getting undercut !!!!!!

[Johny Walker]

well its happend again ,priced some stumps up for a mate ?,a tad over 1/2 aday on a friday so early finish & take the familay bowling

quoted £250 as only 2,m from yard ,me & the carlton ,easy job,

 

the other chap another mate quoted , waite for it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

& sent a predator s/g & a man to use it for £120 & took him all day

 

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

 

[18 stoner]

You will never beat them Johnny, so dont try lowering your price to compete.

 

Stick to your guns and accept they must be desperate and wont earn anything working like that.

 

Let them get on with it and take the family out anyway!

[Ian C]

Crazy jonny but there are some real desperate people out there. I know a firm not far from me that has just done a large chestnut, everything lowered and did the stump 3 men 1 day and wait for it.................£300!!!! madness.

 

i dont worry anymore as when there kit ib goosed they will have no money to fix it with.

 

 

saying that i have a day tomorrow with the grinder in ripon, just me for £370.......

[Bentonarb]

I keep being under priced but have no idea how they are doing it . Priced two fallen oaks in a school in london. One tree had fallen and taken the other out on the way down . Both trees were over 4ft in diameter and cutting them up would have been a nightmare as there were huge amounts of tension and compression involved. I priced it for 3 days for three men and this included taking away brush ( roughly 3 7.5 ton lorry load ) and leaving logs total price of 1600 +VAT. some one did it for £900 all in ?????

 

I have decided that i wont lower my prices to compete . If they want to work for nothing they can i rather price to do a proper job .

[timtree81]

the worst thing about going in cheep is when work picks up your expected to work for the same rate

[Rupe]

One of the problems with quoting for work is that if four or five quotes are received it is quite possible that one of the companies has screwed up and under priced it by mistake. Of course they only realise this when half way through the job, but its possible that a a significant percentage of arb work is done at a mistakenly low price.

 

Add to that the newer companies that are less experienced, and so rather then "undercutting" they are just simply making mistakes, and pricing cheap through no real fault of their own.

 

I mess up prices now and then too though, I'm sure everybody here has done jobs that they have underpriced, well that is what I mean, too many jobs go to the person who has underpriced by mistake, including all of us who have done it.

[Treemon]

It happens on big contracts as well (H&S dosent even come into it) We priced a site clearance job . There were 3 quotes , £50k , £45k and £13k ! Guess which one they went with and then they had the cheek to phone me for help with a method statement

[Johny Walker]

the thing is rupe, he knew what i quoted,then quoted £175 for the job then thought i was going to do it for less so he dropped his quote to £120 ??

 

i told him what was involved & to allow a day on it ,to make a wage for him sen

 

he paid the guy £80,used a tank of fuel ,& put new cutters in ,

 

all for £120

,

[Pete Hart]

Im utterly staggered by some prices im supposed to 'compete with' at the moment...

 

 

i have actually had to "say thanks but i can't compete with that" on more occasions than i care to recall in the past month!

All i can think is.....there must be people working their balls off for nothing - best of luck to them, and the customers!!

[TArrryan]

One of the problems with quoting for work is that if four or five quotes are received it is quite possible that one of the companies has screwed up and under priced it by mistake. Of course they only realise this when half way through the job, but its possible that a a significant percentage of arb work is done at a mistakenly low price.

 

Add to that the newer companies that are less experienced, and so rather then "undercutting" they are just simply making mistakes, and pricing cheap through no real fault of their own.

 

I mess up prices now and then too though, I'm sure everybody here has done jobs that they have underpriced, well that is what I mean, too many jobs go to the person who has underpriced by mistake, including all of us who have done it.

 

There is of course the extreemly rare overpriced job! I did one a while ago where I realised part way through I'd asked for far too much (almost 30%!!) I must admit I never said a word and they were still happy with the price, They said they would be in contact with more work.

 

In my first year I made a million pricing mistakes, even charged half the amount i should of on one job!