Tips For Running A Successful Welding Business – Pricing Things & Dealing With Customers!

This Post: Tips For Running A Successful Welding Business – Pricing Things & Dealing With Customers!

was put together by our team of editors who are Business Review Consultants that give their expert recommendations, on the latest business software & tools that have been launched onto the market.

When we publish the latest money making opportunity or business software review on Running A Business From Home,

 
we will give you our complete analysis on the most popular software product tools. We will expose the most profitable online systems that top internet marketers don't want to share with you.

 

We reveal some of the most Powerful web programs  That have recently been launched onto the market that will help those starting an online enterprise or setting up new revenue streams.
We will test these software apps, to examine every feature of the tool, making sure its delivering results.      

All the videos we post on our constantly updated blog,

just like Tips For Running A Successful Welding Business – Pricing Things & Dealing With Customers! that your about to watch,

will give you the competitive edge in your online business ventures,

that are targeted towards those interested in using the best tools on the market, that will help you start an online enterprise or run a profitable Home Based Business Franchise, using the most powerful web tools.

Our Product review team

 

Convert all of our highly valuable video reviews, found in every one of our regularly updated blog review tutorials, that can be found in Running A Business From Home,

Into a video transcript using the latest cutting edge techniques in video transcribing, for you to get the most out of these excellent video resources, that will help you to be a smarter digital entrepreneur to review later.

This transcribed content further down, on this post about Tips For Running A Successful Welding Business – Pricing Things & Dealing With Customers!, can then act as a reference guide or refresher transcript that you can browse over,

after you have viewed the video so that you can review each action step in more detail.

all right I hope everybody out there is having a good day I found a lot of requests from people who want me to talk about the actual business of welding and some customer projects and how things work and the like so today’s subject is customers and dealing with them because I just had a rather interesting a job leave I made a video about that which will post probably close to the time this one does and there are some extenuating customer circumstances with that one and I’ve you know I haven’t been in the business for a bazillion in 12 years but I’ve still had my share you know considering the amount of time I have been doing this of customers that are really good and nice to deal with and some that are to put it slightly to put it gently a little bit problematic and I’m gonna tell you guys some stories from each today because you know I’m not really interested in pretending that everything is all 100% perfectly smooth and I think most of you guys and most rates men know that fairly well by now so the first point I want to make is you have to understand that if you’re gonna be doing business with people you have to realize that people are extremely extremely cheap and more often than not customers who are homeowners and hobbyists especially and small-time operators in whatever their business they’re in will nine times out of 10 choose something or not choose something you know be a repair person who does that repair whatever purely based on price this is another reason why and I’ve talked about this before I make it a point to not do business with home owners and hobbyists and those types of groups anytime I can manage to do so because they’re cheap if you deal with people you know like most of our regular customers they’re Construction Companies I do some structural steel work they’re machine shops there are automotive shops these people are used to doing business with other people they understand the concept of hey maybe we shouldn’t hire the cheapest guy to do this or you know they’re more likely to understand hey this person we’re talking to you seems really competent he seems really well-equipped let’s not try to lowball him on this and and try to get just the cheapest solution humanly possible one that story I have that sort of talks to this purpose is last spring is sometime well alright and I’ll preface this by saying I used to have a sign out in front of my house for welding and I took it down because I got so tired of people wanting me to do what I would refer to as BS projects like you know for everybody in there in the North Texas area I you know I if I was the type to I could swear to you guys drove by my house and called me wanting me to weld on a muffler or a catalytic converter for 20 or 30 bucks and these things always have to be on the weekend and you know these people oh they don’t think about these things all they think about it say there’s sign this guy well let’s have them do this welding thing even if it’d be cheaper for us to replace this thing or you know to a muffler shop and whatever they don’t stop to understand that as as a welder I don’t want to spend my weekend you know probably like two full hours by the time it’s all said and done two and a half of the people are late showing up which they which most people generally are I found you know they don’t understand that I don’t want to spend like two and a half hours of my Saturday opening up my shop using specialized knowledge thousands of dollars of equipment and taking time from my weekend to do an absolutely miserable job under their car for like 20 or 30 bucks you know I had so many of these things I ended up taking the sign down but before before the sign was down one day this guy stops by he’s like hey man you know I um I think you like hot shotted cars or something you know hauled him from point A to point B or else maybe you flipped him I don’t know exactly what it was something along those lines he’s like hey yeah you know I want a winch put on my trailer you know he had like just a standard flat deck utility trailer you know slight dovetail off the back and it’s like yeah you know I want to winch on this so it’s easier to load ones that don’t run and you know I don’t want it out in the weather I want to buy like one of those Universal truck toolboxes you can buy them you know farm stores truck places that sort of thing and you know I want you to cut this up and you know so we can put the winch inside it and run the wires do all this stuff I’m like yeah you know I don’t remember exactly what I told him I’d do it for I told him you know two three four five hundred dollars maybe was basically going to take me most of a day to do this not really much materials there’s pretty much all time you know I was gonna have to take this toolbox it’s gonna have to drill bunch holes in that correspond to the frame rails on his trailer make some custom brackets you know run the I think they call it the fairlead or something that the cable runs through it’s gonna have to like mount that on the front of this with the winch right it was just a lot of stuff that wasn’t hard it was just very time-consuming so he’s like you know I tell them to something like look you know I’ll do this but this has to be you know around my schedule this is the kind of thing it’s pretty easy for me to fit in around other air projects and it’s like okay okay it’s the grades it’s great so um you know I don’t know probably a week or so later this guy calls he’s like hey no he calls me and I was working on something so I don’t answer my phone because I was working on something and I call the guy back I don’t know 10 or 15 or 30 minutes later whatever it was it’s like you know I wanted you to say but you turn answer your phone her I found this other shop that’ll do it and they charge less than you shoulda he was really snarky with he’s like maybe next time you’ll answer your phone and I wanted to you know sort of be a dick to this guy and be like look guy you know not that it’s any of your information today I’m working on a multi-thousand dollar project for one of my best customers I probably couldn’t even do this today you know I’m not gonna derail all of this that actually has to get done to do your BS trailer thing which I don’t actually really need to do in the first place it’s just you know like I said I can fit around other projects when I’m out working on stuff you know and give them the full nine yards but it’s like alright well you know whatever guy have a nice day just ended the phone call and I didn’t really think much about it and then by pure chance two three months later I saw this guy again he’s like and he’s surprisingly nice to me he’s like hey could you do this or that to my trailer and I’m like yeah didn’t she say you like yeah you wanted something else done before and you’re like you didn’t do it for whatever he’s it immediately used to mean a change like yeah let me tell you how that went you know I go to this other shop and you know I haven’t done I’m thinking this is great and then you know I use it to move like a trailer there I’m sorry a car on my trailer go home you know close everything up go inside I walk out of my house the next morning yo I smell electrical smoke what what why do I smell electrical smoke and then he walks over to his trailer to discover that whoever he had do this I don’t know if they just didn’t know enough to or they they didn’t believe in grommets for some reason but they didn’t use any they ran the cables for his winch like right under the lid to this box and I guess it was a pretty cheap winch that he had because it didn’t evidently have like a thermal overload or whatever so what happens this guy gets home the night before slams the lid on his box after putting all his chains and straps in it and and I guess over the course of the night the cables shorted out against the steel side of this box and it shorted out that started at his winch running in his winch you know it like pulls the cable all the way in from wherever it was and it stops to put the feral leanings going and it eventually overheats and self-destructs so this whole ordeal cost him like I don’t know an entire winch which evidently like I said no thermal overload so it probably wasn’t a very expensive one but so what it sucked and you know whatever other damage that cost so you know that was that was that you know I it’s really best to not you know burn bridges with the people like ah that’s what you get for being a dick to me on the phone that day you know whatever but you know this is the thing you you have to realize you’re not going to win them all for some reason perhaps it will be a good reason like you were too busy or whatever perhaps it won’t be a good reason like you know you’re working on something else you don’t answer your phone this guy’s having a bad day or whatever but you know you know what goes around comes around and I just I didn’t really think too much about that after that but it was sort of a funny story I still think of it every single time I see a winch to this day another story that hopefully there’s some lessons to be learned from it this is a happier story they so last summer sometime and this is actually the story behind the project I was working on today last summer is some time I was out working on a job with Steve mechanic we were repairing some type of heavy equipment for you know one of the companies that he works for and there’s this little automotive shop right across the street and Steve had gone over and talked to them about something or other oh yeah I remember there was all this hydraulic oil all over this machine and we were afraid it was going to catch fire so Steve goes over there and and Boras like a five-gallon bucket of water so we put it down on the grass brew but whatever the case we’d had some communication with them and you know what through the day we saw them work we saw him watching us working on this thing and later you know I ended up talking to one of the people from the shop and they’re like oh you do well yeah that’s great and they wanted me to do I don’t I don’t remember exactly what it was sort of a I was sort of a BS project or something and this is like an hour and a half from where I live and they’re like oh you know maybe you can just come back and do this later and you know a lot of people like I said they don’t really think about what’s involved from the tradesmen’s perspective to get a job like this done for instance in this case it would have been basically a three hour round trip now mobile welding is it’s sort of an in-demand thing it’s its specialty there’s a lot of money in it for instance I charge a service call fee if it’s closed I charge usually 80 90 bucks beyond that two bucks a mile all the way there all the way back and then 98 now over the fort with a four hour minimum so you know needless to say it’s not really worthwhile for me to drive an hour and a half away like I think they wanted me to like brace sum’ some tubing of some sort under now and and then drive back but you know you can’t tell people when you deal with them you can’t be like look guy you know I didn’t go through trade school and buy like you know buy and acquire and horse trade for like a quarter million dollars worth of equipment to spend you know three hours of my life driving four hours total coming out here to brace your BS line you know when you can probably just go on rock out oh and order a new one for like 20 bucks or something you know don’t bother me with the stupid stuff you can’t you can’t really deal with people like this it’s always best it’s not always possible but it is always best if you make an effort to deal with people the way you would prefer that they deal with you so what I did with this guy is I was like look you know I’d love to but you know we’re not gonna have time today which was true we were out there until like eight or nine or ten or eleven o’clock at night something ridiculous and and you know it’s like look we’re not really gonna have time for this today this isn’t really the kind of stuff that that I do because you know I do heavy equipment repair obviously I do a lot of agricultural stuff I do work for machine shops that sort of thing it’s it’s high-dollar stuff there this just isn’t this just isn’t really the thing for me but I tell you what if you if you’re willing to drive out you know when you need stuff I can hook I can hook you up I can take care of you guys so I gave him my card and I forgot all about it until the other day a guy calls me says he’s working on a an engine out of a Mercedes I don’t know which one it was like a v6 gasoline engine and and I guess this was a salvage engine or taking it was taken out of a car that was wrecked from the best we could figure and for that reason some of the alternator brackets were broken off and like yeah you know just bring it out I’ll charge you X number of dollars they gave him a pretty good rate on it and you know I can fit it around some other stuff just bring it out so you know it worked out pretty well because it worked out nicely for this person he didn’t even bring it out here he got some some nice little Mexican lady with like her four kids in her truck to drive out here with this well in wait while I welded it and then drive it back and it worked out well for me because it was easy money that I could fit in around other projects that I have going on but the point is you have to understand and anticipate beforehand that people don’t understand you know how much of a barrier to entry you overcame to end up in the position you are for welding and you know if you somewhat paid your dues doing stuff that doesn’t really pay all that well and it’s more or less a waste of your time you’re not you’re not gonna drive three hours to go braise the line or whatever that was you know and a lot of people say yeah you will you know for two bucks a mile all the way back and you know whatever else but you know you if it’s something that isn’t at all feasible for some of the pain like it’s a little small mechanic shop you sort of come across almost as sort of a dick if you if you you know if you quote something that way it might be better to say look you know this isn’t really gonna be feasible let me know if you can bring out something to my place smaller and I can fit it in around some other stuff I have going on but the point is anticipate this because otherwise you’ll be completely blindsided the first time someone who you know doesn’t mean any harm doesn’t even realize what they’re asking it wants you to do some total BS job with like all your equipment and all your skills and everything and the other thing is some of my most universal advice for this type is just don’t mess with small petty BS you know every single and I’ll tell you my next story will be from someone is another trailer job come to think of it that was one of the most unpleasant I think I’ve ever had you know there’s I don’t know the reason or the Ryan to it but most of the time you deal with people that are just plain nasty and they’re whiny and they’re clingy you know they’re the type that are bothering you constantly I’ll tell you a story from buddy of mine he’s got probably about one hundred fifty two hundred thousand dollars worth of CNC tables and for a while he was doing some small like stuff on the side with those aside from them it’s just massive production runs that he’d run on these machines and like he told me there was this one guy that every every week or ten days he would text him a picture of some BS thing you like found on Pinterest or whatever so like hey how much for one of these and you know the first few times he quoted them and then and then the guy like either would it do it or he’d be like yeah well I’ll do this fifty dollar thing but only if you deliver it like three towns away you know in Dallas Fort Worth traffic yeah alright for 50 bucks or whatever ah he sort of eventually came to the realization that a lot of these small things just they’re not worth your time and this is why I normally have a 250 minimum for anything here in the shop and the reason for that is you know it might sound like a lot but look at it this way if somebody stops by and wants a new muffler welded onto their vehicle and they’re gonna pull me off of a paying project here for probably twenty minutes to go you know kiss their hands and shake their baby and make friends with them and all this other stuff and then and then they’ll be like you know I I just want this can you do this yeah you know you sit there and talk to him for like twenty full minutes and that’s gone off a painting work and then you know and then they’re like oh you know twenty thirty bucks they drive out there late takes you like two full hours to get this done by the time you know you meet with them and everything and for all that for like twenty thirty bucks no this is why I have a 250 minimum if it’s not worth that it’s not worth my time to walk off of paying work to quote this thing it’s not worth dealing with people who are you know potentially kind of hit or miss this is my next advice find customers who you work well with who have their together and they don’t waste your time they don’t pay late they don’t play stupid games with you and do everything you can to further your relationship with these customers like a while ago I made a video for for a machine shop that I work with they had an intake manifold off of some type of old v8 I think a lot of you guys in the comments that it was like a Buick 207 or some to 315 or some random size of engine and you know this guy I work with this person regularly I coordinated this entire job and I believe about three text messages between us guy just straight up leaves this on my front porch first thing in the morning sitting there in my computer eating breakfast I see him show up on the security cameras and I just straight up leaves that gets back in his truck in a way he goes you know I weld it and and it is just done it’s easy money it’s here and it worked because it’s so streamlined but if this is some random person off the street I’ve never worked with before 20 minutes to kiss their hands to shake their baby you know do all this stuff and you figuring all the time for this and especially if they’re gonna blow me off show up late that type of thing then it really becomes not worth your time very quickly so some of the best advice I could give to summarise find people you work well with who have their their ducks in a row and work primarily with them the next thing you have to realize is you’re not gonna be able to please everyone this is another story of a small B s job that turned out to be kind of a nightmare because you know never once on a construction project if I had people like try to abandon their whatever they wanted me to make on me or try to not pay or just in general be a pain in my rear end like I could tell you so many stories from fifty hundred two hundred dollar cash jobs then like I said in the end just were not at all worth my time this is one of those stories so this person shows up he wants me to do some random stuff on his trailer and and one of these things he wanted me to build a framework to hold a Jack like one of those we call him farm jacks as a brand it’s like a hi-lift jack or something you know you crank it it’s got the thing that goes up so this guy it drops it off if you had me do a couple other things as well like I think I like well ah a piece of plate Rika bolt the toolbox I don’t know just just a couple random BS things and this guy he leaves me with no instruction he leaves me with no plans no pictures to go off of no specifications my instructions were just build a sturdy mount for this jack so I do and and you know is I get the thing on there it’s great it’s fine guy comes back across the master grammar you know he pays he leaves and and and like like a day later I get a phone call from me so I look guy I just I just I just don’t like the way this looks you know this just this just doesn’t uh you know it does it was some just insane thing he said it’s like it doesn’t match the lines of the trailer or whatever this is this is like just here you know obviously it meant a lot to him but this is just like your normal you know 16 foot 7,000 pound capacity trailer like you buy off a Craigslist for 1,800 bucks brand-new or something you know you know he’s like oh I just I wish you would Hangul dit this way or I wish you would have designed the foot that way like I’m listening to this like guy and I basically told him I was like look if you knew how you wanted this thing you should have had a drawing of it you should have had a picture of it you had none of these things this is not my problem I hurted her this is not a warranty issue you know and then in hindsight says I told the story of someone they’re like you were probably too nice no I would have told him to pounce they on the block his number but I was like look you know if you really don’t like it draw up exactly what you want and you know bring it by I’ll do it I don’t know I told him I’d do it basically for cost or something and you know try it trying to be agreeable with this person oh you know he’s like he goes on all these random rants he’s like you’re you know you just have terrible business ethics because this reason and that reason and everything else and I’m like yeah well you know whatever look I tell you what Al you know because this person lives sort of close to me and the other thing is when you can’t make people when you can’t really win things with people it’s best to minimize damages like I guess now it really wouldn’t hurt me because I don’t really do hardly any out sidework I say almost too busy just with existing contracts that I have and regular customers that I’ve been working with for years that I work with because they don’t do stupid stuff and waste my time like this guy was but it’s like and I was thinking to myself is like look you know I don’t want this guy like you know run it running me down her to dirt you know try to make him somewhat happy so it’s like look you just send me your address I’ll send you a refund for like like $44 or some random thing just whatever part of this small BS cash job which I probably shouldn’t take it in the first place and he did and I sent it to him and blocked his number and never heard from the guy again but yeah that’s the thing oh yeah and the other thing I saw that trailer like almost a year later driving around town and the jack mount that I built is still on it and it still works perfectly fine and he never like redesigned it or or whatever it’s just like I said there really wasn’t anything wrong with it it was perfectly sorry right you know I’m capable of building some not to talk to myself up but some cool stuff I can make a trailer jack you know be secure on a trailer these were not safety concerns or anything he just I guess he wanted it some other way which he never bothered to tell me and I got mega butthurt when I couldn’t read his mind or whatever you know I don’t think they’re you know realistically I don’t think there’s really much else I could have done for that guy but you have to expect that you are not going to win them all you can’t but yeah it’s like they say you can’t win them all and the other thing in fact here I’ll show you guys this when somebody comes in unless it’s someone who I know you know and therefore I know they’re not gonna waste my time and be a pain in my rear end this is the form that I use because before I show you guys this one other thing to point out it’s extremely important to have a signs somewhere or something written like a disclaimer that you make people sign before you load and unload their stuff that you know basically it’s not our problem if it gets jacked up during the loading or unloading process case in point this morning on that Mercedes engine like this thing is straight out of the junkyard I think and there’s like all these hoses it’s going every which way and fallen off it it made me kind of nervous even moving in with the tractor so that’s like man one of these is gonna get like caught under my vise or something and I bet each of these lines cost more than charging them for the entire job you know some people don’t like these disclaimers because they say oh then you can destroy my stuff and it’s not your problem well you know theoretically yes but I’m not likely to destroy your stuff intentionally what’s a lot more likely is that you know you bring me an engine with lines hanging all over and is in and there’s no one here except this like little pregnant lady you had drive this thing out here too you know I’m not gonna have her standing underneath this loader like hoping for the exact delay and another time I sold the cab off of a parts truck and this guy brought out this like it was like one of those really junky tractor supply trailers and it was like loaded up past the frame rails on the side was just the most random junk like not things of value just total junk at least not things of value to the rest of us and I was really nervous about that because he’s having me set this thing like on all this junk and like you know if we crushed something or whatever you you need to protect yourself from things like this so TL DR if nothing else I bet you can go on eBay or something and buy like a premade not responsible for damage loading or unloading thing I don’t know how much that’ll realistically cover your your rear end if things actually do go to court but I don’t think most things like that ever do go to court and if you have this you can say look well you know you shouldn’t have your your lines hanging all over the place or something for instance it’s not really ideal it’s you know the ideal thing is you load and unload everything in an ideal way but that’s not really realistic and you know it’s very likely that sooner or later you’re gonna end up loading or unloading some sketchy stuff for reasons outside of your control so that’s something else to keep in mind anyway back on track I think I’ve read acted all my personal information but yeah this is the form that the the trailer jack guy actually inspired and if nothing else he ended up doing me a favor because this might save my rear end someday on something that’s actually you know valuable basically so this is the top part of it this is basically just so that everybody knows what’s expected of everybody else date method of payment you put like cash or cheque or a credit card if you accept credit cards payment conditions you know when picked up for example or if you have to buy a bunch of stuff perhaps you say 50% down as deposit and then you can use that so this can either be a written estimate or you know basically a receipt subtotal sales tax at the Texas rate which is kind of high but we also don’t have a state income tax so it all sort of balances out and basically these are the terms and conditions below all work is covered by a lifetime warranty on all welds performed with the exception being cases of abuse and mistreatment and or material failures caused by manufacturers defects outside of our control cast iron and aluminum repairs are not covered by this warranty due to their nature and that’s a straight up tell people when they’re bringing me cast aluminum or something look you know what you get is what you get I’ll do my best but I can’t make guarantees about this limitation of liability arising from all this due to any reason basically or anything bla bla bla is that if the cost of labor to repair to original specifications as performed by us now this is also fairly important and there’s the story behind this part too this comes from a good friend of mine one time he was doing a job in a city that had a very strict fire code and I guess it was for one of his construction customers and and they basically said look you know obviously we want a good fire escape but the the city says it needs this that and the other thing it really doesn’t because you know if we put this here it’s gonna interfere with this part of it or that part of the building and this is worked perfectly fine this design for like 200 years so this is what we want so on and so forth but it’s not a hundred percent you know in line with what the city wants so my buddy thought about it for a second he’s like alright well look you know obviously the really the worst thing that could happen from the it’s not a safety thing with the people that you set fire escape the worst thing that’s gonna happen is the city comes out and they you know they ruin part you for hundreds of or thousands of dollars and and or they make you fix this thing so it’s compliant look you know I’m willing to do this but you know cheerily you understand that I can’t you know this is your design and everything I you know if this doesn’t work I can’t have this coming back on me and again the guy at the construction it’s like yeah that’s fair that’s fair what do you want to do he’s like I’ll build it the way you want it but I need you to sign something first which basically says customer is entirely responsible for this design any extra work required will be performed at an additional expense so on and so forth and that’s why my thing too has the same passage it’s like I said it basically just means the customer is responsible for making sure their design is legal and so on and so forth because I’m not an attorney like you know if somebody brings me you know whatever whatever and it turns out that the building code in whatever city they’re in it says it should be this way but the customer wants it that way it’s not fair to me if that comes back to me as the city says it needs to be this way and the customers like oh I didn’t know I had heard it Earth you know this way they’re responsible for whatever design they give to you yeah the other part of this is I have right here customer is fully responsible for the design and specifications of all work performed let’s see I lost my place in any situation without written plans trailer jack guy drawings and/or blueprints reworks and modifications will be performed at an additional cost I am not liable for issues arising for misprints within written plans basically what this means is if you know what you want tell me what you want and you will get it otherwise it’s up to me I’m gonna do whatever I feel is best in that situation and if you don’t like it for any reason that’s just too bad you should have told me what you wanted beforehand or drawn it up on a napkin or something you know this is a sort of an example of you know not all situations are good situations that trailer Jack deal was that was the mess that was not really good for anybody involved however you can take a bad situation like that and use it to potentially help you in the future for instance now I have this form and that that whole deal well it was a pain it could have potentially protected me and now by extension you guys as well from an extremely expensive rework on some actual like real deal job at some point in the future and the other thing is you say oh you know nobody’s gonna want to read all this stuff blabbity blah blah blah you know they’re gonna you’re gonna say you’re being too legalistic not once ever has anyone complained about this form literally not one single time most people understand and if anything it’s helpful because if somebody you know goes off on you for designing their thing this way when they wanted it that way but they never told you you can say look well did you sign this form when you dropped off your thing oh okay well maybe next time you know I’ll be more careful and then it’s over crisis averted next up from the completion of work customers shall pick up or take delivery of all items within 10 days unless previously noted above in this giant blank space which I left to note such things from 10 days to 30 days customers shall pay a $10 day storage fee of their items after 30 days they will be considered as abandon and become the property of yours truly this I don’t actually practice it’s only here so I can cover my rear end if somebody asked me to use some large weldment or project and just straight up dumps it on me and then you know I can’t get ahold of them I sell it to recover my cost as an example and in later you’ll you solve our thing that wasn’t yours to sell off the face of the earth for a hundred and twenty days without telling you after you spent like six grand and materials to build this for me I’m out Allah you know this is I don’t if I’m happy to store things for people especially people who I like which is most people that I deal with if it helps them because you know I have a fair amount of space here most things that I work on you know can be stored outside if they get rained on it’s not gonna hurt how half them live outside in the first place it’s just not a big deal however some people you know they’re not the most considerate they’re not the most competent they might not see anything wrong with leaving something with you and just flat out abandoning it or saying oh wow you know that guy he’s got a big yard he can’t hear you store it out there when in reality you can’t for some reason and then it’s in your way for a month yeah I don’t make an issue with this unless somebody gives me a reason to make an issue with this and luckily so far nobody has hence the beauty of this form all right yeah and then the other thing all items sold machinery materials etc are sold as is where is and are not covered by any warranty expressed or implied irregardless of any manufacturer’s warranty which may be relevant through them and less listed above all sales are final so this is here because I know a guy who actually he owns a company that sells welding equipment and what he said in his words are once you sell a guy welder you haven’t actually sold him the welder you own that welder forever in the respect that if this guy he never takes care of it you know he leaves it in his truck and he drives like a maniac so it gets bashed around you know uses it peddled balls-to-the-wall just flat out all the time and then the thing dies you know six years outside a warranty long could you believe this terrible machine I bought from this person all their stuff is junk I can’t believe this broke in that respect you still own this thing forever I I am NOT an equipment salesman I don’t I don’t normally sell hardly anything but if I’m selling like dropps material or a used machine I’m selling the the used machine because I don’t need it anymore probably because I have another one which I realized you know this one isn’t going to do it so I bought that one and said like I said if you want something go to the manufacturer if you buy something use you what you get is what you get like I’m not intentionally going to screw someone over on a piece of equipment but if it works fine when I have it and then you know it dies like the second time they use it that’s just too bad I hope it still has a manufacturer’s warranty all right you know I’m a welding shop I don’t I’m not I’m not an equipment dealer so that that one probably wasn’t the most required to be discussed in this but overall I feel like most people are decent to deal with I’ll put it that way I’ve had it I’ve heard some not-so-great stories but let this discourage you there is a lot of money to be made in welding you just sort of have to know a few things going into it like expect that people don’t realize how long things take and therefore how expensive they are so people will want you to fix a bunch of stuff that isn’t worth fixing you know what I always tell people is people will go out and buy like a $600 tractor supply trailer and absolutely just just just annihilate the thing and then they say oh wow you know this thing it’s you know I could buy another one for like six hundred bucks so you know surely this this person who I know that welds they’ll be more than happy to spend you know however much time they need to completely replace the sides in the bottom and fix the suspension that I bent and all this other stuff when in reality you know even for half the value of the trailer that buys like a little over three hours of my time and no materials and it’s just plain and simple isn’t worth it and then like I said this would be sort of a BS job so a lot of the time certainly a lot more than with other things you deal with people like this who want things like this and then they are always the ones that cause you problems which is why I don’t do this anymore but yeah it’s I guess that sort of got a little bit off-topic make sure the best advice I could give is do whatever you can to cover your rear end like that cast aluminum this morning that welded beautifully but I didn’t know that was gonna happen so that’s why I told the guy look what you get is what you get I mean I’ll do my best but it’s cast there’s no warranties there’s no guarantees and there’s a real chance that that thing was just gonna be pure contamination and I would return it in a blackened blob and be like look guys sorry no and that’s just you know ultimately there’s not that much else I could’ve done about it I just did the best I could luckily it welded amazingly well quite frankly so everybody was happy but you have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best as they say you you kind of have to have some ground rules laid out beforehand and yeah and definitely it’s it’s never bad advice to take a deposit from people as well luckily I normally don’t do this because it’s mentioned I work with a fairly small number of people who I’ve worked with for years at this point so you know I’m not you know they need a $500 job done that takes a hundred bucks of materials I’m not gonna be like look guy give me 50 bucks when you drop this off or else I’m not messing with it because I know I’m I work with them and that’s that’s a comfy place to be the other thing not a bad idea to buy commercial insurance so I don’t really talk about this too much my company has a two million dollar liability policy and it cost me like forty two hundred bucks a year or something so if you’re gonna be doing this in any real capacity yes it’s extremely affordable and you know if that’s just an obscene amount of money for you then make sure you get people to sign a disclaimer or don’t go into this you know I remember getting started I certainly couldn’t have afforded that but you know it’s nice to know that if things happen especially if things happen that aren’t my that aren’t you know within my control they’re outside of my control and I end up getting sued you know I can recover the cost of legal fees and having an eternity have an attorney be like look you know you shouldn’t have done this to the thing after he built it this wasn’t what he built it for this wasn’t what you told him to build it for this isn’t really our problem that sort of thing especially if someone gets hurt because that’s the kind of thing that can add up very quickly and people man a lot of them they’re just plain and simple hard-on stuff I remember a buddy of mine another buddy of mine who owns a welding shop he welded an excavator bucket for a I think they did like they were Road contractors or something and you know he goes out there like yeah this is the bucket this is a machine we use so it’s this nice little small excavator and so he welds it for him and everything’s fine and then like a year later they call him back it’s like this stupid piece of junk you welded broke you need to get out here and fix this immediately and the reason why it broke is because they put it on an excavator like twice the size of what it was made for and twice the size that he reinforced it for and then absolutely brutalized the thing breaking up pavement with it so you know is there really anything the guy could have done about that theoretically but in real-world circumstances probably not have probably never even crossed his mind that one day they’d buy a bigger machine and keep this bucket and hammer on it but you know they did and then when they broke it he’s the bad guy so you got to prepare yourself for these situations also so thanks for watching don’t forget to rate comment and subscribe Cheers