[YouTube Ep] Get 35 Google Reviews in 1 Week? | 136

One of the electricians inside The Mentorship gained 35 Google Reviews in one week. Insane. 

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Transcript

Check twice for bikes before you merge a lane — except for the Uber Eats driver, he probably deserved that little clip.

Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.

Changing lanes and sticking in your own lane is today’s podcast.

I might’ve told this story before — one of the biggest stuff-ups I’ve had in electrical. Not technically, but mentally. It hit me hard around sticking to what you know, sticking to what you do.

It was a smart blind automation job. The client had me around for a heap of bits and pieces. One part of the job was fixing their smart blinds. They had Clipsal Wiser throughout the house — bell push buttons in the bedrooms, smart dimmers, the works.

Now, I don’t know much about Clipsal Wiser. I’m more of a Pixie kind of person — simple, easy to rig up. So I suggested we ditch the Wiser system for the blinds and just install a Pixie system.

This was in the back room — small house, led to a deck, bit of lawn. Four French doors with blinds split in two, and three side windows, each with its own blind. The switches were separate for the side and the doors.

I got the Pixie smart controllers, told the client how great they were, installed everything, went to test it… and the blinds went crazy. All different heights, different angles.

So I started unplugging and replugging each one, trying to reset them individually. Went around again. Same issue.

Panic mode kicked in. I thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Spent nearly two hours trying to fix it. Eventually, I gave up on the smart controller idea. In the middle of that, after so much movement, two blinds just stopped working. I figured maybe there was a heat overload — left it 15 minutes, and sure enough, they started working again. Thank God.

I called Rob — shoutout to Rob, great friend of the podcast. He knows his smart home stuff. Told me about the reset screw up top — tiny little Allen key you insert and wind up or down to recalibrate.

Did that. Reset everything manually. Took the smart controller out. Talked the client out of it.

All up, I spent three to four hours on that job. I walked out of there absolutely wrecked. Mentally drained. Felt like I didn’t belong running an electrical business.

A few months later, that same client called again. Had no hot water. Turned out it was a gas system with a tripped RCD caused by water damage to a power point. I found it quickly, fixed it, and just like that — we hit reset on the relationship.

But I learned something massive that day. We get in our heads. We think the client sees us as useless, but really, it’s just us beating ourselves up. That job crushed me because I went outside my lane.

And I see this happening everywhere.

Here in Sydney, if you want to be a Level 2 ASP provider, you’ve got to get accredited. It’s a week-long course — let’s say $5K just for training. If you’re self-employed, that week off work hits hard — maybe $10K lost income. Then you’ve got equipment costs — say another $10K. So all up, maybe $25K invested.

And then what?

You go back to your usual work. Barely get any Level 2 jobs. The gear gathers dust. You don’t renew the licence. And that’s it — you were “Level 2” for a few months. Now it’s just a story.

Same thing happens with solar, air con, AV, smart home installs — sparkies chase shiny objects thinking it’s easy money.

It’s not.

It’s work, it’s cost, it’s time — and half the time it’s not even what you want to be doing.

Every time you get distracted by something shiny, ask: would Alan approve of this?

And I won’t — unless your core business is rock solid.

I’m talking dialled-in niche, consistent work, clean backend systems, proper quoting, real profit.

But what happens?

You start out, and someone — maybe your mum — says, “You should work with builders.” So you do. And you either underquote and lose money, or overquote and lose the job. Then you lower your price, win the job, and still lose money because you don’t know what’s coming.

Meanwhile, the seasoned sparkies — they’re quoting smarter. They know what’s coming. They build variations into the plan. They end up making double what you quoted — and you feel ripped off.

Same thing with builder loyalty.

If a builder says, “No thanks, I’ve already got a great sparky” — respect.

But if they’re keen for you to quote, be careful. They might be price-shopping or just burning through subs.

Trying to do commercial, builders, resi maintenance, solar, AV — all at once?

It’s pulling you in every direction.

You’re not building a business — you’re building chaos.

I went through all that. I was dabbling in everything.

Then I locked in on resi service and maintenance — and did it properly. I learned the game. I put in systems. I got training. I fixed my pricing.

And suddenly — it worked. The money made sense.

The ultimate shiny object? Starting another division — plumbing, for example.

It’s nuts.

Unless your electrical business is humming — five to ten staff, profitable, structured — don’t do it.

If you’ve got the right person to lead it and everything else is running smooth, fine.

But don’t start another division just because the electrical side feels messy.

That’s just avoiding the real work.

If your business is leaking money, losing staff, patchy with systems, no quoting structure — don’t add more chaos.

Fix what you’ve got.

Profit from it.

Then you’ve earned the right to look at other lanes.

You don’t take a van leaking oil on a highway run.

You fix the fuckin’ engine first.