Help with starting up..

XxStephxX

Hi all me and my partner are both trying to make leaflets to post around the village and surrounding areas to offer our services. We both want to help with general things ie cleaning, cooking, gardening, moving heavy things, painting and decorating and any other general household chores some cannot do themselves.

How ever we would both like to obviously make some form of profit from this so how much should we charge? Im kind of stuck on this because obviously i dont want to rip people off and i want to offer our service at a cheap enough price so that we would appeal to people no matter how much they earn etc but im not sure.

What does every one else think? Any hints and tips as to what to put on the leaflets are more than welcome too

Thanks in advance! :j

paulwf

Hi Steph,

A very good first step is to read all the relevant sections of the Business Link website - everything is clearly written and it is worth taking time rather than reading it in 5 minutes. From there it is worth calling BL and booking on their startup courses which are well presented and free and available in most areas.

For your costings you are going to need quite a comprehensive insurance package to cover all those activities. Presumably you'll also need a range of tools, and there will be costs involved with starting up such as advertising.

A very important thing to consider when you are self employed is that you don't get sick pay, holiday pay, maternity leave and all the other nice things that come with normal employment. These can really add up, so you really want to be charging 25-50% more than your target hourly rate otherwise you'll never be able to take a day off sick or for holiday!

You appear to be covering a lot of activities, although it is good to be able to appeal to more customers be careful that it doesn't end up being counter-productive...e.g. if you are advertising you can do cooking and decorating I may think that you aren't particularly skilled at either so choose a dedicated decorator instead.