Ep 282 - The Biggest Options Mistake

Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to yet another episode, a live episode of Electric Preneur Secrets, the Electricians podcast, where me and my favorite homie, joe, show up five days a week to help you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. We are the Electric Preneurs Just a couple of master electricians with business addictions, here and ready to serve and support you in this journey. The admission cost for this for you to sit back in the hot seat take everything we give, just promise to take action. Joe, I'm missing doing this live every day, but I know we're still providing value. Brother, how the hell are you today?

I gotta admit I'm doing really really good, because every time I hear that hello, hello, hello, it definitely fills me with almost like this happy energy of man. We're doing it again, we're building something. I just love the energy we put into every episode. It's like you know what I'm doing really well. I'm feeling blessed. Today I'm going to speak to that.

Go for it. There's two sides to getting shit done, like crushing business, crushing it. One is motivation actually being inspired to do something, but the other is discipline. We always start with a little motivating hello, hello, hello and try to bring some heat, try to bring some heat to this but we always end with a couple of action items. Those mean taking a little motivation and taking action, which is discipline. We actually touch on both of these every episode, and that's not just by fluke, it's because we actually want you to succeed. Today's episode is absolutely no exception to that. In really, it's about these options again, man. It's about not taking shortcuts. It's about not making big options mistakes. We alluded to one, but I have a feeling we're going to uncover a few here. Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure we're going to Number one. Sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say speaking of the discipline versus the motivation. I just wanted to say I think it's really particular for this episode because when it comes to options, it's very easy to get inspired for them because you're like, oh well, obviously they make sense. I agree. Higher tickets, higher conversions of closing, better consistent relationships, longer life time values, better tracking the odd goes on. We all know that it's a good thing to do, but yet why aren't people doing them? And I do believe it's the lack of discipline, and I just want to call in what that actually looks like. You know, so many people say like, what is motivation? Everyone thinks that motivation is the thing that's like oh well, you just do it please, when really motivation is just you activating your discipline to say, no, you're doing this thing now.

That's a nice way to look at it. One of my favorite sayings around this actually came from one of our mentors, Jim Rohn, and he used to say you know, you got to be careful who you motivate. You motivate an idiot. You're just going to go running around a little faster and mess things up, right. So again speaking to this combination, I think when we do the right things, we're motivated to do the right things and we're disciplined to follow through. On that. It's massive.

We've got Brian Peasey with us, James with us as well, you guys joining us in the Electricpreneur Secrets Group. Thanks for saying hello, and you could join us too on these lives, just by joining that Facebook group. And or, if you want to communicate with us and you're not on Facebook, jump on our website, serviceloupeelectricalcom. Spoiler alert Some courses are going to be accessible from the website very soon. And Austin Matthews with us. Hello, hello, hello. Let's get into this number one options. Mistake, Joe, what would you put on number one? And, gosh, if you say the wrong thing, I'm going to have to interrupt. I think Now the pressure's on because I've got one, that's just like burning number one.

I can say there's one that pisses me off the most and I don't know if it's the right one, but I'm going to go for it. I really don't like templated options. I would say the reason why is because people want to make options, but they also feel uncomfortable having that mental or emotional or technical stretch that is required in order to come up with viable, consistent options. So, as a result, they say well, what are the things that we can quote in every home? I can put a smoke detector in, I can put a search factor in, I can put the label in, and you know what? To an extent I could see how that's justified.

But you're losing on one major critical component and that is when we describe options, it's always with a. I did this for you because could you imagine you're being called out and saying like, hey, it's a tripped countertop outlet, and then you go through all things and I check the panel, I check this, oh, but the first thing I'm going to tell you about is, as a generator interlock, the first thing you're going to bring up, how can you have a because frame for that, unless, unless you felt, this customer maybe needs to have backup power for a particular reason that you see is justified by that call. But when you just grew it it's not going to have a good look.

We see this in the form, too, of everyone small. Someone reaches out and they're like hey, can you help me sell more search protectors? No, that's not the point of offering surge protection. The point is, is it actually a need of this customer? And if it truly is, then you should be able to tie that into a because frame, because us teaching anyone how to sell more surge protectors is just some salesy bullshit and no one wants to be sold. It's 2024. Anyone else noting some financial, maybe, tightness? Yeah, aren't buying extras necessarily just because they want to burn some cash. Right. And if you think about that salesy relationship of like, hey, you should buy this, we offer it every time, help us sell this thing. Those are all really salesy transactions. How you move money in exchange is for value, and if you haven't linked a because frame to that value of the thing that you're trying to exchange, then it is salesy. It's salesy as hell and it's not worth the effort to push it in that way. Does that make sense? It does.

It makes a lot of sense. I actually have another one that came to mind as well.

Okay, well, I'm going to actually interrupt you. I'm going to do it Good, because my number one was not offering options at all.

Oh well, I mean okay well, sure you skipped right over it. Okay, yeah, if they didn't offer options, then yes, that would be the first thing. My logic was if they're offering options, what would be the hard thing?

But yeah, it's important to say why it's important to say why it belongs here. This is about the biggest options mistake and we're in a debate about it. My, my side of this debate is that if you're not offering options, I got to. I got to wonder why. Why, as an electrician, do you acknowledge that there are things a homeowner doesn't know? They don't know what's the percentage of homes that you go into that have mislabeled circuits?

I mean, I've got a pretty strong amount whenever I was doing it and I feel that when it comes to labeling, it's a direct why for a lot of things, like if you're an electrician and you were called to say, let's say, my bedroom ceiling fan isn't working and, as a result, I'm going to take a look at it.

Okay, sure, it was just one loose wire in the switch, but I need to go to the panel first, because that's part of our process, and I noticed that half the side of the panel isn't labeled. Well, that would mean that if there was ever something that the customer needed to run and turn off, they would only have half the data available to them. And though it may not be directly related to that ceiling fan, I can see being able to say well, is it wrong of me to want to offer this to you to prevent something from happening in the future? Not trying to fear monger, but simply saying if you ever ran into a situation where you needed to shut it off, there is no way of identifying and you'd have to turn everything off in order to find it out. Do you want to have that, or would you rather know what to turn off safely and accurately?

Serious concern, joe. It's a serious concern and that's why offering no options is such, such, such a bad idea. If you consider yourself any degree of a master electrician, you will offer options simply simply for the fact that you know there's more to every electrical home, home electrical system that we should be inspecting, should be discussing and should be building options around so that a homeowner can see it, not to mention. I like to bring up the fact there's some liabilities in question here, right, when we suggest building options also removes from your need to build contracts, right.

Like yeah, I agree with that.

Great fences make great neighbors. Great contracts make great partnerships right, we're working with someone that's like a partnership, so you want to disclose as much information and define where responsibilities are in end, don't we? And by having options is a pretty way to say look, here's all the things we could do for you with these, because frames for what we discussed here today and the feelings that you conveyed, but it's also showing exactly what they chose and where your responsibility ends, and thus the liability ends too. Go ahead.

In addition, also when you do options are away, there's an observation section which could mean you could come back seven years from now and say let's look at this situation. Ah, I see that Mary had a particular situation with her kitchen countertop. We opened it up and we detected that there was original wiring from the homes of initial construction and that we offered a range of solutions, but she chose to take a more economical package At least. Now, when I get back to that call, I'm like okay, I know what I'm looking for, I know it's there, I know the parameters based on what I saw. So it gives context to the options as well. That way, I'm not scratching my head and going and I know they called this for this, but how did we get to the generator? How did how did that happen? Where was our because frame? Oh, I remember it's in the observations. Now.

I gotta tell you something extremely messed up right now.

Before.

When you started saying that and you were like and Mary had my brain, I was like a little lamb. I don't know why that happened that hasn't happened recently but I went to Mary, had a little lamb for this one, that's all good. Massive mistakes were covered. You had another one. Do you remember or can you draw on a third mistake that are happening? Oh, it is happening with options.

Yes, I have one that hurts my soul. Okay, starting from the bottom up, now let me explain why. There's a particular science to this. Now, let's say that I were to be your electrician yeah, right, and I were to. You were to call me as a friend and say that you wanted me to help you with something around your house. Right, even just friend to friend, not even counting the fact you're an electrician. But I were to come by and say, all right, you want me to put the ceiling fan up for you.

Let's start with this why don't we just take the fan and put it on the ceiling, and then I'm going to take surface mold track and I'm just going to have molding on the ceiling and I'm going to run it off the wall and they're going to run it down to an outlet. And then I'm not even going to hardware, I'm just going to fish an extension cord and I can stick it out and you can just unplug it whenever you want to get the fan going. Yeah, that's, that's the bottom option and I led with that. Yeah, and the bottom option is is what you lead with almost always becomes the perceived standard by your client. So now they're seeing you in the light of that's your initial suggestion, and it's also been established that anything after that bottom option is often seen, if it's moving upwards in price, as you upselling the customer, because no one ever suspects that you're going to come to my home and tell me that you're going to do something that's not going to fix it. They're going to assume that whatever your bottom option is is the minimum fix required and anything above that is just something more, whereas if you reverse the scale and I'm going to start with the best now I'm a hero every time I lower the options Because it's like this is the permanent fix.

This takes care of everything to the finest level. Yeah, you don't like that, okay, let's go lower. You don't like that, let's go lower. Let's look at the mid range. You don't like that, let's go lower. And every option. Five more times I got to lower my number and narrow it, and narrow it, and narrow it. So maybe somewhere around the middle you'll stop me. Compared to if I started from the bottom, working my up instead of ended up with a silver option, I ended up with an economy option Just because the customer sees it as an upsell, rather than I genuinely believe that this is something you need, and here's why.

That's really good. As you're saying that, I can't help but think another mistake. Okay, language, how we're communicating these options, assuming we've built them now, we've got them in the right order. What language are we using to describe search protection?

Oh don't even use search protection In fact. Can we touch on that for a moment? Yeah, let's even use that, because everyone's talking about how you offer search protection. How do we do it? How do we sell more? Don't describe what the part is called. Instead, describe what the part does. So a search protector. If you'd say to a customer, I'm going to give you a search protector, I would immediately start thinking. When I hear a search protector, I think of a search strip. I'm thinking the $13 to $40 strip that you buy at some supply house that's connected to my TV or my computer and it's at that little red button and that's it. That's mentally what I hear. So I'm thinking $30 to $50, maybe $100 if it's in your panel.

I can get one in the dollar store for five bucks. You probably could right what's wrong with that Exactly?

The thing is, what does a search protector actually do? How many customers genuinely know what a search is but at the same time, know that every one of their TVs and computer has one? We don't even know why, but they know that they have it. So instead, it's an electronics safety system. You are installing this system to protect all the sensitive electronics that maybe they can't even have the search protectors in for or search strips in for. Yep, how you can do that with a furnace, how you can do the hardwired microwave, the washer dryer, the stove, the fridge, all these things. You're going to have search strips on every single one of them. That would be ridiculous. You know the 240 dryer? You're not going to do that. But all of them have control boards.

So if I were to said say, well, clay, I'm installing an electronic safety system because just here at the kitchen table, I could see you have a microwave. I see a fridge, I see you have a stove. See, you have the washing machine. I see the LED lightings above us, I see the Nest thermostat, every one of these have a sensitive control on it. So what I'm doing is offering a protective system to ensure that if anything were to come into the home, it has to go through this filter first, and then nothing gets damaged. Was it wrong to be to one offer that to you?

Not at all, and I can tell you from being in the customer's mindset. The difference you just made was, instead of focusing on the 30 to $50 item, by pointing out the actual items in the house, I'm tracking oh $1,500 appliance, oh $1,000. Appliance, oh $500, you know what I mean. So you're adding up a very different calculation. Wow, I should protect that stuff, mm-hmm. And we effectively just went against ourselves and taught people how to sell more surge protectors.

I know right, it's a funny way to have that word.

Oh fun, but it's okay. Another one, if I can. Okay. One more Okay another one would be people using part names. Now, I know we talked about surge protectors, but sometimes people put model numbers in Like you'll have. Let's say, you're offering a panel In the bag. I'm doing a 200 amp square D QO series 45, 60 space panel with this many arc faults at this rating and the customer is looking at the information. And as someone who's presented both ways, what I found is that when customers hear model numbers, they either completely draw it out and it's useless information, or they feel it's important information and that's what they're holding onto. So when you introduce equipment and part numbers, you're either blinding or not blinding. You're either dulling the customer's attention because they're not feeling it's important, or you're shifting the focus to say don't worry about the services providing. This is the thing, because otherwise I wouldn't have given you that much detail on it.

Yeah, I love that. Joe, I'm going to close this out here. Go for it. I'm going to go along on this one. It's going to take us a few minutes to get out of this and to come up with a couple action items. So let me wind us down a little bit. Let's funnel this back just a bit. We've just talked about some of the biggest mistakes in building options and maybe even that comes across as arrogant a little bit. We understand that building options is not a simple task. It can become simple and very easy for you through the process of repetition. Learn, do teach. If you want to master building options that actually speak to the because frames of your clients, the best way to do that is by practicing, actually doing it. Leaving it to chance that maybe this time when I talk to the client I'll just learn some things by some divine power that I'll be able to use to build options is not a winning strategy for this. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I would agree with you there, taking observations from a job you've just done and had troubles coming up with options, and going back to your office, your home, your controlled environment, with your team. Maybe training hour and doing a training hour on options every week could be a sound strategy to improving through repetition, couldn't it?

It sounds like something that we also have every single week. If you're an in-track member, you literally have that time every week where we literally build options with you.

Of course, but you can even do this on your own. Learning, as I've come to redefine recently, is not just listening, hearing, reading, seeing someone do something for you. It's you doing something, causing a different behavior given a similar situation. If you haven't done it, you haven't learned it. So I urge you to make space for this, this Building Options, follow what we're saying here and take action on this stuff. I guess I just laid out the basic action without even knowing it.

Yeah, I was just going to call you out on that, but hey, that's the basic.

I snuck it in there, brother, I snuck it in. Okay, do you get an all star? Yeah, I can make this work, all right.

So let's see when we're talking about options, I would say, what is? Because there's so many things that we can take, of course.

It was a big one.

Because I was going to say, like, my first thought is you know, don't build from the bottom up, always come up with a because frame. But the all star action I would say, if I had to pick one, is the because frame. But I want to go in a little detail about why is that okay? Yeah, okay. So the because frame is also something that you can use to gauge whether your options are going to be relevant or whether your presentation is going to be awkward or not. So before I'd ever sit down for a presentation, I would always write the options in advance.

But as I was writing them before I even got there, I would say I did this for you because for every single statement that I had, every line item that was there, and if I didn't have a strong because statement, I would either question it or I would try to present it as if I was arguing from the customer's position, because you know that they're going to object to some of the things you had.

And if you say I did this for you because they go, what and you just look like a deer in the headlights, it's going to be very quick to see that you just threw something out there. But if you're like, I did this for you because and they're like well, I don't think we need that. Okay, I can understand that, but here's why I felt that it was so included and relevant to make that mention this now. But was it wrong of me to do so? That fortitude and that muscle memory that comes from it, eventually you'll learn, is just the way of living. Now I'm going to always say if I'm going to offer you something, I need to know why that makes sense to you, because if I can't defend it from your side of the line, I shouldn't be on mine.

Wow, that's a mic drop, brother, and you just inspired me. As you were saying that, I was like, wow, if we don't have a because, then we're leaving it for their assumption of our because and what that?

assumption is going to be is because you want to sell me some shit. Guys, this has been another episode of Electric Printer Secrets helping you master options yet again doing our best here, and really you know it's the same mold helping you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. Keep on following us five days a week. Keep on listening. We'll keep on giving and keep putting your hands up every Wednesday. If you're not on our email list or on our Facebook in that sphere of influence, then you're missing a ton of pieces of the program that we give away every single week for free. Why? Well, to rise the tides, because we're sick of the rat race too, this race to the bottom that's sinking all boats. That old dog's not going to hunt anymore. Joe, we're doing our part. We're helping this industry the best we can. Let us know where your options troubles are, Let us know how else we could serve you, and we'll see you again on the next show.

And we'll see you all too well.