Emergency callouts: pricing them and fitting them in

An emergency callout arrives as good news. It pays a premium, the customer has stopped negotiating, and the work is usually quick.

The cost shows up two hours later, in the four booked jobs that have now moved and the four customers who have not been told.

Price the interruption, not just the hour

A callout rate built from your hourly rate plus a margin prices the work. It does not price what the work displaced, which is the whole reason the job is worth taking or not taking.

Set the callout fee to cover the travel, the first period on site, and the disruption to the day. After that, charge time on the job in the usual increments. A customer in a flooded laundry accepts a structured price far more readily than most plumbers expect.

Decide in advance what counts as an emergency

Half the calls that come in as emergencies are not. A dripping tap at four on a Friday is urgent to the person who rang, and it is not a burst main.

• Water escaping, or a burst that cannot be isolated. That is an emergency at any hour.
• No water, no hot water, or a blocked only toilet. Same day, and priced as urgent rather than as an after hours callout.
• Everything else. The next available booking, at the normal rate, with the person told which day.

Writing this down turns a judgement call made under pressure into a question anybody answering the phone can answer the same way.

Protect the booked day by naming who takes the break

A single van business has no choice. Two vans do, and the worst arrangement is the one where whoever is nearest goes, because that is how the day with the tight schedule becomes the day that gets wrecked.

Nominate one person each day as the one who breaks for callouts, and leave their run lighter to pay for it. The other runs then hold, and the customers on them never hear from you at all, which is the point.

Tell the moved customer before they notice

The damage from a callout is rarely the lost hour. It is the customer who took a morning off work, rang at eleven and was told nothing, and who now tells other people about it.

The moment a job moves, the customer on it should hear a new time. A job that has slipped is a job somebody has to be told about, and the only reliable version of that is a rule rather than a good intention.

Where the day has to be rebuilt, rebuild it once and send it out. Each person's stops get reordered with the drive times, and the new run reaches their phone rather than being read out over a bad line.

Invoice before you leave the property

Emergency work is the easiest money in the trade to collect and the most commonly left to a Friday. The customer is grateful, present, and has just watched you fix something. That combination does not survive until the end of the month.

Raise the invoice at the job, on the phone, and take the payment there. Getting paid on site, before you leave covers the three separate gaps between finishing a job and having the money, and how much of the delay is your own process rather than the customer.

Look at what callouts cost you, once a quarter

Add up the callout revenue for a quarter, then count the jobs that moved because of them and the ones that cancelled after being moved. Most plumbers have never put those two numbers side by side.

Where the second is bigger, the callout rate is too low or the rule about who breaks is not being followed. Both are fixable, and neither is visible without the count.

What to do first

• Build the callout fee from travel, first period on site and disruption
• Write down what counts as an emergency, so the phone gets answered the same way
• Nominate one person a day to take the breaks, and lighten their run
• Tell every moved customer a new time the moment the job moves
• Raise and take payment at the property, not on Friday
• Compare callout revenue against jobs moved and lost, every quarter