In article , Stephen
scribeth thus
Thank you every one for all your comments, I have learned a lot.....

I've had a few more thoughts.....

Do customers make voice calls to Handymen or do they email instead?

They want to speak to you. I can't think of any who'd bother with
mailing!..


reason I ask is that I am deaf so voice calls would be a *BIG* problem
for me as it is not possible to lipread on phones. So I would prefer
customers to email me. I'm content to have a 3G enabled Apple Ipad in
the van for this purpose.


Totally deaf?, Can't you have an earpiece for the phone or mobile?..


In a similar vein, many customers have smart phones so they could take
pictures of the job and email it to me to make my job of quoting easier
and/or more accurate without losing working time driving over to teh
potential customer, viewing the job, writing up a quote & posting etc etc.

Well they could but they prefer you to come to them..


Also, customers don't like taking whole days off from work waiting for
handymen to turn up. So perhaps some kind of automated text messaging
service like Taxi's have to say "The handyman is on his way to you, his
ETA is XXX mins" Allowing customer to nip home from work, let me in, I
do the job, let me out and the customer goes back to work.

Could work!.. Delivery drivers have been known to do that..


Talking of flexibility, what about adjacent neighbours deals. i.e.
neither neighbour has a full days worth of jobs. I'd turn up do half day
at one house, the other half day at next doors, and charge then a full
days rate for both houses and they pay half each? and share half the
call out charge? after all, I'd rather work than drive about.


It doesn't work like that, well from what I've seen of it anyway..

I can go part time with my exisitin gfull time job so I'd have an
insurance plan if the handyman thing fell apart.

Up to you..
--
Tony Sayer