I think I have proved time and time again that my customers come first, as a self employed person who does not advertise at all, I have always given a fair price for a fair job and all my work comes word of mouth. Why should I have to sting my customers to fund all these different schemes and organisations that I am forced to join through regulations, As I have stated before when I started plumbing, my qualifications covered Gas, Oil and solid fuel, Now I have to belong to individual bodies to work on each fuel, at this moment in time I may work on 1 or 2 gas appliances a month, I may work on 4 or 5 oil boilers a year and I may work on 1 or 2 solid fuel appliances a year.
Who pays for all these, me, I know that this can be set against my books at the end of the year but ulitmately I still have to pay for it up front, It has been proved that if you put all your eggs in one basket you can be on the road to disaster, many people on this forum are struggling at the moment because work is tight If they are only gas safe registered and one of their regular customer has decided to use renewables and require MCS they have to pass the work on to someone else, does this mean that they are not capable of installing the equipment, no of course not, they ultimately have to make the choice of spending thousands of pounds to register as MCS on the off chance that they may get loads of renewable work, so what happens if they only ever do one install, they certainly can not pass this cost on to just one customer,
Once again the self employed man is slowley but surely being driven out of the industry because many in the industry think of him as a cowboy, well if thats the case I aint hanging up me spurs, chaps or stetson just yet.