How I failed marketing my electrical contracting business - and what I know now that I didn’t as an Electrician!

Transcript

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What's going on everyone? This is James Rest and you're listening to Marketing Secrets for Electricians. 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 life. 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. That's where I'd like to start guys and you're going to learn what I know now that I didn't know when I first started as an electrician. So to start off I'm going to share with you a quick story of my journey, what I went on to become an electrical contractor. All the while I had a vision of being the owner of a successful electrical business.

Now where I thought this thing would give me more free time, money, control of my life, really it took over my life like It was the one thing, it was like a baby basically took all my energy chair, keep it running, keep it maintained. Anyway, let's continue. So why would you start an electrical business then? Well, before starting my own electrical business, I worked for an electrical company for five plus years. I spent so much time there each week publishing hard to meet the deadlines for this company.

So every week they'll pump you out like gotta do this, gotta do this, gotta do this, this constant grind and truth patrolled all my efforts went towards making the owners of that company rich or creating more wealth. My efforts went towards creating them more wealth and all that I was left with when I walked out the door was my tool bag, my trade experience that had built up over the years and none that I would really consider an asset. When you look at the description from which dad poured out an asset is something that increases your wealth. The experience and the knowledge that I gained didn't actually increase my wealth unless I was on the tools being employed. So it's not really an asset.

Anyway, my thinking was, what if I could turn my skills as an electrician into an electrical business and make a profit without physically being on the job? This was my goal. Now, this would turn the business into an asset that could potentially set me up to be in control of my time. Time, after all, is one of the most valuable resources and I wanted to spend it how I liked not how what someone else had preset for me so my short-term vision was on having adventures and traveling to different places I'm still doing that currently in Spain and trying to settle down but anyway long term my goal back then was to travel have adventures and then support my family whilst at whilst having the opportunity to support support my family, have time with friends and family. If that made any sense, I'm not sure.

But anyway, a book that I found helpful in turning your electrical business, your skills into an electrical business, is the E-Myth Revisited. Why most businesses don't work and what to do about it. So this is a good baseline if you're wondering where to start for turning your skills as electrician into something that makes you money, where you're not trading time for money. So in my 20s I thought I could have it all. I wanted both to travel while having my small electrical business working for me.

And I could be working on it from afar. While you might know, from experience, not all dreams or things go to plan. Thinking back, this was my business partners at the time. They, 'cause I was the one on the tools, they had this type of freedom in a way, even though they're still working for someone else. So starting an electrical contracting business this seemed to happen to me quite a lot Let me know if you have the same experience being electrician when you were talking to people that I find out Oh your electrician could you help me out with?

Whatever that thing could be so Everyone I found had needed an electrician, you know, we're all have electricity in our houses and usually there's like a couple things that an electrician could fix for you particularly in Australia you have to have an electrical license to do anything electrical work. So this was in the back of my mind going through my apprenticeship and I found a couple mates with a similar goal to start our own successful electrical business which led us to start a new company called Be Electrical. Inspired by the B-movie we happened to be watching at the time or had seen. Now in Australia in order to start an electrical contracting business this is what you need. You need to be a licensed electrician.

This can be accompanied by doing an apprenticeship of four years under electrical license contractor and passing your capstone. Then you also need to do further study to get your electrical contractors certificate. Then register for an Australian business license. So you've done your apprenticeship, you're an electrician, you've got your contractors certificate, you can then register to have a business and then purchase some insurance and once you have all that you can then apply for electrical contractors license which takes a few weeks once you've got all the previous stuff done now. Once all that legal requirements is out the way that has to be done otherwise you're going to get some serious fines.

With that we went ahead and got our logo designed we got some shirts made up you know all the fun stuff you do all the actual physical stuff you kind of need need to give your business an image. And we got an old panel van. The van wasn't that fancy. It was pretty old run down, but it was big enough that we could throw our tools in. And the only issue was finding anything you needed in a quick manner because it's all rolling around in the back as we're driving around.

So it wasn't very effective, but it did the trick. So we would love to have started working for our own electrical company. So we all kind of wanted getting, you know, support our business, but that wasn't possible because we didn't have enough work. This was the one problem. We only have work from like family and friends and people we spoke to.

We didn't have any outgoing marketing or any marketing whatsoever happening other than our local connections. So we started doing these small jobs around while working for the other full-time company. This was fun for the first few to test out to see how we went, how things went, and however we weren't really going to make any serious money without learning to market our electrical business. So we could grow this company into kind of the vision we had for us. Now, marketing our first electrical business, well, in the contractor's course, they touch on some marketing and talk about doing a SWOT analysis for your competitors.

doing this we discovered that all these other guys had bigger budgets than us with their fancy web pages and pay per click advertising that's the main things we've seen discovered so for example when you look on google you type in electrician your suburb in our case that was $20 per click so if someone clicked on that you would pay google 20 bucks which means for five clicks that's $100 just for someone to go to their web page you don't actually have out of the contact details, they come, they go, that's it. So 100 bucks down the drain in our mind, so we didn't really know what to do. And what we did decide to do was go into the IP Yellow pages, put some ads in the newspaper, and other sites where you could list your business, which was the kind of cheaper option, more affordable for us at the time. Considering we also didn't have a website, we only created their Facebook page, And we did look at hiring someone for a company for SEO, but that was quite expensive and it would take six to 12 months before actually showing some results. However, while reading the newspaper, I came across an ad selling a franchise.

Now that piqued my interest, so I gave them the call and ended up deciding to take the franchise path as to trying to figure all that stuff out on their own. to pay these fees to buy into the brand plus ongoing costs. They had an established brand power and that was the biggest selling point for us was that they already had a customer base. They already had people calling in requesting electrical work to be done. And this is the thing we were struggling at the time with our small electrical business.

This franchise in particular had customers waiting for six months to get their electrical work done while this franchise started up in that particular suburb of that area. So this was the power of the brand, which we were buying into. From our cheap little van, we got to a fully decked out brand, fully decked out work vehicle, all branded out with the new company logo, the franchise logo. And we're excited to begin. This was like a real business before we kind of felt like we were just playing around.

This was now real serious. And basically once we We got all that set up, went into the franchise, paid all the fees. I quit my job and I went straight into the business full steam ahead. Now, I remember our first job under the franchise banner. We arrived in this brand new van, all wrapped up looking like everything was shining new.

We had a full set of gear and shells and material and we had invested quite a bit of money into this and only because one of our business partners had the available funds to fund the endeavour. So that's how we got to that point and we were all ready to go. I had an apprentice with me and we were going to charge per hour because we weren't basically sure how long the job would take and we're both... Well, I'd worked on domestic stuff the apprentice hadn't before. So this felt like the safer option in hindsight.

wasn't. Now the owner was a nice guy but he was like watching us as we moved and walked around and just he made sure to inform us that his dad was a Nintendo guy so he knew everything and this put a bit of pressure under a bit of pressure on us and we cracked we made mistakes more than we would have liked to admit. So for example we had one set of tools in the van like one set of power tools so we're always is throwing the tools running around the house. Here's a drill running about, hey, here it is again. And because the apprentice wasn't so experienced, this took, he didn't really know what he's doing, so he'd do some work and then I'll come and fix it, would make a mess.

It was just a slow and painful, stressful, disorganized first job. Yeah, we just really wanted to get the hell out of there. However, once we did finish, we left, we thought we'd, we're just happy to get the hell out of there. that's basically it there's however the power of a franchise is there's someone above us so my franchise or got caught got a call from this particular customer and said hey these guys come around the left a mess and I'm not happy with that now that what we had to do was negotiate you know offers some extras some extras like just some sweeteners you have to go back and fix a few things make sure we cleaned up we bought a vacuum because we didn't have one so basically and I also go back and didn't actually extra job like small things for him to just sweeten the deal and win the customer over and we did end up having this guy back again so yeah at the end of the day it was a win good learning experience we learned a lot how do we just charge a fixed price at the start this would have Adverted much of the problem the customer wouldn't be in some stress. You know watching us as we made a fool of ourselves Under the pressure and him getting stressed out house getting stressed out much better.

We just charged fixed prices I was really good learning experience there Now With the franchise moving on with the franchise we were able to grow the business however, we still kept running into Problems and the main things we had where I couldn't or we couldn't find a hard, a reliable electrician. All the good ones left and started their own electrical business instead of working for us. So they'll come for a bit, you know, get the feel, see how we operate it and then start on their own. And we went through like 10 to get one decent one who then left after a short amount of time. So then the other option is when we had a team of electricians keeping a steady flow of work for them, even with the franchise this was hard to find that perfect balance of like we mostly we had too much work and had to drop work or we didn't have enough and you had guys just basically doing nothing so the bigger we grew the more stress there also seemed to be so sometimes I felt like all I did was run around after these freaking electricians cleaning up their mess making sure that the customers happy and this is you know part of management I guess but I was still quite stressful, especially when you're a small business, you don't want to be doubling up on every job.

Very hard to make a profit. So with that said, I thought expanding was a good idea. As it happened, I had a mate of mine who was an electrician that wanted to get out of the electrical business he'd been in it for, I can't remember right now, but a few years and had built up a good brand on his own. So when I first started, we went down the franchise path. However, this particular person started from scratch.

His own business did the work and had been in it longer than me and had a good base for one man band electrical business. And what I did was I bought that and ran them side by side. So I had two businesses now. And it was interesting to see how the franchise went and how this self-made electrical business worked. They were like both pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses.

However, then my girlfriend and I decided to move to Europe so she could be closer to her family. Now this put a spanner in the works and I ended up selling both electrical businesses. Letting go of these electrical businesses, especially the franchise because I put so many hours into that over the last five years, this was quite challenging to let go but I couldn't. I couldn't hold that and enjoy going to Europe. If I had that in the back of my mind, if you're not there, you can't fix things and you just end up losing a lot of money, having a lot of stress.

So it's easier to just get rid of it and let someone else deal with it who was there. So moving on to Europe now, how did I make a living in Europe? I'd worked into being an electrician, however, they basically get paid. paid as much as a cleaner, so was not interested in that at all. I had to do some creative thinking and ended up contacting people on Airbnb, which is just basically started up at the time, and offered a turnkey solution.

And this was ideal because the person I found owned a million dollar house or mansion, and they wanted to be in Dubai, and one month, two months a year, stay in Europe, which was great for me. So I ended up managing that place and started learning how to market. So I was trying to figure out how to market this house, this mansion, bigger than what Airbnb offered so we could get other business. So this is where they're going to be out of marketing and something called a sales funnel. Now with the sales funnel, I learned quite a bit, but then looking around, I found many different industries making over a million dollars from a funnel.

And that's the power of using a sales funnel. However, I did not see anyone doing this in the electrical area. And this for me sparked an opportunity. This is what I want to bring to the table for you guys and whoever else is interested. If you could build an automated sales funnel that could help you acquire new customers and make sales for you, while you're on the tools, while you're sleeping, this type of thing, it seems not real, but it does happen, I see it every day, you just have to know how to set this up for, in this case, your electrical business.

So if this is something that would interest you, and then this is the podcast to listen to, that being said, I'd love to hear from you guys, you think if this is something you want leave me some feedback on this idea that would be great and this would this is going to allow me to see if there's any other electricians that will be interested in this because essentially I wish I had this marketing knowledge when I started or even before I started running my electrical business and if this is something that interests you I'll share my journey as I build electrical sales funnel and I look forward to hearing from you thanks Thanks for tuning in and listening, guys. Now, if you want to join in on this conversation and see what we're doing as we develop sales funnels for electricians, head over to Facebook and go to Marketing Secrets for Electricians and you should be able to find us there. Thanks.