Electricians Are Busy All Day, Only Billing Five Hours | 224

Most service electricians think they work eight hours a day. They don’t. By the time you factor in driving, quoting, suppliers, and inefficiencies, you’re lucky to bill five or six. If your hourly rate isn’t built around real billable hours, you’ll stay busy and broke. This episode breaks down the maths every sparky needs to face.

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Transcript

Where’d that thing go?
What thing?
Your time.

Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.

Something that’s so underappreciated with electricians is your time. Your own personal time. Something I’ve said before, and I’ll keep saying it: you can never get your time back, but you can always make more money. There’s never a truer saying. And I think it’s very important that you acknowledge your billable hours during the day are quite minimal.

My billable hours for my electrical business are approximately five to six hours during the day, permitting. I usually have, depending on the job size, two jobs a day, which would be roughly half a day each. Or I might have one full-day job. Three jobs would probably be max in a day.

There’s a lot of ducking and diving. That’s more to the point of what your billable hours actually are.

It depends what sector you’re in. If you’re doing builder work, you or your staff might be busy for eight hours a day. But when you’re doing service work, realistic billable hours are approximately five to six. Throw a break into that as well. They’re on the road, in between jobs, ducking to the suppliers. They still get paid their wage at the end of the week. Their wage doesn’t stop while they’re driving or having lunch.

It’s underappreciated how much wasted time people have in a day. They think their hourly rate should be lower. But when you calculate the hours you’re actually going to work in a year — taking 10 sick days, four weeks annual leave, 10 to 11 public holidays in New South Wales — you’re left with roughly 200 working days.

Multiply 200 by five billable hours. That’s your real annual capacity.

Then you decide what you want to earn, add your overheads, divide it up, and that gives you your hourly rate.

I’ve got a little GPT bot for this for my members. There’s a plug.

When you know your hourly rate, you’re confident with your pricing. It’s a knock-on effect. You realise, “I only bill five hours a day, so I have to charge this much.” It becomes logical, not emotional.

And confidence changes everything.

If you walk in saying, “I dunno… maybe 50 bucks an hour?” and mumble your way through pricing, the client feels that. They think you’ve made it up. But if you deliver your price clearly, online or in person, they read that confidence and go, “That must be the price.”

Now, where does your time get sucked away?

Driving to and from jobs.
 Quoting work.
 Picking up materials.

You go to the wholesaler, bump into another sparky, talk for 20 minutes. Then you chat to the manager. There’s half an hour gone. Suddenly you’ve burned an hour of your day. That’s not billable.

If you’ve got staff, add in going back to jobs, fixing mistakes, sorting inefficiencies. None of it is billable.

Yet companies live in this fantasy land of “I work eight to ten hours a day, I’m flat out, I charge $110 or $120 an hour and that’s decent.”

In service work, the reality is four to six billable hours. Some days it’s three or four. If you’re quoting jobs at opposite ends of the city, or picking up materials, or you’ve only got one three-hour job in the middle of the day — that’s all you can invoice.

Some people think, “I’ll just work longer hours to make more money.”

So they start at 6am and finish at 6pm. That’s not the right move.

If you think people won’t pay higher rates, they will — but there are one percenters you need in place. I did a podcast called You Look Professional, You Get Paid Professional. Have a listen.

You’re not in a factory. You’re not billing ten straight hours. You’re driving, diagnosing, explaining, invoicing, collecting payment. All of it eats into your day.

Five billable hours a day over five days is 25 hours a week.

Redo your hourly rate based on 25 hours a week. Then multiply that by 46 weeks — and that’s generous. Because staff are fully entitled to their sick days, annual leave, and public holidays. They get paid regardless.

What happens is people start with a low hourly rate to drum up work. Then they hire a staff member and scale chaos because the rate was wrong from the start.

Get your shit in order first.
 Know you’re making proper profit.
 Know what to charge.

Then plug in a staff member. Don’t hemorrhage cash.

The end goal isn’t working longer hours. It’s not working Saturdays.

I’m guilty of it too. You look at the calendar, see Saturday open, and think, “What’s a few hours?” I’ll only do it if I know I’m working three hours and making $1,500.

I’m not ruining my weekend to make a base wage. Saturdays are for you. Your family. Your friends. Your dog. Whatever.

We start businesses to make more money and get more time. But business will suck you back in if you let it.

Respect your time. You can make more money. You cannot get time back.

If you charge $100 an hour and work 40 hours, that’s four grand.

If you charge $200 an hour, you only need 20 hours to make the same money. That’s two and a half days instead of five.

Just think about it.

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