We had a client come to us recently; she had seen some internal doors she liked in one of our supplier’s catalogues, however she had 14 x internal doors to be changed.

The doors weren’t cheap either costing around £160 a door along with a £40 handle. Not to mention changing all the door stop along with supplying hinges, latches and labour the cost with the dreaded VAT came out over £3000.

The customer was adamant she wanted those specific doors and handles, but would find it hard that month to pay in one go. She suggested she could pay by credit card, however would then be paying interest on the bill.

We immediately explained to her that because of our regular maintenance for local businesses we run a maintenance diary and that we could do 3/4 doors a month and invoice her periodically.

This suited both parties as we got the job and the client didn’t have to part with a large sum all in one month.

When they felt the work was not up to scratch and questioned the trader he was aggressive towards them and after leaving that day never returned again, taking large sums of cash up front and leaving them with no kitchen whatsoever.

When we met the client they were making tea from the shed in the garden.

Realising they had been without a kitchen for over a year until they had the money to hire another company, we set about sitting down with the client to solve this problem for them.

We took them to our kitchen showroom, got them the kitchen they wanted, we then presented them with 3d cad impressions and drawings along with an itemised quote. They agreed the price with us the following day.

We fitted the kitchen the following week and in the end they had got the job they wanted. All be it a very expensive way. Always check the company you’re dealing with, using trade associations like Trustmark or checkatrade, may help you avoid such rogue traders.

While we were there we were surprised to learn that some of our customers aren’t aware we run a handyman service as well.

She was delighted when we told her once fitting her windows we were able to hang her blinds as well. We also changed the fluorescent tube in her garage with the only additional cost being for the time it took for us to do the job.

She needed to fix the problem quickly because she had a wooden floor in the kitchen.

Luckily we had an engineer in the area so we were able to get to her that afternoon.

We investigated and found it was quite straightforward and the culprit was a leaking tap. We didn’t have the right size washer in the van but we isolated the tap to stop the leak, mopped up the water and went to the nearest plumber’s merchant. We have accounts all over the place.

We were back to fix the problem with the bits we needed in half an hour and fixing the problem took another hour including cleaning up and leaving the client happy.

All in all the job took us 1.5 hours including collecting the parts we needed and thanks to our half hourly rate the problem was fixed quickly and cheaply.