Mondays - Your Prices Are Wrong… and It’s About to Hurt.

Mondays Down Under – Featuring Lee Salisbury, Shane & Nick

Something is happening in the pool industry right now… and if you’re not paying attention, it’s going to cost you.

Quietly…
 Gradually…
 Then all at once.

PVC prices jump 30%.
 Salt cell materials skyrocket.
 Fuel costs ripple through everything.

And suddenly the quote you sent two weeks ago?

👉 It’s already wrong.

In this episode of Mondays Down Under, the crew breaks down what’s actually happening behind the scenes—from raw material price explosions to freight increases—and what it means for pool professionals trying to stay profitable in a market that’s shifting in real time.

But this isn’t just doom and gloom.

This episode is about control.

👉 What you can still control
 👉 How to quote smarter
 👉 And how to avoid losing money on jobs you thought were profitable

Because right now?

The difference between a good business and a struggling one…
 might come down to how you write a quote.

⚠️ WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING

PVC prices jumping fast
→ 30% increases already… more expected 

Salt cell costs exploding
→ Key materials like ruthenium up over 100%+ year-over-year 

Freight costs rising
→ Minimum orders increasing just to qualify for delivery 

Everything is connected
→ Fuel → materials → manufacturing → YOUR pricing

🔥 THE BIG REALIZATION

“This isn’t just a price increase problem…
 this is a quoting problem.”

Because if your pricing doesn’t adapt…

👉 You eat the cost
 👉 You lose the margin
 👉 And you don’t even realize it until the job is done

🎯 KEY TAKEAWAYS

•  Prices are no longer stable—quotes need expiration dates 
•  You should quote what you can control… and estimate what you can’t 
•  Always build in allowances for unknowns (labor, access, conditions) 
•  Shorter quote validity windows protect your margins 
•  Templates and systems prevent repeated mistakes 
•  Customers are getting smarter—you need to be sharper 
•  Deposits, surcharges, and terms need to be clearly defined upfront 

💡 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES (THAT ACTUALLY MATTER)

1. Stop treating quotes like guarantees
→ Use estimates for variables you can’t control

2. Shorten your quote window
→ Two weeks might be safer than 30 days right now

3. Add clauses like:
→ “Subject to supplier price increases”

4. Separate scope clearly
→ What IS included vs what is NOT included

5. Build in buffer
→ Labor overruns, hidden obstacles, weird jobsite surprises

Because as one story proves…

You don’t know a job is a nightmare
 until you’re stuck under a house…
 on your back…
 with pipe in your face. 

⚠️ THE HARD TRUTH

You’re not just competing on price anymore.

You’re competing on:

👉 Accuracy
 👉 Risk management
 👉 And how well you protect your business from things you can’t control

📲 LISTEN NOW

🎧 Apple Podcasts
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👉 Follow the Talking Pools Podcast for real-world conversations that actually prepare you for what’s coming next.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:53

I see that one of the major plumbing suppliers in Australia has put a thirty percent price increase on all their PVC and it's expected to go up further again. BufferZone systems are the pool and spa industry specialists with a complete range of software for pool shops, service companies, and commercial aquatic facilities. With more features and integrations than any other pool industry software, you really need to reach out for a one-on-one demonstration. Contact BufferZone today. Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, good whatever time of the day it is. You are listening to Mondays Down Under on the Talking Pools podcast. It's great to have you with us. My name's Lee Salisbury, I'm pool shop coach. And today I am joined, as always, with my esteemed colleague in New Zealand. Shane, how are you?

SPEAKER_05 1:50

Very well, Lee. Thank you for asking. A little bit under the weather, but I'm okay now. Apologies for last week.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Yeah, all good. And of course, we have our newbie, our new colleague in arms, Nick from Queensland. Hey Nick, how are you?

SPEAKER_04 2:07

Yeah, good, thank you. Hey Shane, how are you going?

SPEAKER_05 2:09

Glad you're feeling a bit better. Thank you very much. It's the joys of kids at kindergarten. You know, as soon as you get a week of cold weather, everybody gets sick again. And it's like, oh, here we go. Just getting ready for the winter blues again. I'd love it.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

It's the one thing kids love to share is thoughts. So I'm starting that all over again with my grandson now at daycare. He's nine months old and just started daycare. And already I think he's had two days off daycare. Sick and barely sick, like just a little bit of a runny nose, but they will not have them at Kindie at daycare when they're like that. And so of course, Nanny Daycare had to step in, didn't she? I'm sure you hate that. I'm sure you've hate it. Look, it definitely stops the workflow, but that's fine. It's only a small part of my week, and I gladly give that up for the love and smiles and cuddles of a little one. It's definitely worth it. But today we have a big topic on the agenda. I think we've all been seeing the emails going around and the whispers in the industry, of course, with fuel having like doubled in price here in Australia. We don't know what the future holds. And we're starting to see it reflected in the prices from suppliers. So I was just jumped on LinkedIn before, and I see that one of the major plumbing suppliers in Australia has put a 30% price increase on all their PVC, and it's expected to go up further again.

SPEAKER_03 4:06

No drama. We'll tell you straight, no worries, just try.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Honoring those who don't just have the answers, but teach others how to find them. If someone helped shape your path in this industry, now is the time to return the favor. Visit cpoclass.com. Click on the Talking Pools Podcast Mentor Award tab, and submit your mentor's name up until May 15th, 2026, because behind every Great Pool professional, there's someone who showed them how to think.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Go to mentoraward.com. Again, that is mentoraward.com. Do it now. Show that person that helped you that they are appreciated.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

What are you guys seeing out in the market? Nick, what are you have you anything come across your desk today?

SPEAKER_04 5:43

Look, there's been a a few uh phone calls from sales reps and a few emails and a few whispers through the industry asking questions. Have you heard anything? Um, because yeah, it is a hot topic at the moment, PVC and plastics in general. Uh, because plastics are needed for everything, even down toine tubs and and things like that. I think it's gonna flow on through to just about every product we have.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_05 6:08

What about you, Shane? New Zealand feeling it yet? Probably not so much with the price increase of products at the moment, luckily. There has been emails sent out, but this is probably in the last four to eight weeks in regards to the price of cells. So cells increasing. But that seems to be a global thing. You were given some numbers just a minute ago, Lee, on the price of Ruthinum. Is that how you pronounce it?

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Yes. Ruthinium?

SPEAKER_06 6:38

Ruthinium.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Um to have a look at the the prices because of course we've seen prices in cells go up um only earlier this year. Um they went up a huge amount, didn't they, Nickel? Chlorinators and cells.

SPEAKER_04 6:56

It was definitely a shock to the system and shock to customers as well.

SPEAKER_02 7:00

Yeah, yeah. So I actually jumped online and looked at the current Eurynium. Yeah, ruthenium. I'm gonna keep stumbling over that one. Ruthenium price. And today, oh actually on the 20th of March, and we are filming this or recording this on the 23rd of March 2026, the price was 67.80 a gram. Now this is US dollars. So if we look historically, the 1st of January 2026, it was 48.68. So that's a gram. So that's nearly a 50% increase from January to March, a matter of 10 weeks. Now, if we go back and we look at the price of ruthinium last January, January last year, 2025, it was$18.54. So in a matter of 12 months, it's gone up probably about 130%, maybe even a bit more. I'm just doing the roughs in my head here. So it's gone from$18.54 to$48.68. And then in the matter of 10 weeks, it's gone up another$20 a gram from$48.68 to$67.80. So you can bet money on it, like literally, we will be spending money on it, that cell prices are going to go through the roof yet again. So for a market like Australia, where so many pools are salt water chlorinated, like let's face it, probably 90% of our market are salt water chlorinated, we are going to really feel the pain of this, or our clients are going to really feel the pain of this.

SPEAKER_05 8:52

I was thinking about this the other day, actually, because you know everything comes in cycles, whether it's fashion or telephones, anything, whatever it may be. I'm wondering if the swimming pool industry is coming in a cycle, because when cell chlorinators and automation was coming out, it was a premium product. You know, only like the rich and famous would have it. And then maybe after a decade or so the prices were coming down, you would see pretty much every household, like as you said, Lee, you know, the majority of Australian swimming pools are saltwater pools now. Now with the prices of everything starting to go back up again, is it going to become a lot more of a premium product again? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Yeah. Well, liquid chlorine's looking awfully cheap, isn't it?

SPEAKER_05 9:45

And and yeah, and then liquid chlorine, the price of chlorine how it was in the last two, three, four years, that was constantly increasing in price as well. You know, that was deemed as a you know almost like a premium product back then. Yeah. And now it's yeah, how do tables turn?

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Well, maybe we need to be stocking up on those little rollerchem dial ups. Like they're let's face it, they're inexp they're inexpensive.

unknown 10:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:15

They'll automatically liquid feed chlorine, maybe as a short-term fix, instead of somebody spending thousands of dollars on a salt water chlorinator, and it will be thousands plural. It used to be a thousand, then it was fifteen hundred, now it's two thousand, now it's like, is it two and a half thousand for a chlorinator now? Your average domestic. Um so a little dosing pump without a probe, no probe, just the little dosing pumps you guys know, the little dial ones that I'm talking about. You can still get them, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And hook it up to a liquid chlorine tub. Maybe that's what we need to be stocking up on. So the people who are on a budget, let's face it, and need to still look after their pulls might be a short-term fix.

SPEAKER_06 11:04

Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

But it's um it's pretty scary when you see that the the fact that in just over twelve months the price has tri tripled. Like it's more than tripled the price of ruthenium has more than tripled in just over twelve months. Let's say yeah, it's a 300% price increase.

SPEAKER_04 11:28

I hope necessity is the mother of invention and someone can design a cell without using it. I'm sure there's someone out there looking at it, and I have heard from one of the suppliers that it can be done. Uh, just don't know how well it how well it can produce chlorine.

SPEAKER_02 11:43

Well, it's certainly interesting. It's so it's way above my pay grade, let's face it.

SPEAKER_04 11:49

People smarter than me need to be looking at that.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

We need someone with a very good chemistry background. So I'll put this shout out, David from WA, if you're listening to this. Maybe you need to get onto that.

SPEAKER_05 12:01

Anyway, we'll leave that at that. Some of the um some of the emails that we have received in the last week, though, is from our suppliers, our main suppliers, they're changing their free charges. Whereas it used to be you would order at$500, but anything after$500, say, you would have free freight. Now they've gone up to six, six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred dollars, obviously, to cover the cost of the fuel consumption that they have now. But whether this is going to change and go back down is going to be interesting to see when things do normalize. But I'd say that's probably the only other price increase that we've seen in the last few weeks to a month.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

Yeah. It's I don't think, Nick, do you get much freight charges? Like you're in Brisbane, so most freight would come to you relatively cheaply or any free, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_04 12:57

We we have minimums for free freight, which we try to adhere to. We did have one supplier recently, uh, and they've just implemented a flat$15 fee, no matter what you order.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

So uh No freight costs were always something that I dealt with as a a regional retailer. Freight was something that I constantly had to deal with with quite sizable minimal purchases, minimum purchases to get free freight, but more often not, yes, a freight charge was applied. Look, that's understandable, especially in this current economy. But we don't want to be all doom and gloom today. We do want to be proactive for our listeners. So we know we're all starting to feel the pinch, and we all are a bit worried or concerned about what is the next season's going to look like. We really don't know. But all we can do is control what we're in charge of or what is at our fingertips. And Shane, this brought up a topic that you were discussing actually a couple of weeks ago, and it becomes even more poignant now, and that is quoting.

SPEAKER_05 14:03

Yeah, 100%. I mean, knowing how and when to quote accurately. So, an example, there were a couple of fairly big jobs that I attended to about a month ago installations. One of them was they changed from a cartridge filter to a media filter. And New Zealand states if that's the case, then we need to run a waistline into the septic as part of the house. You can't just go into the stormwater or into the garden. So this pipe had to go underneath the house. We could get under there, it was it was accessible, but I didn't notice how tight it was getting in actually to the end of the house where the pipe had to go through the wall and into the drain. And it wasn't until I was actually there and it was I was on my back, and the house was literally in my face, you know, the frame of the house. And it was so difficult just to try and and I'm I'm there by myself as well, obviously, having to cut the pipe, measure it, join it, keep it as level as possible, go out, go to the outside of the house, make sure everything's lined up, and then go back around. As soon as you start manipulating the pipe, it moves, and you think, you know, is it lined up with the drain again? So this this job, just that particular part, just took a lot longer than what it should have done. That was one example of one job, but I had quoted the job, and in New Zealand, when you quilt a job, it's very difficult to change that price. So, my mistake, I should have potentially just added a few hours, a few extra hours on, potentially onto the labor, or I should have provided an estimate to the client. So, with an estimate, you can take in variables, but that was a lesson learned, and it's just how happy to be there was two jobs like within the space of two weeks, and it was like better help on learn. So, yeah, though it's I guess a lot of it is always going to come down to experience. Every job is always going to be different, guarding on what the situation is, and I guess over time with your experience, you are going to become better at quilting. But I wanted your guys' opinions as well. I mean, you've both been in business for very long times. It'd be interesting to find out if you did if zero was back in the day when you started your business, how many quotes you've actually sent out. That would be quite interesting to find out. But um, you've obviously sent out quite a lot of quotes in the past, and just wondering if you had any tips or tricks in order to if you see a job and you go, Oh, it's going to be a little bit challenging, how would you go about it?

SPEAKER_04 16:54

You go, Nick. I think, yeah, experience does play a big part in it and looking for those variables that are going to be outside your scope of works. You know, when a lot of the quoting that we do, we would always sort of go work off the the worst case scenario for it for a lot of instances. But you will, as you get that little bit more experience, realize, oh, you know, this could potentially happen. But as you get more experience, you get better at what you do as well. So there's there's certain things that we do that we look at with some uh some jobs and some of the bigger commercial jobs, putting in sort of like uh an allowance for let's say 30% um on our labor for those incidentals that might pop up. Um, because yeah, it's so hard to foresee with a lot of these jobs what's actually going to happen. Installed the chlorinator for last week. I went back today to replace a non-return valve at the front of the pump, which I didn't have. And I could hear something rattling around in the front of the pump, and lo and behold, there was a rock in it. But every time in the suction line, every time I would turn the pump off, it would suck back down through the hole, through the pipe. And it was just very, very difficult to get turn it on, suck it up, trying to get it right in the right position that I could grab it. And yeah, I would never have foreseen something like that.

SPEAKER_02 18:12

And that's the hard thing is planning for the unforeseeable. So I would actually say one of my things that we like to do is quote for what we can control. So if we know that we're replacing the filter and what the plumbing allowance is for that, obviously it's very easy to quote for that. But if you're doing a job like you were doing, Shane, where you know that you've got to run a length of pipe and that it's going to take time, we would quote the things that we could control and then we would estimate the things that we couldn't. So that quote I would do by way of this is to supply and install the filter in the location of the plant. Not included in this quote is the running of the pipe to the storm water pit um or the sewer point, whatever you run it to. We estimate that that's going to be X amount. However, this is not something that we can um quote for, quote accurately for. And so that they sort of get a partial quote. And then they get you you've got some leeway there. Um look, let's face it, we often I don't want to say pluck a figure out of the air, but we do estimate and we we assume that it's gonna take us two hours or three hours. We assume that it's going to be about sixty dollars in fittings. Some we win, some we lose. Some we might have allowed three hours four, but it's only taken us two hours, we have a win. Others we allow three hours and it takes us four, we lose. So you hope that they even out in the wash, as they say. But yes, I would say obviously estimate if if you can't quote and give reasons to and be very direct as to what the quote includes and what it doesn't include, so that you have some control there. And you could even put in like builders do in theirs, should the owner or should selections or options or location change, then additional costs will be incurred to be discussed at that point in time. Something like that. Because I know that I've done a quote on the relocation of equipment for a client to only have Scott arrive there and the client's gone, oh yeah, I don't want it there anymore. I've decided I want it over here. Because they've had someone come around for dinner and they've been talking about where they're going to move the equipment to, and they've decided they want to move it into a completely different location than what you've quoted. Or maybe it was a new heater and they're worried about the noise near a bedroom or something like that. So things can change, but you need to make sure that it's very specific. We used to do a lot of plumb-ins, full plumb-ins, full equipment installs. And so we were very clear about where our responsibility started and stopped because it was the pool builder's responsibility to supply the lines up to the location of the plant and equipment bed. And then that way we wouldn't be turning up and expected to run 15 or 20 meters of pipe because that could be a really big cost that we hadn't foreseen. Does that help at all, Shane?

SPEAKER_05 21:45

Yeah, yeah, I think it does actually. Definitely quilt in, yeah, with everything that you can see. I mean, equipment, if if you've locked a quilt in for two weeks, four weeks, and you do have a price increase, excuse me, and you do have a price increase on the um the equipment, the supplier is good. It is the supplier will always hold that initial price that you've quilted. So, I mean, in that sense, you know, you're not gonna have any issues with price variations when it comes to equipment. So, yeah, definitely supplying a full quilt on equipment, but yeah, that estimate with the labor, maybe a few little parts, yeah. I think that's a very good idea. I've got or just send in an estimate in general.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

You can actually put in your quotes subject to price increase from supplier. So that's my understanding. Might be different in New Zealand. But if like it's that's sort of like an exception or an exclusion. So if you're making that very clear up front, then uh and and like you might need to put a limit on it or something like that, maybe. But Most of the time suppliers give us probably thirty days notice of price increase, wouldn't you say, guys?

SPEAKER_06 23:00

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:01

And so if we're giving our c clients uh and keep it to 30 days, then that way we are a lot less likely to have issues because if the clients accepted it within the 30 days and we've ordered that stock within the 30 days, we know that there hasn't been any price increases.

SPEAKER_04 23:20

Yeah. There's one frame. Sorry. Do you put a time frame on your quoting at the moment, Shane?

SPEAKER_05 23:27

Yeah, we've always done two weeks. So since day one, we've done two weeks. We don't want to leave it any longer. But then we feel that it gives the client a bit more of a a kick up a bum if they are actually being serial. A good point. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Yeah. So yeah, I think making sure that you have a and that's even more important at the moment, with prices being so fluid, like they're they're changing quite rapidly, they're going up substantially. We want to make sure that we're not going to be held to any quotes that we can't honour. Yeah, making sure that you do put that limited period and and maybe at the moment a two-week gap or allowance for a quote to be accepted is is probably not a bad thing. But I always did 30 days and as Nick does.

SPEAKER_06 24:17

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

Yeah, it's probably um it's probably a good thing to do two weeks. So I did a quick look on the business.gov.ae website, and it's there's a list of what to include in a quote. So a written quote should have include at least your business name, Australian business number, and contact details. The customer's name and contact details, a clear description of the work or service. Itemized and total costs include goods and services tax if applicable, any variations or revisions discussed. So that's where I said like to put that in, like about revisions. Um payment terms and conditions such as due date and late payment penalties, preferred payment method, work start and finish dates, quote expiry date, and space for the customer's acceptance. So obviously these days with email, I think it's quite common to just accept an email back from the client. That was something I was always very adamant about. So if somebody would ring me and say, Hey, I'd like to accept your quote, can you go ahead? I'd say, Yep, no worries whatsoever. Can you just flick me back in a return email? Like grab my email quote, just return it to me and say, Thanks. Um, we accept, please proceed. Then you've got their written permission or authority to go ahead with it. The last thing you want to do is then have have a he said, she said argument over I did or didn't accept the quote or I did or we did or didn't negotiate a different price. You don't want those sort of headaches.

SPEAKER_05 26:02

That's a good thing about Xero as well. If you're sending quilts from Xero, they have the option to actually click the accept so everything goes through the books. Um not sure if you said that you've tried it yourself, Nick, but Buffazone have just introduced a quilting tool as well.

SPEAKER_04 26:22

Yeah, so we've been using it for uh a while now, and yeah, it allows you to create templates in there so you can have all your wording set out for all of your quotes. So if you've got a a standard quote for a chlorinator and it can include all those little variations or you know your scope of work, so it's um a bit quicker. But also, yeah, when you do learn from your mistakes and uh this this customer did this and they didn't say this and we said that, well, then it's included for next time and it's just easier for the next for the next quote and just slowly build it up.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Yeah, that's exactly it. It's it's about learning from previous mistakes or experiences, I'd say, as you've learnt by rummaging around under somebody's house for far too long. Um so you've learnt from that mistake and you won't repeat it. Yeah. So how can we avoid it in the future? And I always say, don't try and reinvent the wheel each time. Having quoting templates is a really good way to go. I even have a quoting um spreadsheet and have all different products and all different um parts and labor on that quoting um spreadsheet. And then basically I would just go through, we would populate it obviously with the prices. Now I was going to say each season, but at the moment I'd be increasing the prices every bloody week, putting um our prices in, the buy price, the sell price, and and then the quantities, and it would actually calculate it for me. So it would actually show us our margins straight away. So we'd go, okay, we've got a little bit more wriggle room there. I can sharpen the pencil on this one, or there's not a lot of room on this one, I need to make an allowance for um some what ifs. So I was gonna say, or maybe an ID 10T tax.

SPEAKER_05 28:19

Um, or uh what is it when you just mentioned that he sharpened the pencil? It's not a saying that I heard before. There was a quote that I sent out, I think it was at the end of last year, and the client accepted, but at the bottom he said, sharpen your pencil on this quote. I was like, Countless time. Does he want me to write him a letter? So it's like, oh, that's what it means. So yeah, never heard that, never heard that saying before.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

He'd asked you to sharpen your pencil on the quote after he'd accepted it.

SPEAKER_05 28:52

He did, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:53

Well, you're not gonna sharpen it. He's accepted it.

SPEAKER_05 28:56

Yeah, I think I did knock off a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 28:59

And it's important to also make sure that you include things like, and I've been caught on this one, believe me, I got you, and you only get caught once when it's a powerful one. I had a client who um I did a uh quote for for a I think it was a heat pump. It was$8,000. And at the bottom of his quote, it said that there would be a 1.25% surcharge for all credit card payments. So I put it in the quote. Always very clear about that. But then what happened is his invoice was sent out to him and it didn't have the 1.2 because we didn't know whether he was gonna pay by credit card or not. And in those days, because things weren't so automated with surcharges and whatnot, customers would ring up and we would process their credit card over the phone manually, or they would come into the shop. Uh, but their invoice was always invoiced for the actual amount of the invoice, not for not including a surcharge, because we didn't know if they're gonna bank transfer it or how they were gonna pay it. Anyway, he came into the shop and he paid it. And not only did he pay it with his credit card, he paid it with one of those premium credit cards that are about a 3% surcharge. So on$800, when you are counting all the bins and the hours and the meters of pipe that you're doing,$240 in surcharges is a lot to stomach.

SPEAKER_05 30:35

Yeah, it's not ideal.

SPEAKER_02 30:36

No. So you gotta make sure that, yes, include things like surcharges or credit card surcharges on your on your quotes too. Um, because yeah, I went back to him and I said, Well, I need to charge your credit card for the surcharge. And he said, No, I came in and paid it. You accepted my paym when your staff accepted your my my payment. And I said, Well, actually on your quote, it stays. And he said, Luck with that. And that's where the PIA tax, that's where the PIA tax comes in, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04 31:11

Just catch him next time.

SPEAKER_02 31:12

Uh check it, check it up to the memory banks, that's for sure. So I think in this day and age, especially at the moment with the way the market is and pricing is just so uncontrollable, let's face it. We just really need to make sure that we're working smarter and that we are like ordering smarter. All of those things as well. But we were quoting, making sure that we're leaving some allowance in there, shortening our acceptance times. I don't think there's much else we can do really.

SPEAKER_04 31:48

Customers are getting smarter as well, so we need to make sure that yeah, we're doing all the things by the book.

SPEAKER_02 31:54

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And having a good payment system too, so that we can try and get those payments in quickly. So always always helpful.

SPEAKER_05 32:05

Definitely take a deposit. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

There is rules though around how much of a deposit you can take. Do you know what they are in New Zealand?

SPEAKER_05 32:16

Um, I don't we uh take fifty percent.

SPEAKER_02 32:20

Fifty or fifteen?

SPEAKER_05 32:22

Fifteen, five zero.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 32:25

I think ours is still know what the rule is though.

SPEAKER_02 32:28

I think ours is a lot less. Do you recall, Nick?

SPEAKER_04 32:32

No, I'm not sure. I I I've never um researched that.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Smaller contracts, three and a half thousand to twenty thousand, should not incur deposits more than ten percent inclusive of labor and materials. And projects over twenty percent require a five percent deposit. So um that's under the um domestic building contracts act of twenty of two thousand. So that's um yeah. I knew it was I knew so um yeah, I'm not Yeah, that's very low, actually. Yeah, it is. Um it will probably vary state to state. So I would suggest um having a look at at your local at your state, but just having a look at QBC C, Nick, because I know that's your state. Yeah, um, the maximum deposit for works valued at 3,300 or less is 20%. Yeah, at works valued at 3,300 to 20,000, it's 10% of the contract price. So it's actually very small, and I think they really need to review that. Uh, especially when you're shelling out um quite a bit of money in plant and equipment. Like if you're buying an$8,000 heat pump for somebody and you're ordering it in, that's a lot to to carry, uh, to carry for that client. It actually says the contractor can't claim um more than 50% of the contract price, including the deposit, until at least 50% of the work on site has been completed.

SPEAKER_06 34:16

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

So um definitely worth finding out in your state. Let me do a quick look in um New South Wales and see if I can see that and what percentage you used to take a link? Depended on the client. Um, and I say that because I live in a small country area where I've probably known most of my clients for most of my time in business. So some of them I didn't require a deposit at all, to be quite honest. But if I was doing a solar installation or a heat pump installation or a spa sale, then they were they were large items and I generally was about 20 to 25%. And so, yeah, I'm looking at the New South Wales website, but it doesn't actually give it to me as clearly as it did in Queensland. But I would assume that it would be something very similar. New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland tend to be aligned on a few of these things. So aware of um of your state requirements. But anyway, well, I think that brings us to a close for today's topic. I hope we've given our listeners something proactive to go back and look at in their businesses to see how they can um maybe do things a little better, leave themselves less open to risk or exposure, to being uh under a floor doing a lot of work and not being paid for it. But no, seriously, it's an important time. Money is tight, prices are going up. Make sure you do your homework, make sure you do your research, get your prices right, tighten your contract terms, and also make sure that you leave an allowance for unforeseeables, or maybe, like I said, maybe an exclusions. So this is what we're quoting for, this is what's not quoted for, this will be over and above. So for the things that you can't estimate. But thank you guys. Thank you, Nick, thank you, Shane. And um, listeners, thank you very much for joining us. We always appreciate you lending us your ears. We hope you've got something beneficial out of today's episode. Remember, if you have any topic suggestions or questions, we would love to hear from you. Drop us a line at talkingpools at gmail.com and Rudy will serve that request out to the most applicable podcast host. Actually got that right this week. Normally I follow over that. But anyway, until next week, guys, we hope you'll join us again on Mondays down under on the Talking Pools podcast. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_06 36:56

Thank you.