Customer financing
Win the job. Keep the name.
Finance is how a customer says yes to work they cannot settle in one go. It leaves you a customer whose equipment you fitted. That is something worth servicing.
Get startedBefore you offer anything
You have already been asked.
Most tradespeople meet this from the customer's side. Somebody asks whether they can pay monthly. Their car and their kitchen were both sold that way. Today the answer is usually no.
With finance in the quote the answer is yes. You arrange nothing, and you do not decide who is accepted.
The moment, not the trade
When it comes up.
There is no list of jobs this is for. It comes up on work a household cannot settle in one go: a boiler, a roof, a bathroom. What a partner lends on is their rule.
- They ask first
- Somebody asks whether they can pay monthly, before you have raised it. It is the most common way this starts.
- They go quiet on the total
- Nothing about the work is in dispute. They stop at the amount and say they will have a think. The think is about where it comes from.
- They ask for the cheaper option
- The repair rather than the replacement. The smaller unit, or the part that can be done now. The scope is cut to fit a number, not the property.
- It has to be done by a date
- Before winter, before a baby arrives, before a sale completes. Neither the work nor the timing is optional. Only the money can move.
- You are quoting against somebody
- Two quotes, one with a way to pay for it. The trade's own finance providers call this where a job is lost. Rarely on the work.
- It failed without warning
- A boiler in February, a leak through a ceiling. Nobody budgets for the thing that breaks. Whoever can least afford it needs it today.
What the job leaves behind
You fitted it. You know it.
- The equipment is yours to know
- You chose it, fitted it and commissioned it. Its age, its model, everything awkward about where it sits. The next firm would have to find out.
- It wants servicing every year
- Most of what gets financed needs servicing. You can offer a plan on the thing you installed, to a customer already on your books.
- The history starts with you
- The quote, the job, the finance and the plan sit against one customer. The service record begins at the installation, not at whoever they called next.
- They have a reason to stay
- A customer paying for work you did, on a plan that services it, is someone you hear from again. Not a number in a drawer.
How the offer runs is a separate subject. Where it sits in the quote, who decides, and when the money reaches you.
Full financing details