Thread: This is Crazy
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Old 04-11-2015, 01:03 AM   #59
ksanders
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City: SEWARD ALASKA
Vessel Name: DOS PECES
Vessel Model: BAYLINER 4788
Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 6,266
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mule View Post
Look, I am a tradesman/ craftsman too. It cost what it cost to do the job. Do NOT insult me with a $120.00 radiator cap install while doing a $13,000 job. That is just stupid because it makes the customer (me) think that you think the customer (me) is stupid. Piss me off, work done or not, as a customer, I will stretch you out. You will justify EVERY line on that bill. I have a motto, if I as the customer ain't happy you as the contractor is going to be less happy than me. I will see to it. Screwing on a radiator cap for $120.00, and billing me ain't gonna make me happy.
I look at things a little different...

Prior to taking my boat to a shipyard for a major refit I researched that ship yard. I talked to the people that work there, and developed a sense of trust that they would do a good job, and that they would bill me fairly for time they actually spent dealing with my boat.

When I looked over the invoices every task was time coded. I knew that some tasks blended into others and that the actual time on task A might be higher than actual while the time spent on task B might be lower than actual. What they to this day do not know is I did not care about the individual tasks on an invoice, I cared about the total hours billed on a invoice vs what I thought was reasonable.

In my opinion being a guy that bills my customer daily that's how these relationships need to be handled. There needs to be a trust that our contractors are doing the right thing for us. If a job takes longer than we guesstamate that it should thats not bad, that just means that they found something that was going to cause me grief down the road, and fixed it.

So, I could care less about the radiator cap. To me its meaningless. What is important and since I'm not a Cat diesel mechanic I do not know... is the total labor hours estimated reasonable based on the work to be done, and the boat that it is going to be done on.

I also think that hard fast quotations are very dangerous. The reason is that if they get into the job and find something unexpected, they will have to short cut something in order to meet the quoted hours. Thats why I do not want hard quotes for work. I want an honest estimated based on experience. That gives the trade person the leeway to do the right thing instead of covering up something that they in good faith failed to account for or something that was more time consuming than they expected.
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Kevin Sanders
Bayliner 4788 Dos Peces
Seward, Alaska - La Paz, Baja California Sur
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