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Mark Up -££- How much though?
I’ve often wondered what kind of mark up to put on the things we sell to our customers that we have bought in ourselves.
My latest one is some built up letters that i’m quoting on. I’ve had a couple of prices and they are looking at costing me £600’ish.
We have to charge for fitting the things as well but i obviously want to make a few quid on the them.So my question to the boards is:
whatkind of mark up can you expect to get where you are based? -
27 Replies
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Seems people look to roughly double bought in components that require no work – but a bit of leeway either way works for me.
eg. Bought in letters – One guy – very good customer, they cost me £190 – sold out at £300 + £60 fitting…he spends lots with me though.
Another one – had one letter nicked out of a business name, ancient old things. Told him no way to match it so replaced it all. What cost me £90 turned in to £300 fitted – for an hours work.Small neon stuff is probably the worst for me – it’s dear enough to buy as it is. By the time you ‘double-up’ and add on for transformer(s), cables & labour what a customer thinks will be a cheap advert to say ‘Hot Pies’ comes in at silly money.
To answer your post – at £600 bought in, add £10 for misc materials, 70% mark-up if a good / average customer, 100% if rich / corporate / 300% if local authority (I jest, well…I’ve seen the tenders for gov contracts round here) plus £30/35 per man per hour on the job – £20/25 per man per hour if traveling plus fuel costs at £0.80 to £1.00 a mile.
This varies job to job. Is it an easy ‘plywood’ fit?…or will you be spending 6 hours drilling into marble blocks. 4 letters or 40? Do you have staging or working up a ladder – 8′ off the ground or 18′? Too many variables to be definitive without all the background info.
Think most guys say "Don’t sell yourself short". I try to be middle of the road / good value in my area, but I’ll still get tanned now & again by somebody doing a job purely for turnover plus £10 in the ‘hipper’.
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pretty much what dave says here too…
buying in is taking on debt, i do what i can not to… i.e. sell what we make in house. if i have no option but to buy in, then fair enough, but doubling the price of cost is the "minimum" i look for. as has been said, this varies pretty much on the customer… i don’t mean i am out to rip off… i mean if you have a corporate company handing you specific instructions on everything, then regardless, ill bump another 25-50% onto materials bought in.
something else… if i shop around and find 4/5 trade suppliers charge £100 for a product and the 5th sells "exactly" the same product for £80
ill still add that saved £20 on top. i look at the phoning round as saving me money, not the customer.now that said… ill now contradict myself. 🙄 :lol1:
i have seen us buy in a flexface signs. arrived 100% complete. cost approx £4000
installed in 4-5 hours, 2 men, priced £6000+vat.
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I generally mark up between 50% and 100%. Any additional work required is on top of that (e.g Installation or lettering of a signblank) which is charged at my normal hourly rate. If anyone asks me to sell plain materials such as PVC or vinyl I will mark it up 250%
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We usually double the cost but it can be difficult sometimes. Today we were working on a quote for a sign with built up letters and LED’s. The panel and letters came to about £3000 retail and the price we got for the LED kit was £1200. Can we really add on £2400 just for the LED’s?
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sorry, I’ve had a jug of wine tonight but do you mean retail to trade or general public at £3k?
LED to trade at £1200, should you double? hard to explain unless we know what exactly is involved.
soory if i have this completely wrong….
if you break the design, fab, install in the price it is hard. but hiding the job as a whole is much easier. -
I take on board what you are saying, there are many things that come into pricing the job as a whole.
I think i’ll join Rob abd get some wine down my neck and think a little more 😀 -
I’ve done a few swing signs lately.
Cost of swing sign = £48 + del & Vat, = around £68
Can I really justify charging this out at £136, that’s before even lettering it. Just seems a bit pricy to me if I was a shopkeeper?
:lol1:
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we do a few a-boards nothing special… just few different sizes etc
from memory, the cheapest one "lettered" is about £140 thats nothing special just a few lines of text each side. the board would cost less than you paid though so although sounds expensive, its not. i think "we think" maybe its expensive because you know how much you are making, but its not by the time you work everything out. -
Alistair, with something like a swing sign you can always put less of a mark-up on the actual board if you are applying graphics to it. Look at Phills post, he says he marks up between 50 & 100%.
If you are just supplying a blank board maybe add 100% if supplying a board with graphics then maybe a bit less.
Alistair wrote:
Just seems a bit pricy to me if I was a shopkeeper?
Alistair don’t make the mistake I did by deciding for yourself what THEY will think is expensive. If you do that you will always be to cheap as I was. Try and look at it from a different angle, how much is the customer going to gain from this sign? What does it cost to advertise in the local newspaper for just one week !!!
Your swing sign is going to last for years and pay for itself over and over again. Of coarse what other sign company’s in your area are charging is also going to be a factor but when a customer tells you the sign shop round the corner can do it a lot cheaper make sure it is a like for like quote as there are some really cheap nasty pavement boards on the market that wouldn’t last 5 minutes. -
quote :we do a few a-boards nothing special… just few different sizes etc
from memory, the cheapest one “lettered” is about £140 thats nothing special just a few lines of text each side.Wowsers!!!!!!
I’m in the wrong area Rob…….The cheapest one we do is the standard powder coated aluminium from Adisplay – can’t remember how much this costs us, about £33 i think. I can’t get more than £100 for that, fully vinyled up because the bloke up the road is £95.00 on these.
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You hear all kinds of stupid prices flying around in this game. Ive heard firms doing them at £200 each, and some one-man-bands working from their back bedrooms doing them for as little as £70. I normally charge around £160. You have to remember you are running a business and not a charity.
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Went on a site visit this morning in Arbroath. Really nice guy – easily pleased.
He’d had a rather bad experience with a local sign company. They’d produced one main sign from 3mm white di-bond and screwed it directly to the cladding. No frame, and it was pulled in at every screw. The logo design & vinyl application was flawless – as it should be.
He asked me to take a guess at how much he’d been charged for this one sign alone – 10′ x 5′ sheet with two colours of vinyl. I said about £550 – £600, (knowing this guy was a bit dear) – well it’s an £80 sheet & £20 worth of vinyl screwed to the cladding 3 miles from his workshop…
Waaay out – £1200.00 – now THAT’S a markup!!
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Thats not mark up. that’s a right royal rip off!
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I fell off my chair at £600 😀
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I got all excited and had to nip to the loo! 😀
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His previous supplier – (naming no names for obvious reason) produces some excellent stuff – very well planned & though out, nice logos (most of the time)…right up to the time it’s installed and billed.
Theory seems to be – hit them once for all you can.
Normally results in very irate ex-customers, general bad feelings, and tales of arguments in pubs when he’s had a few…besides a rep. for being a "rip-off".
It’s good for me though – just laugh at the figures they paid in shocked disbelief and happily quote half what they were last time…and still make a good profit…the looks of relief are obvious sometimes.
It’s good to strike a bit of balance – we ARE here to make money…but at what cost?
Dave
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I’ve sometimes found myself in the position where the customer knows and trusts us enough, and doesn’t ask for a price before we do the job. The problem is when you come to invoice the job, I’m cautious about charging too much or more than I think the customer is expecting to pay.
The best way I think is to quote the customer every time, even if it’s a confirmation e-mail that says that you are starting the job and advising the cost at the same time.
As for pricing up, we add on about 100% – 120% mark-up for cut-out letters,
or as Dave mentioned, probably more for Corporates. -
sorry guys,
got to put in a logical argument for pricing.
I would never just add 100% or x% to a bought in item, the same as I would not just multiply my cost by x for in house production.
The only way to do it, is to work out your actual costs, the profit you need to make, and how many you are able to produce with your available resources, some of the biggest global companies, work on as little as 5% Net profit. If you are in competition (not producing something unique) then you really should mark up your percentage in a realistic way, not just a hypothetical value.Its like my local shop trying to charge me £3 for a tin of beans,
when I know that I can buy from the wholesalers for 30p.Nobody should be a busy fool, but you need to find a level, based on your own environment, of the best mark up.
Would you be happy to pay your supplier a 100% mark up?
Peter
Peter
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Well how much does a supplier make on a roll of 610 vinyl?
I’m guessing it is around 100% markup.
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quote autosign:Well how much does a supplier make on a roll of 610 vinyl?I’m guessing it is around 100% markup.
I don’t know, but that’s a different thing anyway.
The vinyl suppliers are buying in bulk and have to stand stocking costs and a lot ofother expenses. We’re talking about buying in just what we need, when we ned it and selling it straight away.
Peter does have a point and while I have no problem in my fellow signmakers charging a 100% markup if they can get away with it I know it’s not something I can do.
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I agree with John and Peter on this one, and if I charged £160.00 for a pavement board I know how many I’d sell.
Alan D -
Hello folks,
I am in the process of setting up a sign making business above my daughters sports shop. I have no experience myself but have a partner who has over 10 years signmaking experience
I agree that its a very confusing industry regarding pricing.ive started to due local pricing checks and checking prices on the net.
At the end of the day i would have thought that you can only charge the going rate if you want repeat business and future recommendations. -
Since i priced this job (which was accepted with the client) i have shopped around for a better price and saved myself £120.00.
That money will be going in my pocket and not knocked off the bill as Rob stated earlier.
I have had several prices for these built up acrylic letters that i’m pricing for and the prices vary a hell of a lot. This varied by £400 in total, so shop around everyone!! -
what about wastage? I try to remind myself about all the little bits of material that are wasted, the prints that go slightly wrong etc.
Just the other day I finished a large print just to find a fly had secretly crawled in, got squished by the roller and got printed on 🙄
All the succesful paying jobs gotta cover the madness that comes between 😎
So yeah, dont be afraid to charge what you are worth and what pays the bills.
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quote Gary Jackson:what about wastage? I try to remind myself about all the little bits of material that are wasted, the prints that go slightly wrong etc.
Not much wastage here! I tend to plan my job sizes & quotes to make the best use of fixed sized materials – and plan that the off-cuts from one will do another one most of the time. Whether sheet alloy or frame – sometimes re-jigging the job by a couple of inches can save £100’s in wastage / odd stock.
Wastage should always be accounted for – it you can’t use it – then THAT customer pays for it. Nobody gets a discount on 8’x3’8" as opposed to an 8’x4′!! No such thing as un-paid for offcuts!!
In the case of screw-ups – whether flies in the digi-print or you’ve just stood on that box of neon that got delivered, enough HAS to be built into the job to at least not lose any money. 😕
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It doesn’t really matter how much anyone else charges, as long as you have worked out how much you need to charge materials, overheads etc. that’s what you charge . In some parts of the country you can charge more but if you are on top of your game you know what you can charge locally .
Lynn
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quote :In the case of screw-ups – whether flies in the digi-print or you’ve just stood on that box of neon that got delivered, enough HAS to be built into the job to at least not lose any money.If you follow this rule you will mark up every job by 50% on top of the 100% profit already discussed!!
As you’re not going to screw up every job, hopefully, you only need allow a small contingency on each job to cover the occasional problem job.
Peter
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