An Electrician's solution to the problems at hand… plus create an electrical services membership site from them!

Transcript

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What's going on guys? James Rest here from Marketing Secrets for Electricians and I'm excited today because we're looking at the problems of the customers but not only that we've got the solutions as well so the electrical business has solutions for your customers problems and we're going to look at how you can use these solutions to package them in a way that adds value to your customer and you so you can start making money as soon as possible. So let's look into that now. So here's what I hear a lot. How do normal electricians like us who are properly trained and licensed who are not willing to cheat and take shortcuts and who are wanting to own a successful electrical business?

How do we compete against the big guys who own the market share or the guys that charge peanuts for an electrical job? On top of that we want to employ the best electricians so we can get off the tools and have plenty of time for other areas of business. live. That's the question. Join me and follow along as we search for the answers.

My name is James Rest and welcome to Marketing Secrets for Electricians. the customers are having so the first one is essentially we don't show up at all or on time like just the whole like being reliable showing that you do what you say you do I've won jobs in the sense a I've said I would show up and I did and three electricians just didn't show up so they gave me the job and this is up in numerous times and most you know you don't know what what connections that customer has and they may be owners of a bigger company and you're at their house and then you get the contractor or you don't know what it will lead to. So it's always good to just show up on time. However, how can you use that? So the solution in your marketing.

So you can go, OK, if I don't show up, if my electricians don't show up or don't let you know what's going on, I will call you. I will call you up and let you know, hey, I'm going to be late and I'm going to send you a message like if I need to go to the shop, so yeah, go do what you got to do. And I'll give you half an hour heads up before I arrive at your place. I'm just running late at the moment. You can also say, hey, in your marketing, you can go if I don't, if the electricians don't show up, if we don't show up on time or when we say we will, we will give you $50 or we will give you a voucher or we'll give you a free light fitting or just something of value where you can say, hey, there's a pain point for me if I don't show up and there's a reward for you.

So even though maybe you made a mistake or whatever, which does happen, you're still going to, they're still going to benefit from you being late. So it turns a negative into a positive. The other thing you can do is also have a couple of testimonies of customers and what has happened in the past. So like, you know, hey, this electrician showed up for me and just highlighting that point that you're talking about 4th for showing up on time. Now the next point is bad quality of workmanship and I've been out to numerous jobs where the previous electrician for example had installed an oven and the oven basically was not working and kept tripping the breaker because the oven was too big for the actual breaker size that they had had on so you needed to run a bigger cable and whatnot.

So the quality of workmanship on the install and everything was poor and the customers couldn't get in contact with the electrician. So they ended up calling me. Now, the advantage here is on your marketing, you could have, for example, in this case, I could have got a testimony from this customer saying, Hey, the previous, the testimony is a huge guy. Like if you can get them on video, especially this will do wonders for, um, your, your marketing efforts in helping to convey people or show people that you're a reliable electrician. And in this case, like I could get a video testimony.

I fixed the problem. I could get a video testimony that, hey, we've been this customer had a problem with their previous electrician and here's what they said. And they're like, hey, you guys showed up. You fixed the thing. You're reliable.

And this is part of your marketing message, as well as you could offer a 24 month warranty or some kind of warranty that The next one on the list is not doing what you said you wanted We do one like this is a matter of communication an issue that you think you're doing three things and the customer thinks you're doing four whatever it may be say I'm going to install four down lights in this house, but really the customer is expecting five if you Have this written down on paper. This is you know, the biggest black and white you have four down lights in the living room It's clear what the expectation is the customer signs off on it And if there's an issue you can go back and say hey, you know We actually agreed upon four not five and then you can work out and negotiate from there But having it in on paper it takes a little bit of extra time or digital like I had an iPad mini and could get them to sign the job or the quote or the agreement so they knew We both knew what was expected of the work that was being conducted So you can have this like out like the message is our quotes and estimates are detailed So you know what to expect when hiring our electrician this is? is a strong point. So the less friction. So if it's an easy, like you come, you arrive on time, you do a good quality work and you do the correct job, it's easy.

It's simple for the customer. There's no headaches. This is a huge win from all other electricians in the field. So this is a good point to work on and have a marketing message around that. Now, the next one is you're so busy that you don't answer the phone.

This is also like you know when you're busy when you're under the pump you don't have time to stop what you're doing and answer the phone to you know you're dealing with a customer here in this moment you don't always have time to deal with other customers that won't work in the future even though you may need to because without dealing with the ones that won't work in the future you won't have any work. So a way to market this is like having a full-time receptionist you can say hey we've got a full-time receptionist that will available to help you with any inquiries on the phone a cheaper way. I had a contracted administration service, a virtual receptionist, and she managed my bookings for me so I could focus on the tools and get things done. Meanwhile, I didn't have a full-time receptionist, but she covered the full-time hours for me, her and her team. So that was awesome, and it made me sound, or look, a professional and a bigger company than, even though I may have been one or two men, to, I may have had only one or two electricians, it was still seeming like we were a bigger company and more professional looking and providing that, you know, image to the customer that we know what we're doing.

So this is a thing to think of when you see that phone ring next time and you can't answer it, is it time to get a receptionist? So this is something you can use in your marketing message now. The next one, unprofessional, no uniform plumber's crack. This is like falls into the line. of what image do you want your customers to remember.

Do you want them to say, "Hey, I had the electrician over and I, you know, his plumbers crack and he had, like, paint all over. He was dirty. He was just, like, not a good image. And even though they're maybe sharing with their friends, that's not necessary what you want them to share. And if you notice things about image, the more professional you look, the essential higher the prices you can charge because your Providing a better quality of service, a better image, a better story.

All these things help increase the value the customer, the perceived value the customer is getting and the price you can charge for your services versus someone who shows up in shorts and t-shirt and just wants to do the job. So be professional and use that in your marketing. Have pictures, have images of the van, of your work, of guys doing the work. Here's how we do the things. Testimonies of people like loving you again is a huge thing.

Next is DIY unlicensed electricians, electricians that just don't know what they're doing. And this is where you can say, hey, we're registered with a local licensing board and have an electrical contractors license. You can check it out here on the web page and all electricians are also checked and verified on our team. And you also have insurance. So here's like using this, say, yeah, there are guys out there there are is your electric is your electrician license was the previous electricity used license how do you check hey here's how you check go to that board so you're kind of pointing and and getting them to be aware like hey you may have had an electrician or a so-called electrician come to your place but they weren't licensed and here's how you can check so you can highlight the problem and say but hey we've got the solution we're qualified we're local we're licensed where we're ready to do the job for you next up we have Next up we have you pay for an electrician and the apprentice does the work instead So this looks bad if say hey I've hired someone to an electrician to wire my house And then I'm here every day and all I see is the apprentice doing the work and the electrician is nowhere on site This is like you know a big irritation I'm paying top dollar and I know apprentices get paid less and their quality of work is not expected to be as good as the tradesmen they're still going through school all this type of stuff so you can use this to say hey at the at each job we have a licensed electrician supervising the apprentice to the appropriate level of their training and just like highlight that you're basically not going to leave the apprentice alone because they're not you know qualified to do you're always going to have a licensed electrician on site to oversee and make sure all the work is up to standard so give them that peace of mind that this is how you operate and you can show examples of these screenshots videos your tradesman, your apprentice, this type of stuff.

Next is the extra charges, additional items, and the customers don't know about when they start. So you may just add, you know, you may be installing something and something comes up and you need to do something else or add something to the quote or like, hey, you're going to do it this way, but now the plumber's in the way or the plumbing's in the way and you have to go around, do it a different way. So that's additional charge, whatever the case may be before and you can talk about before I add any additional charges to the original work, I will let the customer know, I'll let you know that you need to sign off on that work otherwise there's no charge. So if the customer does not sign off on the work, we will not charge them. This is something you can do and you can show them how it works.

Like I've got an iPad, you sign here, whatever that thing may be, to rest assured that if that's a pain point for them, they're not going to have that happen when you're the electrician the job and the last number nine the last thing that we had was that the you won't come back to fix their work so this is like hey you know I install the light and it fell out and the electrician doesn't come back they're getting you and I don't know how many things I've come back to I've been the second third electrician on the job because the other ones just not being in business whatever it may be you can have an marketing campaign where it's like hey we have been in business how many years, 10, 20, however long you've been in business. Or if we go out of business, we've got insurance to cover it. So if our work is insured, even if we're not in business or you're part of a franchise, which is bigger than me or bigger than mine, your individual franchise. So it's a bigger brand. You can use that in your marketing as well.

So these are like nine points we've used. And these are nine examples of the solutions you can use in your marketing. And what I'd suggest is these nine points can be anything. of not nine points these problems they don't have to be just these they're just some things I brainstorm they can be any problems you come across that your customers are having and we kind of went through that in the last episode what you do is you test this what resonates with your particular customer where how are they seeing how are they seeing electricians through the how are they viewing you what problems do you need to solve on behalf of the customer so they're going to lean towards you when picking between the other electrician and what you can do say for example you find that bad quality of workmanship is the biggest obstacle so you've tested all these messages and the the best problem you come into is bad quality of workmanship so we can pull that and that's going to go on to our we're going to make an offer and turn this into a membership so let's let's take a bad quality of workmanship we're going to also bring some other things into it to add to any Any purchase that they do over I don't know a certain amount whatever amount you deem as say $300 anyone that makes a purchase over $300 will get a free bonus membership and now what's included in this bonus membership for example is you could have no call out fees you could have the warranty card so you could have however long the warranty is you could have a private Facebook group where you communicate with your customers everyone gets a discount so all members get a discount up to the value of a thousand dollars and they also get a priority service so they get to jump ahead of the queue if you're backed up for like two three weeks months whatever they can then slot in and get in front of the other person because they're paying that extra extra thing now this membership covers you can sell this separately so you could have a membership and you sell this a hundred bucks a year 200 300 whatever the value stack depends what you put in on it and we can go into this deeper at another point but the main thing is you have a membership which covers certain amount of things and people can pay for it yearly if they want to on its own however if they spend a certain amount of money with your company you can value add that on for free and this is how you make say installing an RCD you're like hey with every RCD install you get this membership and what's included in this membership this this this this and this and it bumps the value up. And not only that, we talked about three types of problems.

So the first one was the market, the actual market problem. We talked about the customer avatar problem. So your customers, your ideal customers, what problems are they having and the follow up problems. So you can also add if they get an RCD. So say you got one RCD or two RCD installs.

Instead of lowering the price, I can go, OK, you get a free guidebook of how to check your RCDs maintain them for the long term. So this is like a maintenance plan. It also explains what our cities are. And you can add that as a value to someone who makes a purchase. And it's a free PDF or it's free for you.

Once you create it, you don't have to do anything else, but it adds value to the customer. And so every install, they get that. And because they get two, it's over, say, 300 bucks. They also then get this membership or what do you call it? the priority service of this loyalty program, whatever you want to call it, they get this, which then say you do two RCDs for one bucks, whatever the thing is, that then bumps it up that they're getting over.

So say a thousand dollars, let's see. So, for example, let's say no call out fees will value that at two fifty twenty four month warranty. That's five hundred bucks per a fake private Facebook group. That's like two fifty. So that's a thousand.

They get $1,000 off or a 10% discount up to $1,000. That's $2,000 and priority service, that's $500. So for that RCD install and the guide, so the guide's worth $50. So for that RCD install, they're going to get $2,550 worth of value for $400. And this is how you add more value to the member without lowering your price.

And it also helps you stand out from the other For example, if one electrician has an RCD for $300 and you have an install for $400. However, you also provide over $2,000 worth of value with your membership for any purchase that they make. They're going to be like, wow, that is like amazing. And I'm going to take either your ideal customer, ideally because you've tweaked your messaging and your membership towards your ideal customer. They're going to take you up on that.

Of course, you're going to get the cheaper guy. who are just I just want the cheapest price and that's great let them go you don't want them to be your customers anyway because they're going to cause you more problems than they're worth so this is a value stack and we've combined it so to turn into a membership that's paid on a yearly monthly or yearly basis depending upon what they want to do so for example let's say they're paying $200 a month sorry $200 a year and there you gave them this you gave them you gave it to them for free the first time because they spent over the amount. So they get it for free. The year's up. Now what happens?

They either have to pay for the membership themselves or they have to purchase your service again to keep that membership for free. And you can give them their two options and you can do follow up emails to communicate with them throughout the year and telling them what advantages they have from making a purchase. And you're this is kind of a side thing to have a follow up sequence of emails and talking to customers which a lot of people electricians don't do we don't have a follow-up sequence which is kind of another topic but anyway the main thing is you can continue to stay in contact and serve your customer on a yearly basis at least by adding value with your membership and on the from your end you get a stabilized income so you know if I have one person on my membership I get $200 if I I have two people, $400 and so on and so forth. So you can work out if I have a thousand people on my $200 membership, that's kind of going to give me another $200,000 a year, either in membership fees or someone is going to purchase because they want to keep that free membership. And this is huge because that stabilizes your business and you now have a regular reoccurring income, which is really what a business is about where you get that money monthly.

when it's quiet, when there is no work, when things shut down, you've still got that revenue coming in to pay the bills and your base is covered. And from there, you can work on other marketing efforts to push further and market and get more customers in other ways. And you're not so stressed out with this make or break each month from the, you know, jobbing or start and stop industry that wants of jobs. really the business I personally don't want to be in. I'd rather be in a recurring revenue.

Also, if you ever go to sell your business, recurring revenues are so much more valuable. For example, a membership site, if you go to sell a membership or a SAS business will get 10 X. So if it's worth a thousand dollars, you could sell a business for ten thousand dollars. Whereas a normal business is worth like one to three type of thing. So this is the value of creating a membership site is huge for your electrical company in the short term for your customers and for you when you go to sell it.

What's your exit plan? This is another topic because essentially you're not going to be in the trade for the rest of your life. There's going to come a point where you may want to get off the tools and this type of stuff. So it will help you sell the business because you have a stable reoccurring revenue, which is just good all around. If you would like help doing this, please reach out to me at go there, go to the contact us.

Let me know that you're interested in starting a membership for your business and we can look into what your membership is going to be made up of and who it's targeted towards. And what ideally I recommend is starting straight away. So we create the membership, we set it up and we send an email to your current customer base and we go, hey, guys, here's membership. And guess what? Some people would if you if we do this directly.

Some people will take you up and you can generate revenue like straight away. And this is the cool thing about it. That's either going to be from membership fees or they're going to like, well, I can pay the membership fee or I can get something, a job done around the house. I'm going to get a job done around my house, which is worth, say, 300 bucks. Whatever that price point is that you've set to get the free membership and WAMO, you've got now income that you didn't have before and you're into marketing.

So that's awesome. helps. If you have any questions let me know and I'll talk to you soon. How we do this? Simple with three things.

You need a customer base, which is if you're in business, you already have this sorted. B, you need a site or a membership area to host this offer, which you're going to create, which is C, the offer. You need an irresistible offer that your customers cannot refuse. During this, you can create a more sustainable business for yourself. If you're interested in doing this, please contact me at marketingsecretsforelectricians.com.

and let you know if you're interested in the membership area for electrician field. Thanks.