Get More Kitchen Fitting Work

Why kitchen fitting quotes get turned down

Because the sale often happened before you were involved.

A customer walks into a showroom, designs a kitchen, and is offered fitting as part of the package at the moment they are already spending. That is a hard offer to compete with, because it removes a decision.

Your market is the customer who declined it, who bought units online or from a supplier without fitting, and now needs someone. They arrive having already spent thousands, which means two things: they are price-sensitive on labour, and they are anxious, because they own a kitchen in boxes and no certainty about who will install it.

The second reason quotes fail is scope confusion. They do not know whether your price includes electrics, plumbing, gas, tiling, flooring, and making good. Nor do the other two quotes. So they compare three numbers that mean different things.

What the customer is actually weighing

Whether one person is responsible for the whole outcome.

They have already discovered a kitchen involves several trades. What they want is not to manage that. A fitter who says "I handle the electrician and the plumber, and I'll coordinate the gas engineer" is selling something different from one quoting labour only.

Where the work comes from

Suppliers without a fitting service, such as trade counters, online kitchen retailers and independents. The most reliable source in this trade, and worth building deliberately.

Builders who need a kitchen fitted inside a larger project.

Referrals, which are strong because a kitchen is the thing people show visitors.

Search, from customers who have bought units and need a fitter.

What separates you from the quote below yours

State exactly which trades are included and which the customer is arranging. This alone makes your quote the one they can understand.

Say what happens if units arrive damaged. It is common, it stalls jobs, and nobody addresses it in a quote. Having an answer signals you have done this a lot.

Explain the worktop gap. Templating happens after units are installed, and stone takes time to come back. A customer who is told this up front handles it; one who discovers it mid-job feels misled.

Be explicit about making good. Removing an old kitchen exposes damaged plaster and unfinished flooring. Saying whether that is in the price is one of the most common causes of a disputed final bill in this trade.

Making the money conversation easy

If you supply units, a kick-off of 25 to 30% is defensible. They are made to order and not returnable, and that is genuinely explicable.

Better still: have the customer pay the unit supplier directly. They own the goods, your exposure disappears, and the largest single payment in the project is no longer flowing through you. For a customer who has already spent heavily, that is a significant reassurance.

Getting started

Free to register. For kitchens the useful part is that the customer signs off stages, such as units delivered and checked, first fix, units installed and worktops, which converts the anxious middle of the job into a series of small confirmations rather than one long silence.