Bite the hand that feeds you... | 139

I broke down why the "steady work" from builders, commercial companies, and lead gen sites might be the most expensive decision you're making. How $120 an hour that ended up costing me money, and why the fear of walking away is the exact thing keeping most sparkies stuck. If your bank account doesn't match your effort, this one's for you.

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Transcript

Bite the hand that feeds you, particularly if it's feeding you scraps. Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.

You've got some work coming in. Maybe it's from a builder, a commercial company, a lead generation website. Maybe it's a mate who just keeps feeding you consistent work. You feel like you're busy and you're spinning wheels. And when you look at your bank account, it doesn't reflect the efforts that you're putting in. And you kind of think to yourself, are you actually making money or are you just trying to just about keep the lights on, so to speak.

So today what I want to talk about is the leads that you're probably being too loyal to and what it's actually costing you. And maybe if you walk away from that lead, it might be the smartest business decision you ever make.

I always like to relate this back to a story and what happened to me maybe five or more years ago. I was approached by an Italian company, very high end Italian brand, very expensive brand, and they do bathroom stuff like baths, toilets, lights, mirrors, et cetera. What it was, was there was a lot of failures under warranty, and I was asked to come into the office if I could chat to the manager. He told me exactly what was going wrong, what failures that they've had, would I be able to help, et cetera, et cetera.

So I thought this was going to be a great gig, and I had a chat and we settled on a rate of $120 per hour, which I at the time thought was fucking balling. And he agreed with it and we had some other little fees like picking up the mirrors and price per kilometre and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, in hindsight, it was way too fucking cheap.

How this used to go down was work orders would get emailed in and then my virtual assistant would log the jobs in and we would sometimes have to call the clients who had the warranty issue. So what would happen was I'd have to drive to the warehouse, pick up the mirrors, maybe sometimes only one, maybe I'd bulk pick up. And then when I do the job, I would either bulk drop off or I would drop it off and I was picking up the other mirror, for example.

And what I realized pretty quickly was I was getting quicker and quicker at these, which meant I was making less and less. And this is the age old of hourly rate versus fixed price. The more quicker you are and efficient you are at your job, the further you get penalized. And the sooner you learn that, the better to ditch your hourly rate.

When I say ditch your hourly rate, everybody has an hourly rate that you work off. Fix your pricing, work off a set price. You need to know your ability. You need to have confidence in what work you do to master this. And it all comes with time and experience. But I never, ever work off an hourly rate because as I said, you get penalized for being quick and efficient.

And what used to happen was I was going out to these jobs and at the start they were taking me about, I don't know, about an hour and a half or two hours, which was pretty shit, all the same. So I was driving 30 minutes in the wrong direction and I would get there, be very savvy with like, you know, bringing all the stuff in in one hit. I would then take the mirror down, replace the part, put it back where I was, or completely replace the mirror.

And what was ending up happening was I was nailing these in like 45 minutes. Therefore at the rate of $120 an hour, I actually was under a hundred dollars to do it, which is ridiculous. So I then realized quickly that I was billing, let's just say for instance, $190 bucks plus GST, maybe $200 odd dollars plus GST, and I was doing two or three of these jobs a week.

And realistically by the time you go there, you pick up the mirror, you do the work, you pack up, you drop the mirrors off, et cetera. For those three little shitty jobs, it would probably be like an eight hour day between the two, toing and froing and all the different jobs and unpacking and repacking. So that leaves like under $600, which is ridiculous.

I quickly learned that I wasn't making enough money doing this. It seemed like $120 an hour was fantastic, but I actually weighed it up that I was only doing 45 minutes. It was absolutely ridiculous.

So what I ended up doing was fluffing up the hours a bit and putting it down for like two hours, and then they were kind of like, why is it taking you so long? So I was like, alright, I'm out of here. So I've passed that on to somebody else.

But I only passed it on to somebody else when I was comfortable enough that I had my own work coming in from different sources, that I planted a seed and now it's coming in. I was only ditching that then.

And that's what I'm saying to you is bite the hand that feeds you by all means, but never ditch it immediately. And it's like what I say to the members when they come on board with me as well, is I want them to make sure that the leads are trickling in from the new sources that they want before they're like, fuck that builder, fuck that real estate.

So you need to be very careful and very strategic when you exit, of realizing that you've got enough work coming in, you're covered. And even if you've only got a couple of hours of this new work and you're charging the correct money, you probably realize that you can make more money in half the time. Doing the work that you actually want to do is going to be profitable.

Why do we stay in these ruts, or what's holding us back from actually taking a leap and going somewhere else? Plain and simple. It's majority of the time it's going to be fear. It's fear of if I stop this builder work, where's my next job going to come from? If I don't buy leads from these lead generation websites, is my phone going to stop ringing? At least it's consistent.

You're kind of telling yourself and like choosing certainty over opportunity. Like, there's so much opportunity out there, you just have to poke it out and just put yourself out there to get these leads in, and that's where the magic happens.

And it's just like, the work is a safety blanket, but you have to realize you took the leap to start your electrical business. And now you've just sat back into a comfort role, almost like you swapped employer.

You've started the business, you fell into this rut. Let's say for instance, you work with a builder or two and you essentially are now employed by them. And they call you on a Wednesday saying, we're pouring concrete on a Thursday. Have you put those conduits in the slab? And you're like, why didn't you tell me this fucking three weeks ago? You never mentioned anything about conduits in the slab. And by the way, that's a variation. And then they turn around and they say, variation? Do you want the next job or not?

And this is a vicious cycle, and this is why people are banging their heads off walls and they just kind of, they don't know how to seek out more work.

And I think it's like what ended up happening was maybe it happened to you where you left your employer, you bought a white van, Toyota HiAce, something like that, and you actually just fell right into that builder's lap and you never actually went about doing anything with your website, your branding, anything like that. Even just planting little seeds to start doing like little local things to put yourself out there. You never did any of that.

And there's the fear of like, oh, well, for fuck's sake, if I lose this builder now, then I'm going to have to start from ground zero again. And that's why I say not to bite the hand is because when you come and work with the likes of me, that's what we work on. We work on all those kinds of things to get you humming along that then it's like, okay, now we can pull the pin with the builder.

But it's that fear of taking a leap from, I've got comfortable money coming in. I want to change work though, because I want to make a lot more money and I don't want someone barking orders at me. You want to do your own thing, and it's that bridge in between of like, you know, you think it's going to be cold turkey, but it's like you need to implement and put these things in place, build up your brand, get your connections. And once you get the work flowing in from the other connections, you can drop that builder to four days a week, three days a week, two days a week, until you're fucking rid of them.

What is the real cost of this as well to your business? When you fly somebody else's flag or you're working under a builder, a subcontractor, you're working as a subbie under somebody else, or for a commercial client, you are flying somebody else's flag. And when you are flying somebody else's flag, you're building their ship and you're not actually building your ship.

Because you're not out there building your own relationships, building your own reputation, building your own reviews for your clients, that they can refer you. I mean, if you do a cracking job for somebody that you're subcontracting to, odds are they're going to refer that person's company. Just have a think about that as well.

And there's all these little things, and it's more so as I spoke about, it's ruts you get into and you just, it's habit, it's comfort of the money's going to come in, so why should I get out of my comfort zone and find these avenues?

And look, the shift will come at some stage where something will, the penny will drop or something will click. For example, you might work four hours one day and realize you made more money than you would've subbing for the entire week.

And it's when you have those shifts and clicks, that's when it's onward and upward from there to realize that, well, hang on. If I work my own work two days a week and I focus on finding other work three days a week, I still make the exact same money I did subcontracting for the week or working for that shitty builder or doing those shitty real estate jobs.

So you really have to weigh up where your money's coming from and how much money you actually want to make and the avenue you want to go down to get that work in. And look, you can do the builder work and all that, but at the end of the day, if you're going to eat scraps, you may as well cook your own dinner. And that hand that feeds you is also the hand that decides how much you eat. We'll catch you next week.