Half your work should never be quoted, and the rest never verbally

A bathroom refit is £1,850. A boiler replacement, £1,670. A shower installation, £840. A leak repair, £235. A blocked drain, £215.

The top half of that list and the bottom half are different businesses and they need opposite handling.

The emergency half should not be quoted at all. Somebody with water coming through a ceiling does not want a document. They want to know the callout charge, the hourly rate after it, and roughly when you can be there. Trying to price a job you have not seen, over the phone, at nine on a Sunday, produces either a number you regret or a delay that loses the call. What that half of your business needs is a published rate structure, not a quoting process.

The planned half should never be priced verbally. A £1,850 bathroom discussed on a doorstep and confirmed by text is where plumbing disputes come from. What was in the price? Was the tiling included? Who supplies the sanitaryware? Is the old suite going in a skip and whose skip?

Most plumbers run one loose approach across both, which is why the emergency calls are slower to convert than they should be and the bathrooms end in arguments more often than they should.

A bathroom is £1,850. Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. One bathroom covers more than five years.

On disputes: a single bathroom that ends badly typically costs a few hundred pounds in unpaid extras, a day of arguing, and the review and referrals that job would have produced. Two of those a year is a very expensive way to save the twenty minutes a proper specification takes.

• Emergency callers told the rate before you set off, in writing
• No planned job over about £500 priced verbally
• A materials position that removes the customer-supplied argument
• Boiler quotes offering options rather than a single figure
• Fewer end-of-job disagreements, which is what the whole page is for

Weeks 1–4. The emergency rate structure written, published and turned into a confirmation text.

Weeks 5–8. The bathroom and boiler templates, with exclusions and materials positions built in.

Weeks 9–12. Tiered boiler options, deposits and staged payments, plus a follow-up prompt on planned quotes.

At ninety days the measure is whether any job over £500 went ahead without a written specification. That number should be zero.

There is a category of unpaid work in this trade that quietly absorbs a day a fortnight.

Somebody rings about a bathroom or a boiler. You drive over, spend forty minutes measuring, looking at the existing pipework, working out whether the soil pipe can stay and whether the incoming main will support what they want. Then you drive home and price it. That is two hours, and a good share of those two hours produce nothing, because the person was gathering three quotes and one of them was always going to be cheaper.

There are two honest ways to handle it and most plumbers use neither.

The first is to qualify harder before driving. Photographs of the room and the boiler, the age of the property, what they are actually trying to achieve, and a stated range for that kind of job before anybody gets in a van. A proportion of people take themselves out at that point, which is the whole objective.

The second is to charge for a proper survey on the larger jobs, and offset it against the work if it goes ahead. It sounds bold and it is completely normal in adjacent trades. A £75 survey fee on a bathroom filters out the price-gatherers entirely and converts the rest at a much higher rate, because somebody who has paid for your time has already partly chosen you.