A guy at my bench in Phoenix said he bills 2 hours no matter what, and now I'm second guessing my whole sheet
So I was rebuilding a sticky aperture on a 50mm last week and this older repair guy named Hal, who has a bench two doors down from me in Phoenix, leans over and says "I don't open a body for less than two hours, doesn't matter if it's a loose screw or a full teardown." I asked him how he gets away with it and he just shrugged and said customers pay for the fact that I know what I'm doing, not the clock. Meanwhile I'm sitting there charging $35 for a 25 minute CLA and feeling like a chump. Part of me thinks he's full of it, but the other part remembers last month when I ate 90 minutes on a stuck mirror that looked like a 10 minute job. The thing that got me is he said guys like us race to the bottom because we price the job instead of the knowledge. I've been doing this 12 years and never looked at my rate card the same way. Has anyone here moved to a flat minimum charge and did people push back hard or just pay it?