Ep 172 - Options & Installer Leverage - The Finisher

Hello again and happy Friday. Welcome back to another episode of Electric Peneur Secrets, the Electricians podcast, where me, pleasant Peasant and Joseph the salesbot Lucani are here to help you five days a week to master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. Got a ring to it, don't it?

It does. You can't help it Every single time you say that. When you say it the right way and the cadence is just like I know it's supposed to be, I'm like yes.

Every single time it feels so good. Bingo Happy Friday, Joe.

Happy Friday to you, my brother, how are? You doing today. I am beyond energized, which normally it's not just because I've got the mystery cup of coffee in my hand. It's because we just got out of an amazing class.

Yeah, can I call a time out quick? Yeah, this morning, the first time we spoke, there was not the answer. You were like dude, little tired. Kids are up early and rambunctious.

Yeah, the pace has changed here. It has. It really has. So this morning I got my ass handed to me. I love my kids. I love them to death. I love them more than anything in the world. But it's sometimes hard when you wake up and they're already right there, ready to go and, like man, if I had that kind of energy I'd take over the world Right. But it was a slow start, like I just couldn't seem to get my steps in stride. But then we had that last class and the moment I get in front of it, it's just I sink into this autopilot mode and I'm on purpose and it just felt so good because what we were talking about in such detail was how we can prioritize our families while also running successful businesses. And just everyone got vulnerable and was really open. I was sharing my struggles, they were sharing theirs and I feel like we all left better. And I just got off the call and I just sat in my chair and I was so grateful for what we've done and what we've built to have a community of people where they could speak that plainly and openly and we can improve on such a personal level. I just I'm so grateful for what we do, man, I really, really am, so I'm going to place a deep gratitude 100% and for our listeners, viewers, people with us live on the Facebook live stream right now.

Go ahead and throw a hand up. If you've ever had a challenge with the time work balance, the work life balance and trying to find that and keep a marriage alive and keep kids happy and attended to and attend all the sports or gym or dance or whatever is going on, man, it's tough and, yeah, we could really connect to some people with that and we have, and in class I would agree it was absolute fire. Even Pete reached out. After him was like you know what guys? It's always a great class, but today was exceptional. So I love it when we deliver exactly what, what someone needs to hear and guess what. We still go through that too, so we need to hear it too. We need to talk about it, needs to be more prevalent, and so you have my support on that topic, joe. 110% Brother, awesome, thank you so much. But how are you about you, man? How are you holding up? Fantastic, the whole house smells like applesauce. Still.

It's endless, right? We talked a bit about that this house is just amazing.

right now, you know what it's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend.

Yours isn't, for a little bit right, yep, we have to wait until November, unfortunately.

November, right, so we're in October this week this weekend. So we got all the in-laws or out-laws as we're coming over for dinner, but they're all good, I love them dearly and I can't wait. Man, I'm excited. Other than the house cleaning and the cooking and then the cleaning after full, total bliss.

I might be there, yeah, other than the prepping and the cooking and the assembly. But when we're there eating it's great, and then afterwards it sucks again, but at least in that time it'll be great.

Yeah, you know that feeling of like turkey and then the inevitable crash that follows, and then it's like who's going to clean this big mess? This guy I love to clean.

I actually one of the weird things I cannot cook. I am a terrible cook but I am a awesome cleaner. Benefits of OCD man, I can clean anything.

That's what I do when I'm around a crowd too. I would rather work than sit there and slouch and fall asleep. So that's what I'll be doing. And since you said that, you reminded me today, just this morning, on our client's success, call our team, call that apparently I'm a good breakfast chef. Oh my God yeah.

So, to put it out there, when Clay came to visit us, there was one particular meal that you made that I still haven't been able to top. I'm a big pancake guy. I like pancakes. I'm very specific with them. But Clay had this ability of making with a granola crust on the outside and baked it into it. So I had this nice crispy brown texture, but a nice little crunch as well, and you don't expect that from pancakes. It had that nutty, grainy texture while also having the fluffiness on the inside. It was.

It's top tier. You're welcome, Joe, and you're welcome for the Maple Leaf Cookies If we went any further down the personal path.

We're just going to educate people on us in our personal lives, so couple of things for the topic here today Sounds good man, I'll rally, I'll rally.

To finish up this Installer Week that we've been so focused on that next hire. There's another topic that ties into this and it comes up in our client circle often and it's come up on the podcast before and we need to go a bit deeper here because it ties directly into the sale. Okay, in your options, see, when we're building premium options, we're also thinking ahead about the little bit of the time delay that a client might experience and the effort and sacrifice. Now I will be the first to admit, early in my electrical career and my trades career in general, when I would provide a service, I was also a get in, get out type that would just provide a single price try to move quickly and honestly. At times I was guilty of a partial exchange, meaning there were things that I cut corners on, there was things I didn't do completely and I feel awful about that. Now. You don't know what. You don't know, man.

Encouraging. You don't know what you don't know. I mean, we've all been there, you know, coming from construction as well. I mean, like I get it. We were pretty much whipped like dogs to be like. You got to go right now, and if you're not going here, you're staying on your own time, so I get that.

In the business world, however, and in the premium service world, even to take it up a notch, we recognize that the things we leave to the customers to do are also a faux pas. That's French. Do I need to explain what the faux pas is?

I think you should.

Go for it. That's a little cliche expression to just mean that's a bad. It's a bad thing to do. Now, if they elect that, that's okay. But shouldn't we give them a choice to have everything done completely? You don't lift a finger except to Write the check. Write the check. Can you touch on that a bit, joe? Yeah.

So we need to be able to provide a better experience as a whole for our clients Because, if you think about it, as your service increases, your price has to increase as well. You're going to scale with more technicians, with more vans, with better office staff, more training, but you have to still justify that expense to the customer. Now, a lot of times, people will invest in higher companies or higher investment companies because they provide a more turnkey experience. The problem with us as electricians is we're very good at looking at our wheelhouse and saying we'll provide everything electrically, but then often neglect the other aspects of the job which the customer then has to pick up on.

Do you mind?

if I touch on that a little more detail of what I'm talking about.

Yeah, dive, right in brother.

Okay, so I'm going to paint the typical ceiling fan. Call right when the customer comes in and they say I want a fan in the middle of my living room. Right now I've got some recessed lights, but I want a fan installed. Okay, great, makes sense. I can't blame you. You may not want to. Maybe they just have a standing lamp. The problem is is that there's no attic access. Above it They've got a finished room and you now have your downstairs basement, which is also in finished space, or maybe it's on a slab. So you have a switch on the wall and you know you need to get power from there to the center of the room. Not likely that you're going to be able to make a perfect fish, unless it's a truss ceiling. So naturally you have to make a cut. You have to get power from one way to the other. So whether it means you cut horizontally or up the ceiling or a cross-dye, however you do it, you've got to make cuts. Yeah, what happens then? Who's going to patch these things? A lot of times the electrician says well, I'll do the base, coat, spackle, I'll just put the sheetrock back up. You get a painter to come back in. So they've paid you, but they didn't get the emotional product they wanted. They purchased the fan not because they wanted it, not because they wanted light, but because they wanted to enjoy their living room more. That's the emotional connection behind it. But now that they have to spank and spackle the product they purchased though it was the fan didn't give them the experience that they were chasing for.

Required them to put in more effort to get to it Exactly.

It reminds me of the book that we are reading and the customer's suggest manifesto.

Right and to go a little deeper, then the feeling they have when you're done and you leave is now I've got to do this Exactly Instead of wow, joe's a really good service provider. I love the new fan. Come on, come over here, check this out.

Exactly. So what we need to do is say how can we take a few steps forward to determine how they have to do nothing? Do they truly do nothing? So what that would look like is not only am I going to do the first rough coat spackle, but I'm also gonna come back and I'm gonna do a second coat, smooth spackle, or I'm gonna sand, or Then I'm gonna paint Maybe. I mean, I remember there was a situation once where we had a popcorn ceiling and Part of the ceiling fan quote was we're gonna bring in a painter who's gonna scrape the whole ceiling down, remove the popcorn ceiling, shore up the areas that were weak and Completely refinish it. It was a 70s style room with the wood paneling on the side, but now that popcorn ceiling she always hated is gone. So there was an extra reason to invest in us Because we were providing that experience of you know what I know we have now. Now I can enjoy my living room. We're modernizing. It's not just the fan, it's the experience. So they were able to use it the way they wanted to.

It's a great opportunity to tie in additional services. Mm-hmm, and if you're listening to this and feeling like I'm not going back, I'm not doing that now. I need to coordinate with someone. Who is that someone? Is it skills on my team? Is it someone we find third-party? And that's what this podcast is about beginning to answer to that. So, joe, in your experience, did you find that you would bring that some of those options and that that service in-house, or is it better to third-party and sub it out?

We've done both right. There were multiple different ways you can do it. We had one person who was a general sub who would handle trenching and sparkling and painting. As for like the larger things, like hey, I'm gutting your house, I'm not going to pay my technician to completely refinish house, but I had a professional painter on retainer, so that would be one aspect, mm-hmm. The problem with going with a sub is that their level of quality and their level of service becomes your level of quality and service, because it's your invoice, it's your name, it's your bill, right? So if they don't do the best experience Now, you're forced to either Recompensate from what they've done or you have to now take time to invest in a product that's never really yours, mm-hmm. So it's the easiest way short term. Long term, what we found was better was training the in-house people. We actually had one where it was. He was a former painter and had a former painting company but wanted to become an electrician. And the thing was, and we trained him to be a bit Yep, you can tell. All right, you thought we'll still going on, but you, we were able to train him to become a basic electrician Out with switches, running parts, running basic, while he wasn't amazing tech, but he was so well rounded that it could be like you're gonna assist on the jobs as an apprentice, but then we need to back home paint. You're gonna be on those jobs because we can deliver our level of customer service while then also giving a finished painting experience.

Enduring those times really be compensated differently?

No, the benefit was was that you would be like this is your rate, we're giving you a fair quality rate and it's either you're getting X dollars to do switches and switch into plugs or you're getting X dollars to turn around and paint. Either way it was more effective because we can quantify the costs but, more importantly, we could quantify the experience delivered.

And you had control over the schedule. The quality of the product exactly it was like.

You know, it's not always just what color paint and what brand of paint it's. Did you make sure that the customer was really happy with it and you talk everything the right way? You smile while you're doing it. Were you in full uniform while you're doing it? Did they have an understanding of the time frames it would be done by? Did you follow our process to ensure that everything was done correctly? You're paying for the experience, not for the product, and a lot of times the emotional experience your client gets is way better than what they physically receive.

And again, we know this feeling well, we all do. It's really easy to get it to that 80% point where it's not quite up to snuff skip the customer, check in, cash a check and get out of there. Very very dangerous at this point. If you're marketing and selling a premium product, then the follow through and the follow up needs to be there to ensure that that quality expectation was met. And something really interesting actually you mentioned a book earlier client success manifesto. There was a study in there where we talked about the difference between exceeding expectations and meeting them.

Yes, and that's actually the funny thing, but I love. Please tell me about that.

You can go on, you know, if you want.

I love it because it was one of those things that just stood out that really blew my mind. Yeah, where it was the thought of everyone expects that we need to exceed expectations to have our customers wowed, like really, really wowed, but the fact was, only one percent of customers could distinguish the difference between meeting those expectations and exceeding those expectations Only one percent. So the thought was is that when you can establish what they wanted from the beginning and what they wanted from the beginning was a fully finished product you met that you don't need to go above and beyond in certain areas because you've already described and delivered exactly what you're going to provide?

Hundred percent and that puts so much more emphasis. First off, that was surprising to me too, and I read that. I was like, really, we all sit here and we talk about it like it's a buzzword. We need to exceed expectations, we need to set the standard, then go way beyond it, when the reality is that so many people are just not meeting expectations. That that's the important fact, yup, and what a lot of that comes down to is actually setting expectations in the first place. If you don't set the expectation, joe, who does?

Unfortunately, it's a normally you'd say the customer, but not always. A lot of times, if it's not you and it's not them, it's those that they've learned from. So you'll find the person who has the father-in-law, who's a former contractor. They're looking at the project through his lens. So now, suddenly, because you didn't expect the expectations or set the expectations, they're getting it set from outside sources, and that's when conflicts happen. So you need to be able to say this is the full experience you can come to expect from us. Here's how we're going to deliver it and here's how we serve you before, during and after. And it's already set. It's a silver platter, it's here you go. Remove it, lid, voila.

Before, during and after. That sounds familiar. I think we talked about that recently, Yep, In the value price objection week, that we went through this thoroughly actually, and what that again assumes guys, if you didn't get that value piece, you can still grab that with the value price objection, but it assumes that you know what you do. And that sounds so simple. Joe, I almost feel stupid saying that live on the air.

The sad thing is that not a lot of people do really understand what they do. They know the task they're supposed to perform. Like I'm an electrician, I'm going to perform electrical services. I'll be then compensated for electrical services. Okay, sure, that's the physical, but emotionally you're providing an experience to your clients, you're rectifying their fears, you're placating and addressing what they need mentally and emotionally. They're paying for the experience not of your tool turning, but what they're receiving from that product. When you're not meeting those emotional expectations and you're only delivering to physical like look at the panel, look how tight these wires, look how neat that panel is. Every wire is perfect, 90 degrees the panel. They're not going to open the panel, they're not going to see the wires behind the wall, but they will notice if that light fixture flickers.

Yeah, totally tying in the customer service aspect into the electrical trade To just give this that common metaphor here is like McDonald's doesn't have the best hamburger, of course not. And the best electricians often don't have the best electrical businesses. Because the extra time they spend, that 20% extra they spend on perfecting the stuff that a client doesn't notice could have otherwise been invested in perfecting the stuff, the experience, the journey that the client actually experiences, they actually feel Because, again, remember, they're going to remember how you made them feel and that's what people will pay for and that's what will get you five star reviews. I have yet to see a client actually give a five star review because of how square or how every screw is in perfect alignment on the cover plates. Right, yeah, perfect, 90 degrees on the wire. Oh my God, five stars for service loop electrical, perfect, quality work. They're not electricians and that's not to say you should cut corners on quality. That's the opposite of what we're saying here. But shouldn't we focus on the experience and the things that matter to them and by knowing your offer, like truly having an offer that you can articulate, solve the value price objection, set expectations and build options from that makes sense for every client you serve and you'll soon find this need for a finisher and someone to ensure the quality of that feel when you're done is wow right now, at that point in time.

If you know my touching on it, I was gonna say there's one other thing that I wanted to cover quick, yeah, hit it which is it's not just your painter and spackler, right? There's one other thing that your team should really have and we can just lightly touch on it, and that's someone that can do excavation. Now I just wanna put something out here and say you're gonna do an outdoor trench. Anyone who knows that we're gonna dig a trench, you're gonna dig 18 inches down for your PVC. What happens a year later after you've dug that trench? What happens to the soil? It dips right or the grass doesn't grow. Well, wouldn't a better experience for your client be? I know you want me to run the power to the pool, but what I'm also gonna do is I'm gonna tamp down the soil. I'm actually going to bring top soil with me. I'm gonna make sure it's completely flush, and even I'm gonna put grass seed down and I'm gonna hay on top of the trench. Or I'm gonna sob the lawn by cutting it to where I'm gonna expose the roots, and then I'm gonna fold it back over like a toupee when I'm done, and then I'm gonna water it to make sure that it takes, and then you're not gonna have to get a landscaper to come back and fix your yard when we're done with it.

Huge point. I'm really glad you brought that up because, honestly, man, I've got projects in my backyard that haven't got done yet, because I don't wanna deal with the soil, the grass or the regrowth. Yep, it is that kind of problem. It's inconvenient. I don't want it. Your clients don't want it. If they do, that should just be a choice, shouldn't it? Let's offer it the highest level, guys. This has been another episode of Electric Printer Secrets and I just about cut us off without the action items.

I was gonna say, I was gonna say Stop me brother.

We're getting late, but let's do it. Action and all-star action. Do you got action?

I can take either one, all right.

Hit the action. I'll be ready to follow you up.

Awesome. So when you think about what are the steps we need to take in order to get this position, obviously your first thought is where do I find this person? What do they do? How do I pay them? Even simpler than that is I need to identify what role they're solving Right. So if you look at your project, what I want you to do is, after you've finished it, look and see what will the customer have to do. It could be anything. It could be. Do they have to go to the town and submit the permits? Do they need to call the insurance to get recompensated? Do I need to make sure I call the utility company to come back to plug in the meter? Whatever it is they're doing, I want you to put it onto a list and simply just draw a little pro and con from left to right. Actually, I'm getting into the all star. Start with what is your list of services that you recognize your client can need or have to do. Bare minimum is if you recognize they need to do them. It's something that you can then start offering on their behalf and making your options more compelling 100%.

I mean the easy all star to follow. That is the who. Now you know what. Who can help me with this stuff? Who do I need? Because, once again, we're not doing this to add a hat to you. That is not the point here. You've already got too much going on, so you're going to need the who. If that starts with a sub, as Joe mentioned, there's some pros and there's some cons. Scheduling pains, you're going to pay a little extra, but at least you can get some flat rates and know that information now so that you can apply it to your quotes and have that information handy when you're building up your simple premium service pricing. Now, that said, once you better understand that it's easy to transition to bringing someone in-house. Like Joe said, there are many jack-of-all-trades types out there who don't have the credentials to be an electrician at full rate that are still looking for work and looking for the new challenge, looking for something different, a change of pace, a change of scenery. If you think about this position, it's actually pretty good cakewalk, right? Hey, I get to be independent, drive around, I get materials, I help on some jobs. Sometimes I work on a team, but a lot of times I'm working on my own to just be the finisher. Who wouldn't love that? Who wouldn't love that, joe?

I mean, I can't you want to?

tie into that.

I mean, the last thing that I'm thinking is just with this person that you bring on who's doing your finish work. They add such an immense amount of value to your client experience that that 20% really could be the make or break deal of whether they work with you. If you were going to say I have the one person for $500 who's going to do a project, but I have to do more compared to someone at $1,500, but I do nothing, that client's emotional relief could be worth triple the original investment. To say I'm too busy to have to coordinate things, I'm too busy to have to take these things on, but I know for a fact you're going to do it and your warranty is lifetime, which means I'm going to allow you to do this, and I'll tell the other guy who is cheaper that I went with someone cheaper than him.

Love it Any good people to do good things. Guys, as you can tell, we got rid of all the fancy shit. There's no script, we just chat. That's why I almost cut us off early today, as I have done once or twice before. But this has been another episode of Electricpreneur Secrets. Episode 172 options and installer leverage. Getting that finisher, getting those options up, helping people at a higher level, increasing perceived value, knowing your offer to a T guys, setting expectations and following through. If you did that, how great would your business be then? I love it. We're here five days a week to help you master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. There is a quiz on that later on the phone. Call you and I will get on. So, guys, have a great weekend. It's sunny and 75 here. I'm ready to get out of here, Joe. See you guys Monday.

Looking forward to it, wish you all the best weekend. You all deserve it. Cheers.