ****in hack. "Now im just expensive" lol dumb ass, dont you claim to be able to do a material and labor brakedown in 10 minutes? you are just fool of ****, you claim to do 9 diffrent trades, make up your ****in mind HACK!!

Somebody poop in your pool brah?

Tom R · 06-30-2009, 07:21 PM

The proper amount to charge is the highest price you can get that keeps your schedule full.

You're the only one that can figure that out.

Elite_Drywall · 06-30-2009, 07:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crock

Somebody poop in your pool brah?

Brah? is that how you talk to your customers? No, nobody pooped in my pool just hate HACKS like you!

BCConstruction · 06-30-2009, 07:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tom R

The proper amount to charge is the highest price you can get that keeps your schedule full.

You're the only one that can figure that out.

Your right Tom and thats why i dont want to be to expensive. Better to be busy than to have 1 day job that pays well and have the rest of the month off.

Crock · 06-30-2009, 08:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elite_Drywall

Brah? is that how you talk to your customers? No, nobody pooped in my pool just hate HACKS like you!

You mad?

DavidC · 06-30-2009, 10:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crock

You mad?

I think the gate tender nodded off.

Good Luck
Dave

Crock · 06-30-2009, 11:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidC

I think the gate tender nodded off.

Good Luck
Dave

LOL! I love it when peeps get so infuriated on the interweb.

KennMacMoragh · 07-23-2009, 01:56 PM

Bcconstruction, I'm in the same position you are, I am just starting to get things organized as far as how to bid and how to run everything in general. Except I didn't just move here, lived here my whole life.

If I were you, I'd stick with time and material bids as much as I could. That's the safest way to go if you're inexperienced in bidding. Rates can go from $25 to $60 an hour, however much you want to charge is up to you. I hear a lot of people say "Well I'll start out charging low until I build up my clientele, then I'll raise my price." Then after they get a few jobs their customers will tell people, "Hey this guy is pretty good, and hey, he's cheap!" Then people will keep calling you expecting a low price. But do it however way you want.

I would also do some market research in your area, call up other subs and builders and pretend you are a customer. Tell them you have a job you need work on and ask for a price. Try and get some hourly rates and some unit cost rates from other builders in your area. Not only will that give you an idea of what your competition charges, but you'll find out how they market themselves over the telephone. You'll find some who are good at doing that and some who are bad. It will give you some ideas of what to do and what not to do when you advertise yourself over the phone.

J F · 07-23-2009, 02:04 PM

New to US need some advice

You may want to re-consider your move. If you work hard and smart enough to make any real money, you're going to get taxed to death on it...just sayin'

Mike(VA) · 07-23-2009, 03:29 PM

Ok, guys, here is something I wrote and posted to another site. Simplified, but it gets you started on thinking about how to go about pricing your work. IT MAKES NO DAMN DIFFERENCE HOW SOMEONE ELSE PRICES THEIR WORK!!! Using someone else's pricing criteria is a sure road to ruin since you don't know if they are profitable or not.

Sorry it doesn't word-wrap as I did a cut and paste from Word.

So you want to ask a pricing question, huh? By: Mike Frost, Homestead Renovations, LLC….Mike(VA)….
We’ve all seen it; new guy joins a forum and says this is the best place he has ever seen. Glad to be here and by the way, what do YOU guys charge to (insert routine contractor activity here). Once the popcorn is gone, the dust settles, and the blood has been cleaned up, we never hear from the wonder kid again. We can say good riddance, but we have helped to create another potential hack.
Ok, so you are going to ask a pricing question and since we can’t stop you, we might as well help you out. This article is written to help you understand some of the things that go into setting a price for your work so that you hopefully will become better educated about running your business. We do want you to succeed, be profitable, and to help enhance the image of contractors in the public’s eyes.
“How much do you guys charge to hang drywall?”
“Tree fiddy, but only on Sundays”. “As much as I can get”. “I don’t charge for that, I pay them”. Funny, but not very helpful to you, is it? That is the typical response you will get when you ask a question like that. Right, we all want to know what the other guy charges for a couple of reasons. One is from a competitive standpoint, to see how we stack up to others, the other is because we don’t know how to price our own work and want to jump right in now. If you could, you would take our price and reduce it by 10% and become rich and famous. Sure. That is the crux of the issue and the one we will talk about here. All cost numbers are hypothetical so don’t get your knickers in a knot thinking the numbers don’t look right.
Let’s say you want to know how much everyone charges to hang rock. (Drywall, GWB). You, on a good day, get the following responses: $30 for a 4x8 board and you supply everything, $45 for a 4x12 board and I supply everything, and $25 a 4x8 board and you supply the boards, I supply everything else. Now you have answers, but what price are you going to use? Point is, none of the answers will help you because you know absolutely nothing about why those guys set their prices at the level they did. So let’s look at what goes into setting prices, from YOUR business perspective.
Size doesn’t really matter, so forget the board size and who supplies what for now. You have a residential single family job to bid that you estimate (from your vast years of experience) will require 1500 boards. You think it will take two 2-man crews one week to hang, tape, apply two skim coats and sand to primer ready condition. No primer, no point up. To start figuring what you will charge for the job, you will need to know two things; what the costs of doing this job are and what the costs of everything else is.
Job costs are things that are directly needed for a particular job and include all your materials, tool rental for that job, labor for your guys or subs, delivery fees, disposal, consumables such as masks, gloves, etc, and anything else that is for that job only. The other costs, called indirect costs or overhead, are for things like your truck payments, gas, insurance premiums, profit, shop rent, office staff salaries, marketing, profit, new equipment, profit, profit, and so on.
Wearing out your new carpenter’s pencil, you figure that your job costs, called direct costs, will be $22,500 for this job. That is about $15 per board. At this price, you will break even from a direct cost basis. What you don’t know is, and many guys just shoot from the hip here, is how much your indirect costs are. $5 a board, 10%, whatever, you just don’t know. A simple way to figure it out is this: take all of last years indirect costs, costs not associated with a particular job, and divide that by the total amount you billed for last year and you will get a percentage. Say you did 200K and of that, 60K went to things other than direct job costs. Your overhead is 30%of the total, so add 30% to every job cost. Simple right, and the light goes off in your head; take my job costs for a given job, add 30%, and BINGO! My new rate of $29250, or $19.5 per board. Off you go having made no profit and nothing for mistakes.

So now you have to figure in profit, and that is where many contractors have a problem. Maybe industry standard is 8%, but that is not enough. You can put whatever percentage of profit on a job you want. If it doesn’t sell, either your profit percentage is too high, your overhead needs trimming, or you overestimated your direct costs. Shoot for 20% and see what happens. You now have job costs of $22,500, overhead of $6750, and you are going for a profit of 20% over the direct costs AND your overhead, or $5850. That comes out to $23.40 per board. You charge that per board and you will cover all your costs for the job, cover the percentage of overhead associated with that job, and have $5850 in profit, free and clear.
This is an extremely simplified method of figuring out what to charge. It is only a starting point. Keep in mind that there are a lot of other factors that go into pricing a job and there are several other ways to calculate your rate. I have tried to put out a simple method that will at least get you started with understanding pricing. It is now your responsibility to further educate yourself as time permits by reading up on the subject, learning what you can about different methods, and figuring out which way works best for you, AND THEN DOING IT!
Doing it this way will enable you to price your jobs for what YOU need to operate your business profitably and it doesn’t matter what others are charging does it? Doing it this way you can see that asking a pricing question really gets you nothing and you begin to understand why you got beat up and kicked down. Better question to ask is this: I need to charge $25 per board but too many GC’s only want to pay $20. How do you guys deal with this since I don’t want to lose money. Well, that may open up another can of worms, but that is fodder for another article.
So what was your question again?
Some good references to get you going: (Spend some profit, (that’s what it is for), to learn)
Mark Up and Profit, A Contractor’s Guide, Michael Stone, about $35, http://www.markupandprofit.com/books_mark.html
How Much Should I Charge?, Ellen Rohr, ebook format, about $20, http://www.barebonesbiz.com/detail_hmsic.html
Profit 101, George Hedley, about $20, http://hardhatpresentations.com/prod...il-eckamap.php
Running a Successful Construction Company, David Gerstel, about $20, http://astore.amazon.com/paradigm360...007200-3928019
Defensive Estimating, William Asdal, about $30, http://store.builderbooks.com/cgi-bin/builderbooks/806

J F · 07-23-2009, 04:44 PM

I'm in total agreement with you Mike. I think what happens is anybody new to business thinks there is this magical "going rate" and it's just not the case.

I do realize that there are certain circumstances which may dictate what you charge, but if you're running your own show, only you can figure out what your costs are and what your price needs to be to cover them, along with your necessary profit...end of story.

Mike(VA) · 07-23-2009, 05:32 PM

J F, you know, its not just that guys are lazy and want to use someone else's rates, although some are lazy. Many times it is just that they don't know how to price their work and don't know where to look. Yes, only you can determine your own rate, but you have to know how to do it.

J F · 07-23-2009, 05:40 PM

Again, I agree. I don't think much of it comes from laziness, but from just not knowing how...along with a strong belief that there is a "going rate", which also stems from ignorance (not a bad word, just means not knowing...I've got plenty of it myself regarding many things).

J

06-30-2009, 03:32 PM	#21
DavidC View Profile DavidC DavidC Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (1,917) Photos (95) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity DavidC Trade: Remodeler Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: NNY Posts: 1,917	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. You newbies should break off, go back to your corners and don't come back until you learn the art of paragraphs. I meant to say please. Good Luck Dave __________________ www.CookContractingLLC.com

06-30-2009, 04:28 PM	#22
ARI001 View Profile ARI001 Pro Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (318) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity Pro Trade: General Contractor Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Stafford, VA Posts: 318	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. Dave, I apologize for the lack of grammar. I was not trying to write an English term paper, however now that I know I'm being graded I will try to be more careful.

06-30-2009, 06:07 PM	#25
J F View Profile J F You did what?? Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (6,601) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity You did what?? Trade: Carpenter Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: North of Atlanta Posts: 6,601	Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

06-30-2009, 07:16 PM	#27
J F View Profile J F You did what?? Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (6,601) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity You did what?? Trade: Carpenter Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: North of Atlanta Posts: 6,601	Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

06-30-2009, 07:21 PM	#29
Tom R View Profile Tom R Pro Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (6,484) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity Pro Trade: Carpenter Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 6,484	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. The proper amount to charge is the highest price you can get that keeps your schedule full. You're the only one that can figure that out. __________________ http://www.tr-built.com

How to effectively use customer testimonials - even if you onl...

Green Framing Presentation - Updated

Greenlee Glo-Stix...

DeWalt Self-Level...

New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Re: New To US Need Some Advice.

Join Now... It's Fast and FREE!

Already Have an Account?

07-23-2009, 01:56 PM	#35
KennMacMoragh View Profile KennMacMoragh Pro Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (2,245) Photos (116) Reviews (1) Projects (0) Toolbox (1) View All Activity Pro Trade: Repair/Remodel Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Seattle, WA Posts: 2,245	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. Bcconstruction, I'm in the same position you are, I am just starting to get things organized as far as how to bid and how to run everything in general. Except I didn't just move here, lived here my whole life. If I were you, I'd stick with time and material bids as much as I could. That's the safest way to go if you're inexperienced in bidding. Rates can go from $25 to $60 an hour, however much you want to charge is up to you. I hear a lot of people say "Well I'll start out charging low until I build up my clientele, then I'll raise my price." Then after they get a few jobs their customers will tell people, "Hey this guy is pretty good, and hey, he's cheap!" Then people will keep calling you expecting a low price. But do it however way you want. I would also do some market research in your area, call up other subs and builders and pretend you are a customer. Tell them you have a job you need work on and ask for a price. Try and get some hourly rates and some unit cost rates from other builders in your area. Not only will that give you an idea of what your competition charges, but you'll find out how they market themselves over the telephone. You'll find some who are good at doing that and some who are bad. It will give you some ideas of what to do and what not to do when you advertise yourself over the phone.

07-23-2009, 02:04 PM	#36
J F View Profile J F You did what?? Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (6,601) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity You did what?? Trade: Carpenter Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: North of Atlanta Posts: 6,601	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. New to US need some advice You may want to re-consider your move. If you work hard and smart enough to make any real money, you're going to get taxed to death on it...just sayin'

07-23-2009, 03:29 PM	#37
Mike(VA) View Profile Mike(VA) Custom Stuff Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (859) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity Custom Stuff Trade: General Contractor - Custom Renovations Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Manassas, VA Posts: 859	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. Ok, guys, here is something I wrote and posted to another site. Simplified, but it gets you started on thinking about how to go about pricing your work. IT MAKES NO DAMN DIFFERENCE HOW SOMEONE ELSE PRICES THEIR WORK!!! Using someone else's pricing criteria is a sure road to ruin since you don't know if they are profitable or not. Sorry it doesn't word-wrap as I did a cut and paste from Word. So you want to ask a pricing question, huh? By: Mike Frost, Homestead Renovations, LLC….Mike(VA)…. We’ve all seen it; new guy joins a forum and says this is the best place he has ever seen. Glad to be here and by the way, what do YOU guys charge to (insert routine contractor activity here). Once the popcorn is gone, the dust settles, and the blood has been cleaned up, we never hear from the wonder kid again. We can say good riddance, but we have helped to create another potential hack. Ok, so you are going to ask a pricing question and since we can’t stop you, we might as well help you out. This article is written to help you understand some of the things that go into setting a price for your work so that you hopefully will become better educated about running your business. We do want you to succeed, be profitable, and to help enhance the image of contractors in the public’s eyes. “How much do you guys charge to hang drywall?” “Tree fiddy, but only on Sundays”. “As much as I can get”. “I don’t charge for that, I pay them”. Funny, but not very helpful to you, is it? That is the typical response you will get when you ask a question like that. Right, we all want to know what the other guy charges for a couple of reasons. One is from a competitive standpoint, to see how we stack up to others, the other is because we don’t know how to price our own work and want to jump right in now. If you could, you would take our price and reduce it by 10% and become rich and famous. Sure. That is the crux of the issue and the one we will talk about here. All cost numbers are hypothetical so don’t get your knickers in a knot thinking the numbers don’t look right. Let’s say you want to know how much everyone charges to hang rock. (Drywall, GWB). You, on a good day, get the following responses: $30 for a 4x8 board and you supply everything, $45 for a 4x12 board and I supply everything, and $25 a 4x8 board and you supply the boards, I supply everything else. Now you have answers, but what price are you going to use? Point is, none of the answers will help you because you know absolutely nothing about why those guys set their prices at the level they did. So let’s look at what goes into setting prices, from YOUR business perspective. Size doesn’t really matter, so forget the board size and who supplies what for now. You have a residential single family job to bid that you estimate (from your vast years of experience) will require 1500 boards. You think it will take two 2-man crews one week to hang, tape, apply two skim coats and sand to primer ready condition. No primer, no point up. To start figuring what you will charge for the job, you will need to know two things; what the costs of doing this job are and what the costs of everything else is. Job costs are things that are directly needed for a particular job and include all your materials, tool rental for that job, labor for your guys or subs, delivery fees, disposal, consumables such as masks, gloves, etc, and anything else that is for that job only. The other costs, called indirect costs or overhead, are for things like your truck payments, gas, insurance premiums, profit, shop rent, office staff salaries, marketing, profit, new equipment, profit, profit, and so on. Wearing out your new carpenter’s pencil, you figure that your job costs, called direct costs, will be $22,500 for this job. That is about $15 per board. At this price, you will break even from a direct cost basis. What you don’t know is, and many guys just shoot from the hip here, is how much your indirect costs are. $5 a board, 10%, whatever, you just don’t know. A simple way to figure it out is this: take all of last years indirect costs, costs not associated with a particular job, and divide that by the total amount you billed for last year and you will get a percentage. Say you did 200K and of that, 60K went to things other than direct job costs. Your overhead is 30%of the total, so add 30% to every job cost. Simple right, and the light goes off in your head; take my job costs for a given job, add 30%, and BINGO! My new rate of $29250, or $19.5 per board. Off you go having made no profit and nothing for mistakes. So now you have to figure in profit, and that is where many contractors have a problem. Maybe industry standard is 8%, but that is not enough. You can put whatever percentage of profit on a job you want. If it doesn’t sell, either your profit percentage is too high, your overhead needs trimming, or you overestimated your direct costs. Shoot for 20% and see what happens. You now have job costs of $22,500, overhead of $6750, and you are going for a profit of 20% over the direct costs AND your overhead, or $5850. That comes out to $23.40 per board. You charge that per board and you will cover all your costs for the job, cover the percentage of overhead associated with that job, and have $5850 in profit, free and clear. This is an extremely simplified method of figuring out what to charge. It is only a starting point. Keep in mind that there are a lot of other factors that go into pricing a job and there are several other ways to calculate your rate. I have tried to put out a simple method that will at least get you started with understanding pricing. It is now your responsibility to further educate yourself as time permits by reading up on the subject, learning what you can about different methods, and figuring out which way works best for you, AND THEN DOING IT! Doing it this way will enable you to price your jobs for what YOU need to operate your business profitably and it doesn’t matter what others are charging does it? Doing it this way you can see that asking a pricing question really gets you nothing and you begin to understand why you got beat up and kicked down. Better question to ask is this: I need to charge $25 per board but too many GC’s only want to pay $20. How do you guys deal with this since I don’t want to lose money. Well, that may open up another can of worms, but that is fodder for another article. So what was your question again? Some good references to get you going: (Spend some profit, (that’s what it is for), to learn) Mark Up and Profit, A Contractor’s Guide, Michael Stone, about $35, http://www.markupandprofit.com/books_mark.html How Much Should I Charge?, Ellen Rohr, ebook format, about $20, http://www.barebonesbiz.com/detail_hmsic.html Profit 101, George Hedley, about $20, http://hardhatpresentations.com/prod...il-eckamap.php Running a Successful Construction Company, David Gerstel, about $20, http://astore.amazon.com/paradigm360...007200-3928019 Defensive Estimating, William Asdal, about $30, http://store.builderbooks.com/cgi-bin/builderbooks/806 __________________ __________________________________________________ ___________ I EXPECT THAT SOMEDAY I WILL SEE THE FRUITS OF MY LABOR. IS IT SOMEDAY YET? Clifton, Great Falls, McLean, Fairfax Station, Manassas, Virginia Renovation Contractor

07-23-2009, 04:44 PM	#38
J F View Profile J F You did what?? Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (6,601) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity You did what?? Trade: Carpenter Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: North of Atlanta Posts: 6,601	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. I'm in total agreement with you Mike. I think what happens is anybody new to business thinks there is this magical "going rate" and it's just not the case. I do realize that there are certain circumstances which may dictate what you charge, but if you're running your own show, only you can figure out what your costs are and what your price needs to be to cover them, along with your necessary profit...end of story.

07-23-2009, 05:32 PM	#39
Mike(VA) View Profile Mike(VA) Custom Stuff Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (859) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity Custom Stuff Trade: General Contractor - Custom Renovations Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Manassas, VA Posts: 859	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. J F, you know, its not just that guys are lazy and want to use someone else's rates, although some are lazy. Many times it is just that they don't know how to price their work and don't know where to look. Yes, only you can determine your own rate, but you have to know how to do it. __________________ __________________________________________________ ___________ I EXPECT THAT SOMEDAY I WILL SEE THE FRUITS OF MY LABOR. IS IT SOMEDAY YET? Clifton, Great Falls, McLean, Fairfax Station, Manassas, Virginia Renovation Contractor

07-23-2009, 05:40 PM	#40
J F View Profile J F You did what?? Send Message Follow Blogs (0) Threads (6,601) Photos (0) Reviews (0) Projects (0) Toolbox (0) View All Activity You did what?? Trade: Carpenter Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: North of Atlanta Posts: 6,601	Re: New To US Need Some Advice. Again, I agree. I don't think much of it comes from laziness, but from just not knowing how...along with a strong belief that there is a "going rate", which also stems from ignorance (not a bad word, just means not knowing...I've got plenty of it myself regarding many things). J

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version Email this Page	Search this Thread: Advanced Search
Display Modes	Rate This Thread
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode	Rate This Thread:

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Professional Salesmen I need your advice.	Grumpy	Marketing & Sales	46	01-08-2011 09:10 AM
Advice on demolition work	Dmax Consulting	Construction	7	01-07-2011 01:12 PM
Advice wanted for starting a construction firm	P.J.	Construction	34	10-09-2009 02:51 PM
Need your advice!	rcesare	Excavation & Site Work	9	03-01-2009 06:35 PM
Advice for starting Career as Operating Engineer	TrendTherapy	Excavation & Site Work	0	02-13-2009 11:07 AM