President's Post - September 2026
A few weeks ago, we were flying signage and tools up a mountain by helicopter.
It was one of those jobs that reminds me why I love this industry. One week you’re putting ‘stickers on boards’ in the workshop, the next you’re working out the logistics of getting people, equipment and signage somewhere you can’t even drive to.
We’ve had a few jobs like that lately. Out-of-town installs, some highly technical fabrication, and jobs with a lot more moving parts than usual.
They’re interesting and challenging. They’re also incredibly easy to underquote.
And sometimes, despite all our experience, we simply stuff it up. We think something will take six hours and it takes eight. We underestimate how fiddly something is going to be. That’s business, and we can’t expect our customers to pay for every mistake we make. But then there are the unknowns.
The Unknowns
I’ve talked before about protecting our margins when material, freight or fuel costs change after we quote. But this is different. These are the things hiding underground, behind the fascia, or apparently inside the hardest concrete wall in New Zealand.
An out-of-town job runs a day longer because of something we couldn’t reasonably foresee. Suddenly it’s not just another eight hours of labour. It’s accommodation, meals, away allowances and maybe another day’s equipment hire.
Or you arrive onsite to dig a hole for a sign pole and discover the ground is rock-hard. Your 20-minute hole becomes a two-hour ordeal.
Or you install a fascia and discover the building behind it is rotten, or there’s a weird cavity and you can’t find a decent fixing point.
Recently we had to attach signage to a concrete wall. No problem, we’ve done that a thousand times. Except this wasn’t the concrete we were expecting. We found ourselves killing drill bits and burning out our rotary hammer drill trying to penetrate what appeared to be around 100 MPa concrete when we’d expected something closer to 30 MPa.
You can’t always see that one coming.
We are Good Buggers
And this is where I think our industry has an interesting habit. We’re a bunch of good buggers. We want to get the job done and we don’t want to make a fuss – we certainly don’t want the client feeling like we’re cheating them. So quite often we sigh, grab another drill bit, work the extra couple of hours and quietly absorb the cost ourselves.
But should we? Probably not. If a builder opens up a wall and discovers something completely unexpected, you can bet there’s a conversation coming about a variation.
Maybe we need to get a little more comfortable having that conversation too. For me, the key word is communication.
Communicate Early
And that starts at the quote. What assumptions have we made when we priced the job?
If we’re installing posts, perhaps our quote needs to state that excavation is based on normal ground conditions and doesn’t allow for rock, buried concrete or unidentified obstructions.
If we’re fixing to an existing building, what are we assuming about its condition and the suitability of the fixing points?
For remote work, how many days, accommodation nights and travel hours have we actually allowed for?
We don’t need a 14-page legal document every time we install a sign, but we do need to be clear about what we’ve priced and what assumptions we’ve based that price on.
Then comes the really important part: if something changes, communicate early.
Don’t spend six hours fighting with a problem, finish the job, and then surprise the client with an invoice that’s $1,000 higher than the quote. Stop. Take a photo. Ring the client.
“We’ve hit solid rock. We allowed for normal ground conditions, but this is going to take approximately another two hours and add $X. Are you happy for us to proceed?”
That’s a pretty reasonable conversation. The customer understands the problem and knows what it’s likely to cost before you carry on. And then document it. An email, text or note through your job-management system. It doesn’t need to become bureaucratic. It just needs to be clear, and you need a record to go back to if there is a problem with the invoice later.
Know the Difference
There is another side to this, of course: we need to own our mistakes. If I quote eight hours and my team takes ten because I underestimated the job, that’s probably on me.
But if we discover a rotten wall, buried concrete, concealed services or something nobody could reasonably have known about, that’s a different conversation. Knowing the difference matters.
Dust of your Terms of Trade
While thinking about this article, I went back through some of the resources NZSDA provides to members, and it was a good reminder that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
NZSDA has standard Terms of Trade as well as additional terms specifically for installation work. They cover things like scope of services, concealed services, the condition of the building or sub-fascia, access and circumstances where installation may need to be suspended.
But there’s an important catch. Having good Terms of Trade isn’t much use if your customer doesn’t know they exist. The NZSDA guidelines make it clear that customers need to know the terms apply, accept them, and we need to keep evidence of that acceptance.
So, are our Terms of Trade going out with our quotes? Are our customers accepting them? And does the person onsite with the drill in their hand know when to stop and make the phone call?
We don’t need to stop being good buggers. I hope we never do – it’s one of the things I love about our industry. But being a good bugger doesn’t mean our businesses should carry every unknown risk. We need healthy margins to employ people, invest in equipment and train apprentices.
So maybe this month, take another look at your quotes and dust off your Terms of Trade too. What assumptions are you making that your customer doesn’t know you’re making? And does your team know when to stop, pick up the phone and have the conversation?
Quote what you know. Be clear about what you don’t. And when the unexpected happens, communicate early. Most customers are pretty reasonable when we bring them along for the journey. And sometimes, being a good bugger means being fair to your own business as well.
Logan Sutton
Creative Director – Future Grafix
President – NZ Sign & Display Association