[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by Zeke

We need to divide this discussion up to wages paid to employees and fees charged for services. A plumber on a company truck makes $16/hr here. The company charges more in many different schemes, some up to over 199/hr. A good bit of it is to sell up at the job and the employee gets a commission.

I have bee self employed for most of my life and I did not send out employees in lieu of me in separate vehicles. Yes, this is the way to make money, but I wanted to do personal service. It's a flaw in business to take such an interest in each job that I had to do the majority of the work.

However, I never had any reservation about presenting an invoice for work done.

I have a real problem with those that present an invoice for work done that never saw the work. Most of today's "contractors" ride around in a huge pick up and "check in" with the work being done by those they harvested out of the Home Depot parking lot.

I cannot find any trade work performed within the last 10 years that is anywhere near what I and my contemporaries did 20 years ago. It has become a lost and unappreciated art. I will say the 2 out of 3 PCA members that hired me did appreciate the workmanship. The third was looking at a cheap Lowe's display and thought anything seen at Lowes was a slam dunk. Obviously, they had never shopped at Lowes. You see a red entry door and want one? You become a fool, but I'm the fool because it didn't exist when I went to order it.

We've had this debate before Milt, but I still think that with some marketing and word of mouth advertising in the right circles you could be very successful. My father in law is a real craftsman, much like yourself. His passion is doing custom cabinets and furniture but he does a wide variety of remodeling and repair work. He has two employees but does much of the work himself and takes real pride in quality, enough so that he has gotten exposure in remodeling type magazines when the customer sent in pictures. He has never spent a dime on advertising and normally has about a one year backlog, despite living in predominantly rural central KS.

There are still people that will pay for quality and integrity, I'm definitely one of them. Eventually you realize that you get what you pay for. Your challenge is finding those people.