Not sure if this would work now but we used to send the customer into the shop to get a price, and they'd be quoted retail price. And we'd not only charge full price labour, we'd often get the materials trade and charge full price to the customer. If they were regular customers we'd go halves. We were VAT registered so it we could also claim the vat back but we'd take a hit on competing on price when ours included VAT. So it's swings and roundabouts.
We used to also buy bulk underfloor heating and on those jobs we made a killing on the install, the supply direct of heating, and the supply via a trade retail outlet for the rest of the materials. And we used to get a lot of conservatory jobs all over the country for that. In summer we'd book bathrooms in for the winter (the 9 months of winter we have that is so pretty flexible) but the three main sunny months when conservatories go up we used to pretty much only try to do them.
You can make your business work differently to competition doing this sort of stuff and changing the business model slightly. And if you do the right thing your customers love it, get a nice job at a fair price, and you make a nice income out of it.
Though that was some time ago. Pretty sure the model would still work. But perhaps the pricing would need to be factored in with current issues such as more tilers aiming low these days to get work, and more tilers quoting, that sort of thing.
But you don't always have to give trade prices to your customers, of course.
