Most quotes bundle materials and labour into one number. Here's why that's the opposite of how Harry works, and what it means for you.
Most quotes in the trade come as a single number: one figure for the whole job, materials and labour bundled together with no breakdown. It's simple to read, but it also means you have no real way of knowing how much of that figure is the actual cost of the fence panels, the sandstone, the hardcore, versus the work itself. If a quote feels expensive, or a competitor's quote is cheaper, you're left guessing why, without ever knowing what's actually driving the difference.
Every quote is broken down into two figures: materials, charged at trade cost with no markup, and labour, priced separately. That's true whether it's a small fencing repair or a full garden wall rebuild. As Harry puts it in real quotes sent to customers, in his own words, not marketing copy written after the fact:
"I believe this is the fairest way to work as you know exactly what you're paying for and I'm not making any extra on materials."
"Maybe I'm too honest for my own good, but I like to be fair and honest and this is just the way I work."
"I do this on all of my landscaping jobs because you know exactly what you're paying for and I make no extra on materials. For me this is the fairest way to work."
A lot of trades add a percentage on top of material costs to cover handling, storage, delivery coordination and the risk of prices moving before the job starts. That's a legitimate business model, plenty of good tradespeople work that way. HSH Services simply doesn't. Materials are priced at what they actually cost, and that figure is shown to you as its own line, separate from the cost of the actual work: the digging, the laying, the pointing, the finishing.
A single bundled figure is undeniably simpler to write and simpler to read at a glance. The reason HSH Services doesn't work that way comes back to a fairly straightforward principle: if you're spending money on your garden, you should be able to see what it's actually being spent on. A bundled figure asks you to trust that it's fair without giving you any way to check. A broken-down figure lets you see for yourself, and ask questions if anything looks off, rather than just taking it on faith.
It also changes the conversation during the job itself. If ground conditions mean a bit more hardcore is needed than first estimated, that's a materials conversation with a clear, checkable cost attached, not a vague renegotiation of one lump sum with no reference point to work from.
Honesty cuts both ways. Material prices aren't fixed in stone, they're taken from supplier websites and can fluctuate slightly between the quote and the job starting. Trade discount usually brings the final figure in a little cheaper than the number first quoted, but it's not a guarantee, and it's flagged as a possibility upfront rather than glossed over. That's a deliberate part of working transparently: telling customers what might change, not just what's fixed.
When a quote arrives split into materials and labour, it's worth knowing what should sit in each column. The materials line should cover everything physically going into the ground or the structure: hardcore, sand, cement, membrane, paving, timber, fixings, post-crete, and anything else specific to the job. The labour line covers the actual work: digging, laying, building, pointing, and the time that takes, including disposal of anything that's been removed.
If you're comparing quotes from different tradespeople, a broken-down quote is far easier to compare fairly than two single, bundled figures. You can ask each one what's included in their materials line, whether disposal is covered, whether delivery is included, and get a genuinely like-for-like comparison rather than guessing why one number is higher than another.
A few questions worth asking any tradesperson about their pricing, not just HSH Services: is the materials figure an estimate or a fixed price, is there a markup built in even if it's not shown separately, what happens if material costs change between the quote and the job starting, and is disposal of old materials included or charged separately. The answers tell you a lot about how transparently a business actually operates, beyond whatever the quote document itself says.
On a recent garden wall project, the brick match a customer wanted was expensive. Rather than just quoting it and moving on, Harry flagged that a slightly less exact match was available at a significantly lower cost through a trade contact, and let the customer decide which mattered more to them, the closer match or the lower price. That's only possible because materials are priced and discussed openly in the first place, not folded into a single number where that kind of choice is invisible.
This isn't a policy for big jobs only. Whether it's patios and paving, decking, driveways, or turfing and landscaping, and whether the job is in Horsham, Crawley or one of the other areas covered, materials and labour are always shown as two separate figures. Read more about how HSH Services approaches every job on the About page.
Get a quote for your project and you'll get the same breakdown: what the materials actually cost, and what the labour costs, as two clear numbers, not one figure you have to take on trust.