The 76-chair contract I turned down

Business Hub · Working With the Trade

The offer

Seventy-six chairs, going into student accommodation in Scotland. One fabric, one repeated job, all delivered at once. Seventy-five pounds a chair.

On paper it is the kind of enquiry you wait for. Nearly six thousand pounds, a single client, no fabric books to post out, no customer changing their mind about the colour. Months of guaranteed work.

I turned it down, and I would turn it down again. Here is the whole reasoning, because this is the sort of decision people make alone and then worry about for weeks afterwards.

1. The rate was the first problem, not the last

Seventy-five pounds a chair is a price, not a rate. The only number that matters is what is left per hour once materials are paid for.

Work it through. Fabric, foam where needed, sundries, and the labour to strip and rebuild a chair properly. By the time the materials came out, the job was paying somewhere around ten pounds an hour of bench time.

That is below what the workshop costs to run before I have eaten. And a contract does not get better with volume — a job that loses money on one chair loses it seventy-six times.

Volume magnifies whatever the margin already is. If the margin is thin, scale is not the fix. It is the trap.

Run any large enquiry through the cost estimator before you get excited about the total. The total is the least useful number in the whole conversation.

2. They wanted the new fabric put over the old

This was the point where the job stopped being a bad price and started being something I could not do at all.

Covering over an existing cover is not just untidy. It is uncertifiable.

The UK fire tests are run on the composite — the cover and the filling tested together, as they will actually be assembled. If I fit new cloth over the old cover without stripping it, then I do not know what is underneath, the old cover is now acting as an unspecified interliner, and there is no combination anywhere that has been tested which matches what I have just built.

I could not issue a compliance statement for that work. Not because I would not — because no honest person could.

The practical objections are almost beside the point, but they are real:

• You cannot inspect the frame, the webbing or the springs if you never take the old cover off
• Degraded foam stays degraded, now wrapped in new cloth so nobody can see it
• Years of use stays in the chair — dirt, sweat, whatever else, sealed in
• The extra bulk makes the chair look wrong and the lines soft
• Your staples go into a rail already perforated by the last two coverings

The word for the finished article is not reupholstered. It is covered up.

3. Student accommodation is contract work, not domestic

Furniture in student accommodation is not a sofa in someone's front room. It is a public building with sleeping accommodation, and the specification is a step up.

Contract seating falls under BS 7176, which sets hazard categories by the environment the furniture goes into. Student halls sit at medium hazard as a minimum, and medium hazard means crib 5 — BS 5852 ignition source 5, tested on the cover and filling together.

Fillings still have to satisfy the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 as amended on top of that. Contract work does not take you outside the domestic rules. It adds to them.

None of that can be met by putting a length of cloth over an existing chair. There was no version of the job that both did what they asked and met the standard the building required.

If you are unsure where a job sits, the fire regulations checker walks through both regimes.

4. Ask who carries the risk in ten years

This is the part upholsterers skip, and it is the part that matters most.

If there is a fire in that building and the furniture is implicated, an investigation does not stop at the client who bought it cheap. It follows the trail to whoever last worked on the chairs, and that is a workshop with a name and an address.

Two things follow from that.

Your insurance may not help you. Product liability cover is not usually much use when you knowingly supplied work you had been told did not meet the specification. Read your own policy wording — you may be less covered than you assume.

A written instruction from the client does not transfer the obligation. You are the one with the trade knowledge. Being told to do it that way is not a defence when you knew better, and it will not read well anywhere it might be read out.

Seventy-six chairs is also seventy-six chances. Any one of them is enough.

5. The chairs were not worth the work

The last thing, and on its own it would have been enough.

They were cheap imported frames. Thin softwood, stapled, glued and already flexing. Putting twenty hours of skilled labour into a frame with a few years left in it is not restoration, it is decoration on a short-life product.

The failure is not the point of sale. It is eighteen months later when the joints go, and nobody remembers who supplied the chairs. They remember who last worked on them.

Ask of any large job: is the piece worth the labour? If the answer is no, the price does not fix it.

What nobody counts

Even if the price and the specification had been right, there is a set of costs that never appears on the quote.

• Capacity. Seventy-six chairs is months of bench time. Everything else in the diary either waits or goes elsewhere, and the customers who go elsewhere may not come back.
• Cash flow. Materials for seventy-six chairs is a serious outlay up front. Institutional clients pay on their own terms, and sixty to ninety days is common. You are lending them the money.
• Storage. Where do seventy-six chairs sit while you work through them? In whose insured space?
• Transport. Collection and delivery of a volume like that is not a trip in the van.

"There'll be more work after this one"

There is always more work after this one.

Take a job at ten pounds an hour to win a relationship and you have not won a client. You have set a price. Every subsequent enquiry starts from that number, and the client who wanted it cheap the first time has not changed their mind about the second.

The work that follows a bad rate is more work at a bad rate.

How I said no

Briefly and without a lecture. There is nothing to gain from explaining at length why someone's plan is wrong.

"Thanks for thinking of me. I can't take it on — what you're describing wouldn't meet the fire requirements for that building, and I'm not able to certify work done that way. If the spec changes so the chairs are stripped and rebuilt to crib 5, I'd be glad to look at it again."

That leaves the door open on terms I could actually work to, and it puts the reason in writing without arguing about it. They went elsewhere. Somebody did the job.

What would have made it a yes

I am not against contract work. It can be the steadiest money in the trade, and I have taken hotel work happily. What this job needed was:

1. Chairs stripped properly, so the composite is known and can be certified
2. A written hazard category from whoever is responsible for the building, on the job sheet before a single chair is touched
3. Materials specified to crib 5, with certificates kept for every one
4. A rate built from bench hours, not a per-chair figure handed to me
5. Staged payment, because no small workshop should carry six thousand pounds of an institution's materials
6. Frames worth rebuilding

Every one of those is normal on a properly run contract. None of them was on offer here.

The thing worth remembering

The hardest part was not the decision. It was watching a large number walk out of the workshop and wondering whether I had just been precious about it.

I hadn't. The job would have paid below cost, could not have been done compliantly, and would have left my name on seventy-six chairs in a building full of sleeping students for the next decade.

Turnover is not the same as profit, and neither is the same as sleeping at night.