Valerie Hayes: “A full diary can actually hide underpricing very effectively”

The Upholsterer's Pricing Guide, by Valerie Hayes of Atelier Valérie Hayes Upholstery, launches at the Festival of Upholstery on 2 October. After around 30 years in accountancy, Hayes retrained as a professional upholsterer, bringing a head for numbers together with a love of chairs. As those two worlds came together, she began developing a practical business model for understanding what upholstery work really needs to earn.

She also wanted the guide to start a wider conversation in the trade: not about competing on price, but about more openness and trust around how the work is valued.

The 68-page guide looks at true costs, pricing structure, billable time, profit, logistics, market testing and the boundaries that help make the work sustainable. RRP £49; pre-order £42.75 including UK P&P; £40 when collected at the festival. She answered eight questions for The Furniture Magazine, in her own words.

You spent around 30 years in accountancy before becoming an upholsterer. What did each profession teach you about the other?

Accountancy taught me that numbers tell you what is really happening in a business, whether you like the answer or not. Upholstery taught me that the numbers also have to allow for the reality of skilled, physical, creative work.

When the two collided, I realised I already had the bones of a business model. I understood costs, margins and cash flow, but now I was applying them to something I loved doing with my hands.

What surprised me was how often very skilled upholsterers knew exactly how to construct a chair but had never been taught how to construct a price.

Why can an upholsterer have a busy workshop and a full diary but still not be particularly profitable?

Because busy and profitable are not the same thing.

You can have work booked months ahead and still be absorbing costs yourself: collection and delivery, sourcing, admin, conversations with clients, ordering materials, unexpected problems and all those little pieces of time that never appear on the invoice.

If the price only covers the hours spent physically upholstering the furniture, the business is quietly paying for everything else.

A full diary can actually hide underpricing very effectively.

Say an upholsterer wants a take-home income of around £35,000. What does the business actually need to earn to produce that?

This is where people often confuse what they want to earn with what the business needs to earn.

If you want a personal income of around £35,000, the business has to generate considerably more than £35,000. It first has to pay for the workshop, insurance, tools, machinery, utilities, bookkeeping, marketing, vehicle costs, holidays, sickness, training and all the other costs of trading, while still leaving room for profit and contingency.

Then you have to spread that requirement across the hours you can genuinely sell.

The guide works through that calculation in detail, because understanding the difference between working hours and billable hours is one of the foundations of sustainable pricing. That calculation can completely change what somebody thinks their hourly rate needs to be.

Your guide encourages upholsterers to compare what they quoted with what a job actually cost. What can that exercise reveal?

Almost everything.

I think every completed job gives you data.

Look at what you thought the job would take, what it actually took, what materials you used, what you forgot to charge for and what happened around the edges.

Perhaps stripping took twice as long as expected. Perhaps there were six hours of sourcing and client communication. Maybe collection and delivery swallowed half a day. Or perhaps you priced it beautifully and it worked exactly as intended.

That information should feed directly into the next quote.

Pricing becomes much easier when you stop guessing from memory and start learning from finished jobs.

You distinguish between what a job needs to return and what the market will bear. How should an upholsterer use those two numbers?

They are two different pieces of information.

First, work out what the job actually needs to return for your business. That number comes from your costs, your time, the complexity of the work and the profit the business requires.

Then look at what your market will bear.

If the market will comfortably support your price, wonderful.

If it won't, simply reducing the price does not make the underlying cost disappear. You then have a business decision to make: change the service, become more efficient, work with a different market or decide that particular type of work is not commercially viable for you.

What I wouldn't do is use somebody else's price as the starting point for mine.

Where do good boundaries become financial controls rather than simply customer-service rules?

Very quickly.

A written scope, deposits, clear approvals, distinguishing an estimate from a quote, charging properly for additional work and documenting changes are all boundaries, but they are also financial controls.

If a chair is stripped and you discover something unexpected, there needs to be a process for stopping, explaining it to the client and agreeing the additional work before continuing.

Without that boundary, the upholsterer often absorbs the time and cost.

Good boundaries aren't about becoming rigid with customers. They create enough clarity for everybody to know what has been agreed and allow the upholsterer to do the work properly without giving pieces of the job away.

If an upholsterer changed just one business habit after reading this interview, what would you want it to be?

Review every finished job.

Take ten minutes before you mentally move on to the next chair and ask: What did I quote? What did it actually cost me? How long did it really take? What did I give away? What would I charge next time?

You don't need to transform your pricing overnight.

If you make every completed job teach you something about the next one, your pricing becomes progressively more accurate and your business becomes stronger with it.

Who is the guide for, and who is it not for?

It's for upholsterers who want to understand whether their business is really working financially, whether they're newly self-employed, established but undercharging, or simply ready to look at their numbers more seriously.

It's for people who are good at the craft but were never really taught the business side: hourly rates, billable time, overheads, logistics, profit and reviewing whether a job actually performed as expected.

It's not for someone looking for a universal price list, a set of prescribed rates or a shortcut that tells them exactly what to charge. Every workshop, market and business is different, so judgement still matters.

The guide is there to help upholsterers work out what their own business needs to earn and make pricing decisions with more confidence.

The Upholsterer's Pricing Guide launches at the Festival of Upholstery, Birmingham, on 2 October. RRP £49; pre-order £42.75 including UK P&P; £40 when collected at the festival.

The Upholsterer's Pricing Guide: pre-order