A cowboy builder is someone who makes up his own rules whenever required to avoid doing something properly and safely. A cowboy builder bends the rules, takes shortcuts, uses the wrong material and generally does whatever they need to in order to finish as fast as they can whether the job is safe or not.

So back to my contractor. If the pipe work that he has just installed leaks and he comes back to repair it then there is no problem. If the pipe work leaks and he starts avoiding the calls and then changes his mobile number then there’s a problem.

HOW TO SPOT A COWBOY:

• Mobile number on business card (no home or office number listed)
• No address on business card
• No qualifications (membership to appropriate group i.e. FENSA, NAPIT, ECA, NICEIC, Gas Safe Register)
• Most will give a ludicrously low price (they’ll usually bump it up as time goes on)
• Won’t give any price guideline before starting work
• Leaves job site A LOT for no apparent reason (the pattern is likely to get worse)
• Does a little work here and there but doesn’t actually finish anything

Beware of these types of builder, electricians, gas fitters or plumbers. The average builder is honest and like everyone else is just trying to make ends meet. There are those however who are looking for a dupe to take in. If you’re unsure of who to hire ask advice from someone who knows or go to a professional body such as Gas Safe register, NAPIT, NIC EIC, etc.

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What it really means is that the person who has to hire someone is now very distracted from seeing your good work or application due to volumes of not so good work and applications. In some cases it’s worse as there are hand written applications, CVs, notes  and a whole range of interesting items job seekers will choose to try and get attention.

The reality is this. My method is to create three piles of applications as quickly as possible. Pile one is for applications that will get fully read, pile two is for applications which may get looked at if pile one applications don’t stand up under scrutiny and pile three where the application is not likely to ever see the light of day again.

It may sound cruel but if I have two hundred applications and I spend as long as sixty seconds to glance through each I’ve just spent three and a half hours of my day. Half my day just to gather the ones that I want to read. So I go through them even faster that sixty seconds.

How do you get noticed! You always have an opening line or cover letter which is short and sweet and to the point!. The first line is more important than people realise and it needs to convey quickly the 5Ws. If I’m interested I will read further. If I’m not interested in that you’ll end up in Pile Three. Not good.

So here is a real example of how to end up in Pile Three even though you may have experience and be THE person I’m looking for. This arrived via email only and was only addressed to the Sales Department.

Hi my name is Xxxxx Xxxxx 19 and I was wondering if you are taking any apprentices on, I have already done 2 years as an electician apprentice but only working for a one man band so the amount of commercial work or industrial is limited to the odd one every couple of months. I am currently in my second year at college and filling in my log book on a day release course at Xxxxx Xxxxxx College in Xxxxxx Manchester.

I have passed all previous exams and am currently working towards my level 3 knowledge doing testing and inspection and fault finding which should be completed by July. I have had a variety of work with my boss at present such as burglar alarms, fire alarm and emergency lighting systems, heating systems, three phase and single phase installation although three phase has been on a more additions to alteration on existing installation as work base is mainly domestic properties. I also have experience of regular periodic testing and fault finding.

The reason i am asking is that with mainly domestic propeties on the work base i am finding it hard to gain the evidence and also expirence needed to complete my log book and will hold me back on qualifying, also the pay rate i am recieving is below minmum wage and want to gain more commercial expirence for the future and also have the more likely possibility of having a job at the end of apprenticeship with a well established company.

Thanks hope to here soon

Spelling and grammatical issues aside the last thing I want to see is someone who is slagging off there current company, or boss, or supervisor. Why? Simple. Whether you like the people you’re working for or not it’s there business. They are the ones that get up early, lose sleep when things go wrong, work long hours after everyone else is gone home, etc, etc, etc. Bitching and moaning is a guaranteed trip to the Third Pile.

So let’s suppose that you get noticed and get called into the interview. What next? Read Part 3 coming out shortly.

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I hammer away relentlessly at cowboy builders, electricians, gas fitters and DIYers who attempt, and fail to work to CURRENT Building Regulations. So I have to applaud Plumbfix as well as Wolsely (Plumb Centre and Parts Centre) for their stand on supporting CORGI and CORGI Registered gas installers by limiting the sale of gas related products to the general public. It would be fantastic if more retailers got on the ball and stopped selling certain items such as gas hoses and other fittings used almost exclusively by gas fitters to anyone without an up-to-date CORGI card.

These moves will aid our industry in identifying us as trained professionals who keep up on technological changes and up-to-date on building regulations and not the bum crack builders that we are usually linked with. If the public knew how much of our own time (not billed to customers) we spend reading articles, taking courses, working with trade associations and going to meetings like CORGI Road Shows they would understand our commitment for public safety and the difference between our work and the work of untrained, non-registered and non-regulated trades perople.

So to the owners and board members of firms selling gas related products to the general public. You are now the avenue by which bumbling DIYers and cowboys obtain the tools of the trade to undertake dangerous work. Don’t believe me?! Look at the Cowboy of The Week awards. I have no shortage of awards to give out.

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1. Danger of the Week Award – Cowboy Kitchen Fitters

As a small home maintenance business trying to conduct business in an age of more and more stealth taxes I am not a big supporter of grandiose plans to drive me further out of the market place. The current multi million pound propaganda drive to convince us on how useful congention charging will be to Manchester is a case in point. I personally feel something has to be done to ease congestion, well pollution actually, I’m not sure I agree that charging small businesses to enter the very city the public wish us to keep running is the way forward.

Is this unclear? Let me clarify. I hear daily from my own customer base that it is difficult to find a reliable and licensed plumber, gas fitter or electrician in the City Centre. I know that the rates to undertake work in the City Centre are already steaper than outside the city. I know that despite everyone’s fear of killing the planet that no one wants to move into a cave and when a leak starts flooding you and your neighbour or you have a gas leak or you just want a new kitchen or bathroom appliance added; most folks don’t really care about the environment and the argument becomes cost.

So to the case of cost:

1. If I keep my my business in Manchester City Centre and drive in to work every day I’m going to have to charge my city and my out of city clients an extra fee.
2. If I keep my business in Manchester City Centre and also move into the City Centre I’ll have to charge my city clients extra.
3. If I move my business out of the city centre and don’t live in the city centre I’ll have to charge my clients extra.

As my client base is in and around the greater Manchester area and I never really know where my next call will come from I’ll be in and out several times a day. My staff will be in and out several times a day. My clients will be paying for not only the congestion charge but an administration fee for making the call and getting the pass as the current government cannot seem to at the least have the billing done automattically like they do in Canada.

So when it comes down to saving the environment I would like to see a simple formula showing how all of this extra money from everybody is saving us. To quote the recent flyer from the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Authority, “The £5 charge in 2007 prices will be no more than £6, in 2013 if charging is introduced then as planned.” Which means is that the congestion charge could go up and probably will go up but shouldn’t go up. Of course we all know that government charges rarely stay the same and never go down. I will have no choice except to pass the charges on to my client because it will ultimately be there problem. If I move my company away from the city centre it will cost. If I move outside the city it will cost. What to do?

Perhaps then the answer is that all city centre clients need to move out of the city so we don’t have to service them. That would eliminate all requirement for anybody to be in the city. We could move everthing outside of the ring road and carry on business with just the usual price of increasing petrol, increasing coproration tax, increasing minimum wage, increasing cost to memberships such as NIC EIC and CORGI, increasing cost of training and memberships along with all of the other costs I am enevitably stuck with because we are not a cowboy operation.

It is not evil to enter the city centre as the government is trying to make out. Those who provide essential servces such as deliveries, couriers, plumbers, gas fitters, electriciancs, cleaners, repair persons and other miscellaneous tradespeople are not in the city for no reason. We’ve been called by the public to provide a service.

Perhaps everybody would like to see how easy it is to run a city centre business or home without us for a week or two. Enough is enough! Stop bullying us into more and more increases in the cost of doing business. We have to pass it on and the loser in all of this is the same public that you say your trying protecting.

Go live in a cave or live in a heated and lit house. There is a cost for comfortable living, If you don’t accept that cost then go back to the turn of the century.

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Another good article here.

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To that end here are some examples from real CVs.

Hobbies: i like hanin’ with my mates

Hobbies: Playing video games and listening to music

I’ll not go on as most applications and CVs had lines like this. A job application or CV is a professional profile. It’s not an invitation for a party. I’m not your mate. I’m not your friend. I’m a business person who requires a new staff member. To be blunt about it; you need to work once you’re here and I in turn will pay you. That’s the deal no matter how much legislation and spin is created. If you can’t work you won’t get paid.

So what should you do to get a job. Be specific on your application or CV. List the work you’ve completed as it relates to the position you’re looking for. Don’t list your hobbies no matter what anyone tells you as it helps the decider make a final decision based on your choice of hobby. A good example would be someone who lists loads and loads of sports on the CV. If the eyes looking at your CV isn’t a big sports fan it may in fact hurt your chances. And DO NOT list hangin’ with me mates, or ‘wii expert’ as it is irrelevant to anything you might be applying for.

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Two very interesting things emerged from this experience. The first was that we received a great many applications from people who already had there gas papers (A.C.S.) and were looking to get their twenty job portfolio together so they could gain their CORGI/Gas Safe Register card. The opposite end of the scale was that we received many applications that were incomplete, displayed no real interest in working for us or anyone else for that matter. All but a few even mentioned plumbing, heating or electrical references in any context.

I have over the years had to hire and let staff go. It is not an easy job to do either and after having to sift through hundreds of applications or CVs you get fairly fquick at it. There are a few items that need to stand out for any application to make it past a set of experienced eyes.

To see what those items are stay tuned for part 2.

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My initial call was taken by the usual out of Country call centre who had me wait on hold for a period of time. Once the call was taken I was told that I had to call between specific times on Monday to Friday only and speak to the disconnect team. As a plumber, gas fitter and electrician it is very difficult to call back during the day so I made the call a few days later.

My initial call was taken by the usual out of Country call centre who had me wait on hold for a period of time. Once the call was taken I was put on hold for a period of time and then told that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. I said no and I was put on hold for a period of time and then told again that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. I said no and I was put on hold for a period of time and then told again that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. I said I would call back later.

I called back a couple of days later. My initial call was taken by the usual out of Country call centre who had me wait on hold for a period of time. Once the call was taken I was put on hold for a period of time and then told that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. At this point my head almost exploded! I did however keep calm and explained that I don’t sit at a desk all day. I work on the road. They then suggested that perhaps someone could call me back. I said no. I work on the road and was heading out as soon as this call was sorted. They then suggested that they could email me the MAC that I required. WOW! What a concept! Perhaps they could have suggested that a week earlier and saved me from going over my free call cellular limit. I said ‘yes please’ and sure enough a few days later I had my code.

So it would seem that after punishing us for our excessive usage they also make it difficult to leave them. You would think they would be happy to get rid of a company like ours that has downloaded 20 gig too much once in five years. Our new supplier ZEN Internet has much the same policy in place but if we go over our usage we don’t get crippled and left to suffer. We can throw some money at the problem on a permenant or temporary basis. That’s all we wanted in the first place. Goodbye DEMON. Goodbye THUS. Hello ZEN.

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So I started by replacing the MS-Office products. After some research I found the Sun Systems Open Office would be a good replacement. After downloading and setting up the software, which was a non-issue, I ran the two Office products in parallel for a few weeks. In that time I opened up old documents of all types, re-saved some in the new format, some in the old and generally tried to check all possible scenarios. No problems were found so we removed all Microsoft Office products from all of our machines. Bye-bye Billie. A painless and cost effective project.

We also decided to remove Internet Explorer in favour of Firefox. As with Office we experienced no issues to date. The one small exception is being nagged now and then by Windows asking us if we want MS products to be the default products on the system.

We have three issues left to resolve. The first major issue is how to replace our Exchange server with another package that also has a desktop application much like Outlook. The second big issue will be to move to a Linux Desktop environment and the third issue bringing Linux to our Server. On that day we finish the world will still be turning, Bill Gates will still be rich and in business, but we will have saved a lot of money and still be in business also.

So in short, it would seem that you can run a business without using Microsoft. There is other software which functions as well as their software does but without the fees. Business is tough enough these days without the extra and excessive licensing costs.

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The story started last month when our server started throwing out the occasional error for which we could not find the cause. Over the next week we lost our mail server due to overly large housekeeping and data files which filled the drive. In our attempts to repair the problem we discovered hardware issues which was the actual cause of the problems a week earlier. As our files were now corrupt and the physical disk issues were causing problems copying files off the bad drive we decided to rebuild the server and make some other changes and upgrades at the same time.

To make a long boring IT story short, we built the new box, installed the software and downloaded all of the appropriate service packs required to bring everything up to date. This also caused us to upgrade our laptops as well. I suspect this is why we were DEMONised or THUSed. Unfortunately for us we had another week of data reconstruction to get our damaged mail files back on the server and working and yet another week configuring our user and utility accounts. THUS of course has an automated system which doesn’t care if servers are down or for that matter that email addresses actually even exist. In fact the address they sent to has never existed as we have never used ‘postmaster’ as an address. Over a period of five years the address they were using. So they sent an email to nobody at an account that they invented telling us we were bad people and slowing us down to 128K.

As we didn’t get the warning of course we didn’t know we were over their limit and therefore carried on our business as usual. Thinking that we had configuration problems after the re-build we of course spent countless hours trying to figure out why we had these speed problems. Try running a business that uses Google Maps and Web Based Accounting and Scheduling software everyday not to mention the myriad of other non-business services we access in the course of a week. We did finally get the ‘knuckle wrapping’ email once all of the accounts were again configured and of course we called to find out how to rectify this crippling problem.

Interestingly enough THUS says that they cannot overturn the decision. Their kit cannot be reconfigured once its been set. There is no way to talk to anyone in authority and there is no fine that can be paid for our bad behaviour and interestingly enough there is no way to escalate the problem. I’m sure glad that my business doesn’t run that way as I’d be out of business! We also queried the fact that we weren’t informed and was told that their automated email would suffice. In mentioned that in cases where one is having there services cut I would expect like BT, Virgin Media and other utility companies that perhaps a notice by post would be more appropriate to business users but THUS informed me that “email was more reliable than the post as letters do go missing.” I stand corrected yet again today by Demon Customer Services.

The bottom line to all of this is that if you run a business and are serious about using ADSL check out the capping policy which is usually buried about three or four pages down on some obscure web page as even the larger business packages have a cap and it would seem that if you go over even once in a period of five years as in my case that you will be closed down. Interestingly and I hope on the taped conversation used for security and training purposes the operator I spoke to informed me that if I upgraded to the next package up there was no cap. I told her she was wrong as I had already read all about the next package up and there was a cap. She insisted that I was wrong even when I told her what page to go to. Bad news when your staff strts believing the company line without ever checking for themselves. We made alternative arrangements on a partners home ADSL so we could run our payroll and pay everyone before Christmas but it has caused misery to the lives of our staff, our outside vendors and customers alike as we have grown to depend on the services being there when we need them.

THUS of course owns the service and they can do what they like, when they like, and there really is nothing you can do about it. I know that because that is what Demon Customer Services has reminded me time and time again this last week.

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