MASSIVE electrician shortages, yet electrical contractors STRUGGLE… to find work

Transcript

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Hey guys. James Dest from Marketing Secrets for Electricians. This is episode 5 and today we're looking at why there's a massive shortage of electricians and we're still undercutting each other. I don't understand. 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 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 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. So, this is crazy, right? There is a massive shortage of electricians in general around the world and yet, when I look around and I talk to other electricians, there's always this competition on price. We're always complaining about being undercut by the other electrician. highlighting how cheap this other guy has done the job.

Well, that just pisses me off. If you understand the basics of economics, supply and demand, when there is less of something, the higher the price to purchase it should be. There are industries that do this on purpose like the diamond industry. There's plenty of diamonds in the world they mine it and slowly and at a stable pace, they store it and when they release it, they release it. So, the price remains where they want it.

So, it's a rare thing like a diamond in the rough. So, it's a rare item instead of selling it the same as copper. So, they do that to make or keep their profits. So, they want to know there's logic to it. So, that being said, the electric shortage that is said to be coming or is here and depends which country you're in, it should work in the electricians favor.

Now, before I continue, I've kind of, you know, I've been a startup. I've done the electrical trade and previously, when I was first starting up, it was, you know, maybe my mentality. It's like, okay, how do I win these jobs? I just got undercut prices so I can actually win the job and for me, you know, generally when you're undercutting on price, your or the customer picks you, the cheaper one over maybe the more branded one or the higher prices. They're generally a type of customer that is going to be challenging to manage and maybe not worth your time.

So, let me kind of run through that and you'll see what I mean. So, when you first like undercut, you're like, yes, you know, there's this thrill, you won the job and you have that like little thrill and adrenaline and little win, especially if it's your first job, you'll definitely get that hit. But then, when you go round to do the job, what I found is kind of like, I was expecting to just do this one thing and the customer was expecting a totally different thing or their expectations were different and something like, you know, I would be expecting to like, they purchased a push bike and what they're expecting is like a BMW or, you know, another type of car that, no, that's like, you know, so much more expensive. And in that case, the relationship, you know, you're starting off on this rocky ground, so it's not the best relationship to start a business on or business venture on with a customer, which is essentially what you're doing. You're wanting to build a relationship so they will use you again, not find the next electrician.

You want, if you go to a person's house, you want them to be a repeat customer, which is hard to do as well if they're always expecting the cheapest dirt price that they can get. So, what I found with these type of customers is they're always trying to sneak in these tiny little things extra as well. It's like you're doing it, you're like, you know, upgrading a switchboard and maybe they want an extra, you know, an extra thing. They're like, ah, you know, it's not that much. It's just, it's a quick thing.

They're trying to always push these little extras in, which is not what was there. And you have to kind of stand your ground or be a push over. And this is where I also like being in business, it helps you grow. Like if you were a pushover, you're no longer, you're either going to lose money and go out of business or you're going to have to change and evolve, which is cool about being in business in itself. So, and then the other thing these customers do, I'm going to cheapskates do, they can essentially watch you by the minute.

Not, not everyone is a cheapskate, but yeah, they're watching the dollar. They're like pushing you. They want it done as quickly as possible, especially if you're charging by hour. And then once you've completed the job, it's kind of a pain because the mentality of these is like, Hey, I'm not paying now. I want to pay later.

I don't have the money now. I'll do a next paycheck. You know, even if it's such a small job and a small price, they're still going to haggle you out to not pay for as long as, as long as they can. So is this the customer you really want to serve? And this is a big key in going into business.

And when you're first starting may not be so relevant, but it needs to be because you're investing your time into the customer to build a relationship. And you want, you know, you want to focus on what's your ideal customer to help you that you want to serve, but also meets the requirements so you can have a sustainable business essentially. Yeah. So finally, once all set and done, these jobs that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel just to do, if you sit down and work them out, most of the time, you won't make money or the margin is so little or in worst case, you're actually like working for, you know, your alley rate is nothing and you want to be a hundred bucks an hour and you're working for 10. So that's like 10 X the wrong way.

You want to work and you want to be going up in price and, or what I've found also so if I did this and I hired electrician to do the job, I would pay out of my, the company would pay out of, or I, depending on how your business structure is, you know, you've got to pay, it's going to come out of your pocket for that job to be completed, which is like not, you won't stay in business if you continue doing it that way. And, you know, I've always, that brings me back to the point like is, winning this job worth it. And that's kind of when you do your next quote, your next job, like ask yourself, well, is it worth, do I really want to win this job or can I let the cheaper electrician win? Because I don't want this type of customer. So I'm urging like, this is kind of a message to like electricians out there stop undercutting each other.

You know, I've done it, I've learned it's not, it's not a good experience all round. You know, you feel you also like, or I felt my time was not worth, like I got pissed off because I felt my time was not valued. I felt like working my ass off and getting nowhere instead of growing my business. And you'll find that that's not the best situation to be in. You want to feel valued for your time and your work and take pride in your work because having, doing a good job helps you get repeat business.

They're like, oh, this electrician was great. Or they're like, I mean, maybe you'll get, hey, this electrician was so cheap and you should use them. But again, if you're also under stress, rushing, you're going to do a shit job and you're also attracting more of those clientele. So it's a small but big thing. So I hope that helps.

other electrical contractors undercutting you or someone, you know, another contractor, reach out to them and ask them why. You know, maybe they're new and they don't understand, help them out. Talk to them, share this podcast. Let me know. I'll try and reach out to them.

Let's try and stabilize the market value for electricians. That would be so cool. We could just set the commodity price, even though I don't like the, at least the minimum. I don't like calling it a commodity because it's not really, if you listen to other episodes, I don't want to be a commodity, but in the sense of an hourly rate, at least if we set the price so sustainable and you know, everyone's, if it's, if it's worth going in business at a hundred bucks an hour, instead of 10, everybody's charging a hundred bucks an hour. And those who are not charging a decent price won't last long.

And the other thing here is you can use that as part of your marketing. The other part of the points that I've talked about here is you can use these in your marketing message. So, you know, you can highlight and go up and say, hey, the cheapest electrician job look like this. There's a Facebook group, crappy electrical. Yeah.

Like the cheapest electrician gives you crappy work. If they're not electrician, but saying, now look at this job, you know, do you want, this electrician in your house? And you can share this type of message. If this is like part of marketing, find what people are talking about and use it. So most of you moving on now, most of you would have heard of Tony Robbins.

Yeah. He teaches something called model what works. And that's what I want to do for the electrical business. You know, they kind of train us, you know, on the tools and that like the, the electrical system. The side of the business, but the marketing and what makes a successful business.

Yeah. They touch, but in my opinion, not nowhere near deep enough that it needs to be. So what I want to do is, or what I'm doing is finding electrical businesses that, that are making a killing, that are winning, that are doing the right things that have a sustainable business model. And we can share that. So I can, I want to interview them.

I want to share what pitfalls they run into, what challenges they had to overcome to get to that point, to help us understand their journey and also what they're doing now that's working for them. And I mean, yeah, you could say, Hey, they're giving away their secrets. In a sense, sure. But if everyone does this, they're no longer secrets, but it's also raising the bar and the standard for the community of electricians around the world. And if I'm doing something, in one place, you know, I really don't care if you've someone else copies me around the other side of the world who, Hey, let's work together to grow.

I mean, the same type of marketing may or may not work. This is all one big experiment to see how we can help the electrical industry, particularly for marketing your electrical business. So if you want to see these interviews, you can get access to this marketing secrets from electricians video course by going to marketingsecretsforelectricians.com and opting in to check it out. Now I want to thank you guys for listening. It's I enjoy creating these videos.

And if you find these valuable, please rate, subscribe on iTunes and leave feedback. I love reading any feedback you guys have. And I'll talk to you soon. Have you ever wondered, how that electrical contractor came to be so popular, have so many customers and what they did to get there? And let's face it, a bit jealous that your business isn't quite there yet.

Well, I'm doing a interview video series where we're interviewing these electrical contractors, getting the gems of knowledge and what they've learned over the course of time that they've run their business to get it to that point. We're not only going to cover how they got there, but what, it falls, they ran into along the way. So you don't have to go through them yourself and you can go straight to ideally having that success or implementing things straight away that lead to your business growing a lot faster than it otherwise would have. So if you're interested in getting and listening to this video series course, you can go to marketingsecretsforelectricians.com and I'll see you there.