There's a job that comes up constantly when you tell people you're a handyman. A door that won't latch properly. A curtain rail that's pulling away from the wall. A tap that drips when everything else in the bathroom is fine. Small stuff. Annoying, but small.
Most outfits won't touch it. Not because the work is difficult, but because the maths doesn't work for them. If you're running vans, staff, and fixed premises, you can't afford to spend an hour on a single hinge and call it a day. The overheads need feeding. The minimum call-out has to be two hours, or three, or the job needs to hit a certain ticket size before it's worth scheduling.
We don't have that problem.
The overhead is low enough that it makes sense
Lizards is one person. No depot, no staff wages, no fleet to fund. The cost of getting to and from a job is low enough that a one-hour call-out works financially. We charge for the time and materials the job actually takes, and that's the end of it.
This means a job that would be turned away elsewhere gets done. The dripping tap. The fence panel that shifted in the last storm. The two smoke alarms that need new batteries but are too high to reach safely. These are real jobs. For the person living with them, they're often the thing that's been sitting on the list for six months because every tradie they've called has a minimum spend the job doesn't meet.
Small jobs suit how we work
The whole business is built around staying local. We base ourselves in one area for a month or two at a time and work within easy reach of wherever we're parked. A morning of three or four small jobs in the same suburb is exactly what this model is set up for. It's not a workaround. It's the point.
A lot of handyman businesses grow by chasing bigger jobs, hiring staff, and expanding their radius. That's one way to run it. We've made a different choice: stay small, stay close, stay useful to the people nearby. A full day of varied small jobs for a handful of different households is, put plainly, a good day's work.
Small jobs are where trust gets built
A big job is often a one-off transaction. A small job, done well and charged fairly, is how you become the person someone calls first next time.
Seventeen years in the trade has made one thing clear: the homeowners who refer you, who leave a review, who tell their neighbours, are usually the ones whose small problem got sorted without fuss. They weren't promised anything grand. They got the door latching and the invoice came to what it should have.
"No job too small" isn't a marketing line. It's a description of how the business actually works.
If you've got a list of small jobs that have been waiting for someone to say yes, we're the right call.
Got a list?
We're taking bookings in Auckland through the first week of July, then back from the first Tuesday in August. One-hour minimum, $60/hour, no GST.
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