Episode 150 - Eliminate Slow Season with The SS-Playbook

Hello, hello and welcome back to Electric Pernur Secrets, the Electricians podcast. I am here with my esteemed co-host and business partner, joseph the Salesbot Lucani, and I am pumped up Not just because I'm one of two master electrician hosts on this show with business addictions, but also because it's Action Wednesday where we're going to give you actual tactical piece, the value piece to help you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium level electrical service. Joe, are you equally as pumped on this fine Wednesday morning?

Oh my God, the word energy and electricity could only go and describe our moods right now because right now, I'm beyond pumped. I feel energized. Honestly, I really still feel like the weekend's energy is carrying in, because you can take that that's shocking, oh.

I see what you're doing there.

Yeah, I love it. So my first thought is why Did you do anything over the weekend? Because I know I did a hell of a lot of relaxing. That's why I'm feeling this good. What about you?

I actually did, Following our last week's topic having time off. This weekend I had Friday off and went to this business summit which I did a little post about. Some of our followers probably saw that on Facebook. That was cool, Talked about AI and the future, education, and there were some really cool people there. But then it was also like the first four days off I've taken in an overdue amount of time. Let's just say that.

Yeah, a significantly overdue amount of time. You need that time, brother.

Here was something fun that happened, though. Maryl and I went and took the boat out on the lake. It's getting late season so we had to get that. Make use of every opportunity. It's probably the best way to say it, but the lake that we go on Harrison is pretty long. It's something like 70 or 80 miles long. It's big. It's a big lake. What happens is it's north-south long and the wind in the afternoon blows north across this lake northeast really. We're Pacific side. That's just what happened. We went up the lake quite a ways about an hour. It was rough going out. We found this new spot. We thought that was really cool. On the way back, though, we're going against the wind and it had picked up a bit. I just have a little 20-foot lake boat. It's a bow rider with a 5.7-liter V8. Gets up on plain nice, but it wants to go. It's really difficult to find the balance. Speaking of balance, the swells are now three to four feet. They're getting pretty big on this lake. The boat keeps going faster and we're just smashing these swells. It's a fiberglass boat. I heard Mariel kind of giggling at one point and I looked down and I'm straight-faced. She's like what's wrong. I was like I've just never broke a boat before. She's like what do you mean? I've never broke a boat before. Okay, well, that's a good thing. She says Well, sort of, except for I don't know the threshold at which this boat just brings. Oh my God, we're standing and surfing this boat and just trying to bear the smashes on the knees. It was incredibly wild. I think I ground my teeth down a little bit. We got back and just said Sionar to the lake. We were happy to be back on dry land and that was the big event of the weekend. Joe, thanks for asking.

My God, it was good to see you at a certain point. I don't know how it would respond to that. I'd be like, well, I've never broken a boat. I'd be like what the fuck did you just say we're just breaking a boat? Hold on, revert that a second.

What are we talking about here. It's tough to say, man, it's tough to say you get all this stuff and all these cubbies and every time you smash a swell it's just like bang, bang A fiberglass boat, I can imagine, Because when you said she looked down, I was like tell me there's water in there.

What did you see? What happened to the fiberglass boat of yours?

I asked my neighbor. He's a bit sketchy. He said you got to go a lot harder than that before they break in two. But he's like, I have done it. They will break, they will sink, they will sink.

Anyways we don't want that to sink, but hey, thanks for bringing us to the speed on that. That's a fun weekend.

Action Wednesday. Let's get ready to it, shall we? Because we've got some really important stuff to just like give away here. Let's carry on yesterday's conversation about this thriving in the slow season Not surviving, but thriving First and foremost. What would you consider the difference between survival and thrival?

Okay, I mean, that's a weird way of saying it. You're a survival or thrival. I like that. But I guess the difference is can you run this month without needing to go into savings sustainably, like let me give you an example. So we would consistently run at around $100,000 a month. That's what you'd expect month in, month out. Right? A slow season I remember having slow season months of like 30 to $40,000 a month, like I remember when things would just dry up and we weren't prepared for it. That was bad. That was like, okay, you had all this, you had a million dollars there, and yet now you're tanked between these months and you have to literally like bleed away the savings you have. That's survival, but that's not thriving. Thriving was when we were at months where it was like 70, 80, $90,000 a month, where it was significantly close, or at least close enough, to where your summer months were. If you can be consistent and you can say, all right, things are a little tighter but I'm not going into savings. In fact my growth rate is continually funding that growth. Now we're okay, I'm willing to go sideways as long as I'm not going down. But when you're thriving you're still able to chip away towards the loan towards the shop rent, towards the new vans, towards your continuous education that's thriving.

I love that and as you say that, I'm thinking of this statement that we've all heard before, like two steps forward, one step back, that's survival. Having to compromise on your dreams or vision, that's survival. Yeah, thriving would be plowing straight ahead. This isn't going to stop you. You might slow down a little, but we're staying the core still. We're still in focus, we're still going to make this and on the next high season you're going to feel that difference, I would imagine.

Right 100% Because, if you think about it, a lot of our future seasons are predictions based off the current year that you're in. So like if you're used to having a slow season or you had a slow season, your spring is in recovery. But if, imagine you didn't have to recover, you could just threshold springboard forward and then every May forward to November is just allocating resources back into your company because you don't have to pay back the debts.

Nice. So like proactive spring instead of reactive.

Exactly, and I've had a lot of reactive springs. The reason why we're so good at this was because we had to learn how to survive better. For all of you guys in Eastern Northern Plains, it's like you get it, it gets cold and people don't want to call, so you've got to make the situations happen yourself.

Yeah, absolutely so. I mean, we can feel it, man. We know there's a difference. We know everyone just wants consistent months. Why wouldn't you want that? There's no possible way that you're listening to this right now, thinking I love when high season just beats us to piss and when slow season just comes to a complete crawl Because your staff don't enjoy it. You don't enjoy it. It's stressful. No one knows what's going to happen next year when it comes, so it's actually inspiring fear in your staff. It's a very reactive environment and if someone sees something that is more proactive, more stable, more consistent, then just jump ship. You, yourself might even give up on your dreams over this. It's important. So what's holding us back, Joe? Why aren't people making the most of slow season? Why aren't we being more proactive? Why hasn't someone taken full advantage of our Action Wednesday and gone to our Facebook page, put their hand up and downloaded the SS Playbook?

yet the reason being is I think there's a couple of specific major moving parts to it. The easiest answer is because it requires you to shift your focus. What I mean by the easiest answer is people will do things that are comfortable, even if they're not healthy. I mean, how many of us are in relationships that we shouldn't be in but where it's harder to leave the relationship than it is to just continue going as if everything's good like?

habitually get stuck in a cycle.

Exactly. We just find these situations and we stay in them. That could be the first factor. The second factor is we know that HVAC and plumbing have a better shot at these particular calls. Some of us say, oh, we'll just create a different department and then that holds whatever you're trying to do. The other reason is that not a lot of electricians understand the particular market and how markets shift in mindset towards different seasons. And then, lastly, beyond that is, electricians aren't familiar with the different niches they could get into. Like, there's a lot of things we can do and I'd love to touch on them. I know a lot of them are going to be in our marketing plays, but I want to make sure that people know there aren't things you can do electrically that don't force you to get out of your niche, that you can sustainably provide for yourself with.

Totally and we're going to dive right into that. I also want to add this. I think I did a post about this even on the weekend, it just kind of came to mind. A little quote inspired me. But ultimately humans consistently copy. We're a breed of imitation and imitations flattery, Don't get me wrong. But there's this whole concept of law of diffusion theory. Have you ever heard of this before?

Yeah, I mean, from what I understand, it's really whether someone's going to be the first one into it or whether they're going to be a follower, and I'd love to hear your take on that.

Yeah for sure. It's like an exponential. You've heard of a bell curve before, right, yeah. So with any new strategies, there tends to be the first movers who expect but also absorb all the risk because it may or may not work. But then there's the early adopters, someone who recognizes what's working and jumps on this ride and says, wow, I believe in this, I'm coming for a ride too, because I really believe this is going to be fruitful. So it's like the first person has to be faithful. The second person has to just trust the leader and get the most fruit out of it. You get your best exchange at that point. But then there's the mid to late adopters, where there's already 100,000, a million, a hundred million people, depending on the size of this strategy in this niche, right. So, for example, we talk about this in marketing, where everyone's on GMB, everyone's using LSA, everyone's trying to leverage PPC, and that's why the rates are so high is because of how late we are in adopting those strategies. We accept it like it's the way, but Google itself has grown. Google developed those strategies. They're not that old. But now there's 100,000 gurus that teach you and all the other late adopters strategies to make the most of that. So that's kind of what I mean by this law of diffusion theory. And then there's some who just never believe it, think it's too good to be true and never jump on the wagon. This to me is that for electricians in this space we're still so new to service and treated like the red headed stepchilds, and while HVAC and plumbing may have a lot of this figured out, we're still feeling like could this be true? Is there such a thing? Do club memberships actually work for electricians? I hear that on calls almost every week. Yeah, but does this actually work? Of course it works. Just because you haven't seen a million electricians do it yet, there's only 10,000 that are doing it. Maybe, if that even doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just hasn't taken to the masses yet. You got to ask yourself is now the time to be an early adopter, or do you want to wait till you see another million people with it? And then you jump on the bandwagon and realize it's not as effective as it could have been if I jumped on this Walmart stock back in the 50s.

Oh my god, could you imagine? It's like you're still sitting on your McDonald's stock for when it first came out, or you still have your version one of your Jordans. All these things are amazing if you had them originally, but you have to have the faith that they're going to work.

Yeah. So it's kind of that. It's not having the experience or not having the leadership from someone, the mentorship, to get through it. Good news for all of that the experience is here, the mentorship's here, it's free, and we even have a value piece for club memberships. And what we're giving away the SS Playbook is only going to add to that fuel for the fire, because literally we're giving this all away Again. Strategy is not the problem, you guys. The strategy is here. We just want to be the ones to help you with that. We want to see this industry actually take off and rise up together. Is it wrong of me to say that or want that, joe? No, it's not your question there.

No, I love that, and the thing is being someone who's had to run calls from multiple industries. It is incredibly important to learn from those that are around you. I learned a lot of these strategies while trying to mimic and be like what are they doing right? Why is it that I'm so slow during this season? And yet all these other trades have all this work? How do we figure this out? And that's the thing. You just need to be willing to immerse yourself into something that's uncomfortable to find the answer that makes your life comfortable again.

All right. Well, we got about five minutes here, okay. What I want us to do now is just give it all away. Okay, it's one of my favorite things to do. You want to share with them, like how we can start putting some of these strategies to use and what these strategies are.

Yeah, I'm down.

All right, and, guys, if you want to capture any of this in a more detailed format again, come to our Facebook page or come to our website at serviceloopelectricalcom, send us a message and ask for the SS Playbook. That is not the Super Sport, that is not other references. It is the slow season Playbook and we've made it specifically for September. Another S Maybe it's the SSS Playbook, because now is the time. It's still fall. You still have leverage in this. All you've got to do is take proactive action. Mm-hmm, all right, all right, you ready to jump into this?

Sure, I was gonna say. I just want to touch on one thing before we do so, because you mentioned that proactive action is required, and I also want to let people know that there's actually a curved scale to the level of effort it takes to pull this off if it's done later. First, being done now, hmm, sounds, if you, if you can do this now, like imagine the right way is hey months ago, springtime, you were designing your membership and you're implementing that's. That's the perfect plan, right? Obviously you do that. Then it becomes much easier because by now you have a pile of leads that you can transfer. What are the fall season or winter season? Yeah, but you're in winter now. People are thinking about it. Even if they're not thinking about, it's in the back of your mind. Every time a cold breeze blows, someone's thinking about winter. Yeah, so you can implement it now and insert these calls. You'd still be more successful than if it was already snowing. You're already in December and they hit you with the. Well, I can't because it's Christmas. You need to have it already on the calendar before that argument comes up.

Yeah, okay, that's, that's really powerful. So the way I'm seeing this, joe, is these inspections that we're aiming to have take place in winter really come from three places mm-hmm. Club members pre-sold maintenance on niche equipment right, yep and warranty. That's correct. How can we begin to leverage this? Let's talk through it from the beginning to the end in like a hyper condensed format and let's plow through this okay.

So I'm gonna try and go on a rapid speed. Forgive me, you stop me.

Wherever you need, okay and I think we're in order of importance even the way I said that because club member, ultimately if I can just insert this, basically, guys at your top option or wherever they bought the club membership in your process, they've identified that they really appreciate the finest things, the most convenience, the least time delay. So this is your top customer to serve, because it's the highest probability that they'll continue to purchase from you. Is that right?

Joe, that is a hundred percent true. Oh, that's the reason why we want those clients. First One they've already made that purchase. So whatever it was they were like, I made a purchase. They're already showing their buyer. Second, they bought from you. They specifically said I like your service and I want to work with you, but the membership has a particular benefit to it. They've paid you in advance to say I want to exclusively work with you for the benefits that membership provides to me. And They've already said yes, you can come and pre-schedule this appointment for that season. So now when you show up, it's not a cold call, it is a client who has paid you to reform this service at a time that they Expected it and, if you have timed it correctly, they've already had five, six months since they last made a purchase. So you're in a situation where, if they did make a purchase, they were already completely paid off and now you're back with a fresh customer who truly is interested in what you're doing.

Love that. That was brilliant. You laid it out, man, awesome. Now, when it comes to warranty, I mean there's another piece here you could leverage. I mean, technically, you could offer the best warranty in your market by not only being a lifetime Craftsmanship warranty which is something that we dive specifically into in our program on the inside track but also what if you exercise PM inspection, a preventative maintenance, winter inspection on that equipment to ensure the lasting Impact of that craftsmanship guarantee? What would happen then? Yeah, that was.

That was something that we specifically did with generators. The reason being was we would actually say we have a preseason and a postseason Maintenance that we can offer you, and the benefit would be is we're gonna come when we know this is gonna have the maximum amount of stress, when the battery is likely to drop below your 11 cold cranking ants. We're gonna test and make sure the winterization system is working and then, after we've tested it, we're then going to turn off the main in your house and go through the whole home To inspect and make sure that all the circuit you would have backed up are now getting the power they need. So when you need it this season, it's ready for you and Then, coming postseason, you just have another opportunity to be there when, before they tune up the AC, you're working on their generator before the spring storms. So why?

I know points yeah, and I know lots people are seeing dollar signs right now, but what I'm seeing literally is white gloves and smiling faces. Men, mm-hmm. Is there a better experience than this?

No, and the reason why I say that is think of all the times you experienced bad service. Did it ever? Or even I even bad service, media ochre service service that doesn't stand out. Very few of us receive bad service, but a lot of us receive mediocre service to such an extent that the name is so forgettable we don't even remember who we're supposed to be calling back. But if you were to say it is truly an honor to serve you at this high level, because we believe in our lifetime crash-machines guarantees, because we believe in providing you that first-class membership experience, because we want to offer you this solid warranty to such an extent that I'm going to come back months later just to ensure you have no problem, and I'm going to do it without you even asking. In fact, I'll call you to get it on the calendar because I'm so insistent on this gets done. That's a memorable experience. That's someone who's going to say yeah, all right, I'll call SLE again. This is what. Yeah, you know what. I at least remember you because I saw you three times.

Building relationships and trust, and the further you go down this road, the better. Now, keep in mind, just like we mentioned, the end of yesterday's episode. Your six options format feeds this too, because if only 10, maybe 15% are taking your top option, that leaves 85% to 90% of your clients still have things left undone that you already know about. You already have a roadmap for them. But then what else do you find when you do these thorough inspections? What else are you able to add to that? What other opportunities are they just more comfortable speaking to you about now that some time has passed? Or new opportunities with that new and additional trust?

There's one particular situation that comes to mind that I feel would be really helpful for a lot of people. That was whenever we would install de-icing systems. The reason being is, let's say, someone was proactive and they said I want to install a de-icing system in September. Okay, that's likely now, when they're going to call us right, but they're not likely expecting what it's going to cost running the dedicated circuit, powering it, making sure everything needs to be routing it up towards the top level. Okay, so it's likely that they may not take the humanistat automatic option. They may instead take the manual. I'll throw the switch, I'll press the GFI, I'll turn on the breaker, whatever it is. Now you come back two, three months later and you're in the winter and they've had to experience. Oh, I've got to go downstairs every day. I've got to go downstairs and turn it on. Oh, it's snow. Is it going to snow? When's it going to turn off? Then you introduce an automatic option, say hey, clay, I understand when we first set you up with this that we had the option for it to be fully automatic. What was the reason you chose to do this all manually? Now, after experiencing it, would you at least now have an interest in being like. I don't want to deal with this again. What does it cost to go automatic? You? mean, if I do it that way. I do nothing, you do nothing. How would you like?

to proceed. Absolutely so. Their perception of the inconvenience was then confirmed again through the actual activity and the pain in the ass factor. Absolutely, man, it's gold. It's gold. And even we talked about before with hot tubs and how so many of us do hot tubs. Many of us even make a niche out of hot tubs and yet we won't come back for that pre-winterization check.

Yeah, it's rough to think about, because if you really figure out what needs to be done with your hot tub, if I don't touch this thing or I don't keep this electrically running and you now have something that doesn't have power and below freezing, you now have a giant ice cube that, like your boat, is going to risk cracking into pieces. So wouldn't it not be in our customer's best interest for us to at the very least ensure that this circuit is stable and will not fault out, regardless of what seasonal condition is on it?

And again, just like we talked about the warranty and your unique service position, your market dominating position, wouldn't it be an advantage to have that written into your options, on display, even in your marketing, to say we're the only ones that are coming back and booking an actual preventative maintenance to ensure that craftsmanship, to ensure that stuff never happens to you. So they're getting an extra value adder built into that package and the price starts flying out the window as you build this package up. It doesn't even matter anymore because it's not comparable. No one else is doing it and the reason they won't do it just like we talked about yesterday on the podcast is because they're driven by that getting get out quick, don't waste money, it's not profitable, we can't go back, we shouldn't do that. We don't want to be salesy. All these fears and the scarcity is just living on through their business and it's holding them back. So why not be different? Why not build it into your pricing? Why not just build a sustainable and consistent profitable business and run the play? It's run a play. I love it. Styo, styo, styo. Stick to your offer. Our friends, joe, we got to lay this out Action item or all star today.

I want to take the all star again. I mean, this is my area of expertise, I love this shit. So I want to constantly be set in the bar high.

We can give you the all star. So yesterday I focused on pricing and making sure you have cash reserves. Today, in a couple of ways, and even yesterday, we've talked about ways to leverage this at the front end of your business, which is more my side of the expertise. I really enjoy the marketing and the conversions and so let me help you with that. Leverage your warranty. Have a look at it. Is it the same as everyone else's or is it different? Can you imagine a way where you're able to work in some winterized inspections to make sure you're able to come back and leverage that on the front end, in other words, in your selling position, in your marketing? Are you able to do that with the specialized equipment that you're installing, to give yourselves the edge, to be the specialist over the generalist? Really, think about how is my offer different? And could I leverage either of these things to be more attractive at the front end but then to get back into the home, make sure they're happy, have another touch point to build trust and even make sure they don't want to upgrade on the options they chose in the past, or make sure that they haven't experienced some additional inconvenience, like Joe said that they want to now remedy. How's that for just a basic action?

I like how it's. I feel like that's basic plus if that makes sense.

I appreciate that I tried to really bring it down, but I did my best here.

You and I. We're both operating at the Allstar level. I get it. The reason why I wanted the Allstar action is there is a specific step that you guys could take to ensure that you get better traction on this, and this is what I recommend doing. If you want to pick a niche, you must also be attached to the area that surrounds it. Let me explain what I mean. If you're going to be a de-icing cable specialist, where now you're researching different ways and different patterns and different tractions of what works how to route it down the gutter, how to make sure that it goes attached to the guards, how to put on all the stuff that goes with it wouldn't it also make sense that you were exposed to the most people who had ice damming? How do you do that? The way you would do that is getting involved with either roofing or insurance. It doesn't mean that you get into that industry, but wouldn't it be helpful, at the very least, to say this customer experienced an ice dam situation? We recently recognized that a roofer had to go out there to do a basic repair. We can then be the provider that gets attached to that to say I recognize you had that. That's why I'm contacting you to offer your solution so it never happens again. Would that not be the next level? You want to work on hot tub maintenance? Okay, get involved with the pool company. You want to do heated driveways or walkways? Get involved with a hardscape or a paver. If you can connect to those individual points, you can feed each other leads and the very least now you're in a place of connecting with someone who's like yes, I just experienced that problem. Fucking, fix it. I don't want to deal with this anymore. Not a problem on it.

That's massive, joe. I want to thank you for that. I want to thank everyone who's listening, watching us, joining us on the Facebook group. If you have not got the SS Playbook, please join us. Servicesuperelectricalcom. Reach out there, ask for the SS Playbook or, on Facebook, get this value piece. It's going to help you build up a business that thrives, not just survives, to make sure that you get through every month of the year and hopefully even dial back those summers a bit and have a workplace that everyone can enjoy and stay long term. This has been another episode, episode 145 of Electric Pinner Secrets, the Electricians podcast, and we just ended it in 30 minutes. Flat, joe, I can't wait to see you guys tomorrow. Looking forward to it, jens, take care.