So, the $64 million question, how much does a driveway cost? Well, this is a touchy one because quite often we get calls into our office asking for prices over the phone for a driveway. Of course, we have over 1,800 driveways that we’ve installed. We have our own algorithm of everything those those jobs cost, so we have an idea when somebody’s telling me if it’s a 50 metre gravel drive or if it’s a 200 metre resin drive. We have a set of parameters that it might be to and from.

What could influence those prices?

There’s several things that could influence the prices, access is always a big one. I would never ever accept a price on the phone and go with a contractor until you’ve at least gotten someone to have a good look at it, done a proper survey and given you that price in writing.

Another thing is to be detailed. When you’re talking about price, you can have a starting price and a finishing price. This is why we give drawings with our driveway, when we give a budget we then back it up with a full set of CAD drawings. Now, you may be surprised to hear that at my age that I don’t like grey areas when we’re pricing. So, what we do, we encompass every detail into a CAD drawing.

There’ll be none of this “you thought”, “I said”, “when Darren came around”, everything will be highlighted and detailed in the drawing. So, when we do give you a price, it has a line under it, there’s no movement at all. And that is the most important point to get to when you’re doing a drive.

So many times we’ll lose a job by a 1,000 or £2,000 and we’ll get a client ring us back 3 months later and say, “I wish we’d have used you.” When I ask why, it’s because the drive started off at £5,000, a little bit of an experience, and it ended up at £10,000 and it changed halfway through. This is not acceptable, all of these details can and need to be pinned down at an early stage and underwritten. This is why this sector gets such a bad name in some realms of the press, and this is what we’re trying to eradicate.