You charge a fee? !!*!$$$!! ?

Although my business, Lighting for Gardens, is mainly concerned with supply of quality garden and outdoor lighting from around the world, I still do a lot of design work to help clients who want a creative garden lighting system without the guesswork. Most clients are happy to pay a modest fee, starting at £100 plus VAT for a small garden, for what I call professional lightscaping - creating that very different night time garden which a bit of imagination and a lot of experience can achieve. But sometimes I get the "You charge a fee? !!*!$$$!! ?" reaction from people who don't understand the amount of work involved, or who don't appreciate that producing a quotation for equipment supply means doing almost a full design first. "Other suppliers will provide a free design" is usually a try-on, as most people worth their salt in my business will charge a fee of some kind, and where its true all I can say is that the phrase "you get what you pay for" has a lot going for it. What I've got going for me is 15 years' experience of designing garden lighting systems - achieving garden lighting effects beyond a client's imagination in most cases, but learning from mistakes in my early years when I achieved my omelettes only by breaking a few eggs. So that's what you are paying for. And the fee does something else - its not a lot of money, but its enough to weed out the time wasters, the wishful thinkers who think you can light a garden for £100 without having to lay any cables) and the brain pickers - the latter being that noxious breed who lead suppliers or designers on with the lure of possible business purely for the purpose of collating information which can be used for the DIY job, or the bloke round the corner they can pay cash to.