Every time we get a domestic fuel bill we look again at the address expecting to see:

FAO The Head Stoker,
Engine Room,
The Titanic.

Our car tax and insurance is due, and for that price we gaze longingly out of the window expecting to see a Bugatti Veyron - instead our driveway is sporting the new Hyundai Pimple, resplendent in dog doo brown. It has all the speed of a Sunday morning fart, but still costs eighty notes to fill the tank.

And it goes without saying that your grocery bill will be as high as Mrs Walton's on the week that both Grandpa and Jim Bob came down with worms.

Your eldest daughter is taking up the trombone, your handsome son in spite of not knowing where Manchester is, requires another football strip, and it's the law that you must have a foreign holiday. So you give two grand to the owner of El Dungos Hotel for two weeks on a building site, and the pleasure of watching Mario gawping at your wife's fun bags.......take your Barclaycard bill and a bottle of Grappa into the bathroom.....and cry.

Everything else is going up like a fifty quid firework, so it's time for us to sit down and look at our break evens and selling prices.

In production industries like ours, perhaps one of the hardest factors in the equation is calculating the time taken and so cost to do a job. Prior to the fragmentation of the garment industry, large factories so understood the importance off this that they would often have at least one full time accountant, constantly sniffing his way up and down the production line.

Usually in a long black leather trench coat, with small round spectacles, a stick and a slight limp, Herr Timeundmotion would analyse every minute, every stitch, every cost and every mistake. In doing so he exactly calculated the selling price required, and kept Lord Textiles in tweeds and Bentleys.

But for most of us, busy making the tea with your left hand, printing with your right, phones on each ear and a sweeping brush lashed to your todger, this level of financial analysis is just not affordable. So what do we do?

Now this whole subject is not going to be easy for me. As my old maths teacher Dai Phillips said: "Stephenson, you are to basic arithmetic what Bernard Manning was to the triple jump." Sports fans among you may remember that Dai also represented Wales in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, in the board rubber throwing events - this all brings back bad memories. For those of you who do find maths enjoyable though and can do this stuff, by all means clear off and spot a train.

I sat down with my accountant, and posed him the problem - we need to explain in pub speak how to work out a selling price. An hour and a half passed, and what sounded like "Variable, fixed, profit fixed, break even, fixed overhead cost divided by labour cost... bongo bongo bongo..." but I pulled him back to this:

"You need thirty grand a year to avoid scurvy and rickets (before you pay any tax or national insurance).

That's 577 quid a week.

You've got £4,333 a month in fixed costs, like rent, rates and insurance.

That's a grand a week.

You've had an educated stab at how much your variable cost per T-shirt is - how much the shirt costs plus a bit of ink, plus how long it takes to print - let's call that £3.00.

Then you can work out the minimum sale price of your T-shirt by figuring out roughly how many Tshirts a week you can print - say with a following wind you can knock out 500.

You know the T-shirt plus ink plus labour is £3.00, so to print 500 T-shirts a week costs £3.00 x 500 = £1,500.

On to that you've added your fixed cost of £1,000 + your 577 quid wages = £3,077 a week, divided by the 500 T-s you can print, means they need to be sold at £6.15 each MINIMUM.

If you can print more T-s every week you can bring this price down. If you print less, up goes the price. Suck on that Dai Phillips.

This is all well and good - the accountant leaves having put us straight; leaps into his Corvette (my accountant's a man of many contradictions) and roars away - but for most of us there is a financial grand canyon between what we should charge, and what we actually do.

Who's going to call the customers and let them know about the price rises? Most of them go into a trance induced tribal dance shouting ‘Bad Juju' if you even ask permission to charge another 5p, let alone the extra quid we probably all need.

Perhaps it's a good time to grasp the nettle though - T-shirt prices are all going up, 5, 10 maybe 15%. It's about time though isn't it? It's a level playing field and they're still probably cheaper than I paid for them 18 years ago when I had a very silly idea about starting a business. And while we're letting our customers know about these unavoidable garment price rises, what better opportunity to build in a few extra percent for the print or the embroidery?

And now more than ever, thanks to Panorama, are we not in an atmosphere where we can say if it's terribly cheap, someone's probably had a terrible time making it? So we're buying a better shirt, with an ethical provenance, from a printer or embroiderer who cares about their staff and their environment. Let us charge more for it, and then you in turn sell it for more - for once my dear customer, let's all get well together.

I don't know most of you, and fortunately for most of you, you don't know me, but I'd like to guess that most of us have got one thing in common - we've all knocked our pipes out for years and never made any serious bunce. As far as I'm aware there's only one way to the Promised Land, and it's a big fat price rise in all areas of the industry.

I may not get there with you, the heat you know, the flies and this bloody leg of mine, I'd only slow you down; but leave me my revolver, a grenade and some water, I'll hold them up for you.....go on lads, calculators out and on to glory, you've earned it.

Paul

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