Hourly Rate For Christmas Decorating

Ged Comerford is the operational director of The Christmas Decorators, a UK-based company with 47 branches that employs about 400 people.
His business has decked the halls of the Buckinghamshire home of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, as well as David and Victoria Beckham's property.
His day starts around 6 a.m. and finishes around midnight — he gets around 400 emails a day and thousands of inquiries a season to decorate people's houses for the holidays.
Customers pay anywhere from $700 to $80,000 for custom decorations.
Here's his story, as told to freelance writer Zoe Rosenberg.
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I came on board at The Christmas Decorators in 2009 and now I'm one of the owners of the company.

We've got 47 branches across the UK now where we employ about 400 people, and the Aspen, Colorado, branch is still operating.

Before I got into Christmas decorating, I was in franchising of maintenance chemicals. It had nothing to do with Christmas at all, but this is much harder work.

A typical day this time of year is manic. My day starts around 6 a.m. and finishes around midnight.

In that time, I'm taking phone calls, speaking to clients, writing risk assessments and method statements for installations, and putting proposals together.

Customers flooded The Christmas Decorators' head office between September and December with 10,400 inquiries.

I'm dealing with lots and lots of emails — I get approximately 400 emails a day.

If I give last year as an example, just at the head office alone from September to December we handled 10,400 inquiries.

We can't take all the business. We disappoint more than we don't. We don't answer the phones because if we did, that's all we'd do. All our calls go through to a call center where they take all the inquiries, and they send the emails, too. Everybody gets responded to.

But if it's a big name, like Tiffany's, I'll talk to them straightaway.

SEE ALSO: The lucrative lives of professional Christmas decorators, who charge as much as $80,000 to deck a house's halls and say business is booming in 2020

In the past, we've worked with David and Victoria Beckham.

We were asked to turn up on Christmas Eve with Santa and reindeer and carol singers on the doorstep. We decorate Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne's home in England. They live in Buckinghamshire, in the home that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor used to live in.

Home exteriors get adorned with elaborate displays of lights, garlands, wreaths, bows, and trees.

Sharon's extravagant. She has the whole driveway decorated, all the trees and bushes and shrubs. She also has the outside of the house decorated, as well as the inside of the house and her study decorated. We always have to put up one fresh Christmas tree, one real Christmas tree, which the family decorates themselves — but then we've got to come and take it all away.

There's actually no price list for the service we provide. It's a bit like walking into a florist to build a bouquet. The first thing the florist is going to ask you is, "How much do you want to spend?" Because that depends on what your bouquet's going to look like. Our service is no different.

We've got clients that spend from as little as £500 or £600 ($667 to $800), up to £50,000 to £60,000 ($66,739 to $80,087).

Everything we do isn't just time-sensitive, it's time critical.

When you've just decorated one of the biggest shopping centers in the UK and they've got all "The X Factor" finalists coming to switch the lights on, not being ready is not an option. We have to be ready.

"When it comes to decorating, we've had requests for carousels in peoples' gardens and live penguins," Comerford said. "If you can imagine it, we can do it."

One time I thought we weren't going to pull it off was in a little town called Bethlehem. I normally travel to Bethlehem every year to decorate Manger Square, which is really the birthplace of Christianity. In 2018, I shipped all of the decorations well in advance of when we would arrive.

We arrived on Thursday to start work on Friday. We had a full week's work ahead of us, but customs didn't release the goods until the following Wednesday night. The switch-on was on Saturday morning. I had less than 48 hours to carry out a week's work. That was stressful, but we managed to pull it off — without sleep.

We live and breathe Christmas 12 months a year.

It doesn't just happen — you've got to make it happen. It takes an awful lot of planning.

The first Christmas exhibition of the year is in January in Frankfurt, Germany, and it's called Christmas World. It's the biggest exhibition in the world. Then I spend the next couple of months traveling through Southeast Asia. We have our own offices in Hangzhou, China, to maintain quality control of the products we manufacture.

Comerford works 6 a.m. to midnight during the festive season to meet all client needs.

We make things like 60-foot Christmas trees and 15-foot illuminated stags. We also make giant letters that spell out "Christmas," "Joy," and "hope." We make giant presents that you can walk through or sit in. When it comes to decorating, we've had requests for carousels in peoples' gardens and live penguins. If you can imagine it, we can do it.

I also spend a lot of time talking to shopping centers as well, because it's their most important time of the year. There are over 650 shopping centers in the UK, and they all want to be decorated at the same time, for about the 14th of November. Then I get a summer break, where it goes into a bit of a lull.

But throughout the year we're entertaining clients at our headquarters. We're also recruiting, training, and retraining franchisees. And then we're preparing for Christmas again.

All my life's a circle, really. It's a very rewarding business to be in. To put smiles on people's faces is a joy, isn't it? Of course, it's also a very lucrative business as well.