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Ain't no one wanting to pay £60 for an hours labour plus the build and component costs.
Except this is what we should be charging minimum.
The biggest issues is that the motoring industries et all have a much better standing than a bicycle shop.
It would be great if bike shop are exempt from VAT (in labour), as it’s a benefit to the environment and people’s health
(For what it’s worth, our workshop still getting the same level of customers after sticking to the £60/hour servicing).
edscoble-
Sorry @edscoble, I should've been clearer. No-one reasonably wants to pay the £60 to chat about their wheel rebuild and get the components together, then another £60 for us to build it (plus parts). Interested in your thoughts on this. Obviously for experienced wheelbuilders with their own spoke threading, loads of blanks and all the experience knowing which rim is going to be the go to for all circumstances this will take a bit less time, but it's fair that a customer might want to basically chat about things for an hour in total.
We are actually tossing up what to do about VAT thresholds etc as bumping up against the end of the flat rate scheme, so it might make more sense to actually be a bit quieter. Are there other examples of VAT exempt things? I've actually had a look at the rules and it seems that there is very little given a VAT exemption. Funnily enough ship repair and aircraft repair is exempt, so presumably if we put wings or a hull on bikes it would be 0% rated?
ItsHuddo
Honestly, we turn most of them down now unless you're a regular customer. It takes probably an hour of chatting about the wheel rebuild, measuring, ordering, sourcing parts that we almost certainly don't have in stock (ooh, purple nipples, nice (need to order 100 of them though), spokes for a 26 inch wheel (again, we probably need to order 100 of them) and a rim from somewhere we wouldn't be ordering from!) before you even touch a component. Ain't no one wanting to pay £60 for an hours labour plus the build and component costs. It is what it is, and we mainly do it to look like a proper bike shop, but it's far from profitable work.