It doesn't take much to be a stand out electrician | 90

I share three stories highlighting the power of responsiveness, quality service, and reliability. Learn how small jobs can lead to bigger opportunities and how cheap shortcuts hurt your reputation. 

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Transcript

Mush the potato into the Guinness. Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing. I'm back in Ireland over a week now and I've been having some great conversations with random people, and it's really opened my eyes into how you don't have to do much to stand out as a professional tradie or electrician.

So I've got three different stories of three different people I spoke to about what happened in regards to trades, and every one of them was just an absolute disaster case. So for the first story, my brother-in-law was looking for an electrician to install some things in their new house, such as ventilation and a few odds and ends around the house.

I got onto my friend who was a plumber in the town, as I've lost all connections with the electricians and trades in the town I grew up in. So I got onto my friend and just said, "Look, who's the guy to refer if there’s someone reputable?" He gave me the number of a person that's meant to be reputable.

It doesn't have a website. Where I come from, it relies heavily on word of mouth, and this is what I reiterate a lot — what works for you may not work for me, and what works in another country or area, even. You take Sydney, Australia — if you do something in the city, it might work, but if you do something in the country, that same strategy and tactic may not work at all.

It's just like flyers and stuff like that. They work a lot better in rural areas because they’re not saturated like everybody's mailbox in the city. I digress. I’ve sent him the number, he reached out to the guy, tried to call him twice, if not three times, and he didn’t even answer his phone. So after that, what he did was send them a WhatsApp message, which he could clearly see the message was opened, but the guy just didn’t even bother replying.

So that was one of the first things that drew my attention to this was: it’s not that hard to stand out. All it takes is a simple reply, or even just for that guy to say, "Hey, I’m busy. I can’t make it." Little things like that. That guy might be considered again, but now no word of mouth is spreading that he's unreliable, doesn't respond. Why would I bother contacting him?

It’s all these little things that start to build up and just start to disrupt your reputation and bring it down. So those little things — you just need to perfect them. It’s as simple as getting back to somebody quickly, if at all. Just responding to someone saying you’re too busy or you can’t do the job. It’s not that hard. Even if you don’t want the job, you have no intention of doing the job — just let them know. Be respectful, be mindful, because that may come back to bless you, rather than haunt you in the future.

The second story was when I was getting a haircut with a local barber who has a hilarious mix of a weird car accident with another nationality. Very friendly guy, loves a chat. And he was talking away, and I was just about to finish up the haircut, and he says to me, "I’ve gotta go buy some car parts now," just randomly out of the blue. I was like, "Oh yeah, why?"

He said, "I’ve gotta buy new shocks for the car because my mechanic keeps putting cheap shit into it." And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "I’ve gone back. This is the second time now the shocks have gone, and it’s pissed me off so much. I’ve gone to the dealer and got genuine parts, and I’m gonna provide them, and it’s costing me whatever — 400 euro, and it’s pissing me off because I’ve had to go source the parts and bring them to him, and now he’s going to install them."

What had happened was, he’d installed these aftermarket shocks, and they’ve failed on the car, and he’s done it again. Now it’s the third time. So they’ve gone, and his explanation was, he said, "I might get 10,000 km out of those shocks, and I’m paying the mechanic, let’s just say it’s 500 euros, every time you replace the shocks." So he’s about to pay the mechanic 1500 euros for most parts to install these shock absorbers.

What he said is, "I don’t give a fuck. I’d rather pay for quality than skimp and just get something done." So he said, "Look, I might get 10k out of these, and it’s gonna cost me 200 euros on parts, and it’s gonna cost me 500 euros on labor." So I'd rather spend 500 euros on decent quality parts that will do 80,000 kilometers and pay the 500 to install them, than just skimp on it.

And this was an eye-opener and just something that resonated with me, and it should resonate with you as well. Not everybody’s after cheap. Everybody presumes that — not everybody, but a lot of people, particularly newbies to business, and I did this — you presume people want the cheapest possible price. It’s not always about price. Price does come down the line.

Yes, price matters to the wrong client. They care about the cheapest, and getting it done quick, and that’s more present in real estate work and stuff like that. But if someone owns the home and it’s a nice home, all you have to do is educate them and say, "Yes, we can use cheaper products, but you're not gonna get the longevity. You’re gonna be paying for the service to come back again and replace them."

We’d rather do it right, take tech again, and you’ve got a seven-year warranty with this. If anything happens within that timeframe, give us a call. Labor and parts are covered. So it’s like that. Not every individual cares about price. It’s more about getting it done properly than the slapdash approach. Some people will, some people won’t.

So the third and final story is my mom. There's a crack — I'm looking at it right now. There’s a crack on one of the windows in the bedroom. And what happened was the water got in, it dripped down the window from the rain, sat underneath it, and the weather froze over during winter. The frost expanded and lifted the bottom of the window up a little bit.

And what’s happened then is it cracked, put a split right down the middle of the window, and these windows are retro, they’ve been in there for maybe 40 years, and it’s very hard to find a direct replacement for them. So she had somebody come out, and she said, you could tell from the get-go he just didn’t want to do it.

He just looked at it and said, "No, we should do all the windows. If you’re gonna do that window, we need to do all the windows." And then kind of pushed it off in regards to being like, "If it doesn’t bother you that much, let’s just leave it." And he could’ve replaced that one window, but again, just went for the big fish.

This is a lesson as well. In the last podcast, I spoke about quoting a big project for a builder, and with that as well, there’ll be more headaches, more labor, more materials involved. But if you can get the small jobs — let’s say, for instance, this guy became an expert in these little jobs where he’s replacing a window here and there and everywhere — and just does it in volume, he’s making very good money quickly.

That’s another thing to think about: small jobs can turn into big jobs. That one window, the same thing might happen to the next window in two or three years, it might happen to a few windows, and you go, "Alright, let’s do it now." But we won’t be asking him back again. So these are just some conversations I’ve been having.

I just find it interesting when I speak to people and they bag out trades so much. It’s not that hard to stand out in a pedestal, be recognized, and be a decent electrician in your area. When I was speaking to my brother-in-law, he said he actually saw another guy driving around the town who had a sign-written van. He gave him a call, and he said he was very informative, really nice guy, but he didn’t do the ventilation part of it.

But he was even curious himself. He was asking questions back about how it worked or what he actually wanted to achieve with it. He said, "I can’t help you with this, but anything else, let me know." So there are good and bad out there, but the shit ones just get shittier because no one’s going to refer them because they’re dropping the ball with simple things like getting back to people.

But hopefully this just got you thinking — small jobs lead to big jobs, more profitability. Be responsive, don’t supply cheap parts, put in quality and longevity, and then the client will want you back for more.