S3 EP31 Bobby’s World - How to CRUSH Service at $100/hr

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Million Dollar Electrician Podcast, where we help home service pros like you supercharge your business and park up those sales.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

I'm Joseph Witani, and today's my co-host Clay New Meyer. We're here to share the secrets of how electricians sell over a million dollars in a single service band.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Now it's time for sales. It's time for sale. It's time to become a million-dollar electrician.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to another great episode of the million dollar electrician. Today we're going to talk about something that wouldn't quite get you to million dollar years. Not in this format, but it could still be extremely profitable. I'm absolutely kind of going contrarian on this one, Joe. I want to talk to you about Bobby's world and how to succeed as a hundred dollar an hour electrician because you can do it. I don't want to be misleading people. I want them to know. You know what I mean? I think they should know.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

The dark side of sales is pretty much it's like how do I how do we lower our number and still make money?

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Joe's just arms crossed, not into this at all. He's like, Why did I agree to come to this school? Okay, we're gonna have fun with this, but I'm also gonna be serious. If you've ever done our price tool, our price course, if you ever looked at those PDFs, it actually says on page one, maybe the beginning of page two, it's like low pricing strategy is a business strategy. It is, it's an offer, you can do it, but it only works for volume providers. So the next question I always have is like, Are you Sam Walton? Are you are you McDonald's? How did I forget McDonald's name? Yeah, you know, Coca-Cola is easy.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Just be like when and now it's like Coca-Cola. That's it. Done.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Yeah, I'm trying to. Oh, Ray Croc. That's it. Are you Ray Croc? That's what I was going for. McDonald's. Have you seen that, by the way? That movie. I have not.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

I've wanted to get on that for the longest time, but the problem with me is that that assumes I have some free time where I'm investing in things outside my family. No, no, I'm I'm too busy watching Gabby's Doll House and Unicorn Tales. Like, that's where I'm at.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

That's fair. That's fair, man. Anyway, squirrel. But if you haven't watched Founder with uh the Ray Croc McDonald's story, phenomenal movie, man. Learn just so much about business and that thing and cutthroat business, which is kind of crazy, anyways. 80, 100 bucks an hour, it can be done, but you have to work backwards on this one. We'd have to look at okay, volume, sure, but like what kind of volume? If you know when I drive anywhere between 15 minutes and half an hour, I mean, what's what's the price of fuel where you are right now for a gallon of gas?

SPEAKER_02 2:43

So we're over five dollars at this point. Yeah, it's pretty rough, but I mean, there's also other places like California was over nine.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Right now, I haven't been to the supply house in a bit, but I'd imagine they're seeing some knocks too. Everything's going up, not down. That's the point. There's inflation all around. So the reason we call this Bobby's World is you kind of have to become a Bobby, you have to become a Bobby as an electrician. And I don't know if you guys ever remember this cartoon of Bobby's World. It was like a Howie Mandel thing, but little cartoon Bobby rode his little tricycle around, and this is where sure it gets a bit fun, it gets a bit jokey, but there's also some real stuff here in this conversation. Here's how to do this and crack it wide open. If you can get a full city blocks to agree that you will be their service electrician, and you literally position yourself in those blocks so that you could ride a tricycle around, basically, uh, a little even an e van electric bike, a little electric bike you got with towing a trailer behind you. Yeah, it reminds me. I used to work in this facility a lot, big gas facility, and we would do turnarounds every year, which is just like go do maintenance, they shut the place off. Everyone does a bunch of work for a month, and there's all these guys on tricycles, like all the electrician, all the instrumentation guys are on tricycles with their tool pouch and their parts and a little wagon they can pull behind or a little like if you could approach service that way, you could actually do some real damage, even at the hundred bucks an hour, because your costs are so low. Assuming you have that, assuming you can get materials delivered and or have a little store of materials where you only do a parts run kind of once or twice a week. We're gonna have to grab your joke.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Yeah, like I can't the way I'm envisioning this is like, you know, all right, you've got you got your house, and in their garage, you got like a little garage that you're like, dedicated. This is my space, this is where I'm putting my materials. I got my e-bike plugged into a 120-volt outlet with a little trailer behind it. And I go left and I see clients' houses. I go right, I see client houses. I'm like, all right, Mr. Frosty thing comes on, like the ice cream truck just driving, people waving, going, I need outlets changed. Yeah, that's all I see is envisioned kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Little bell, little ring ring on your bike there. Um, keeping it real simple, obviously, and running a program like the good neighbor program, or as people have called it, the clover leaf. So every time you stop at a house, you definitely talk to the neighbors. They all know you. You knock, you say hi. Heck, maybe, maybe you help mow the lawn or some other stuff while you're at it. Like you're you're a full value uh added practice as a service provider. It's very much more of like a strata handyman kind of position. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 5:29

It does, like a pseudo-handyman kind of thing where you provide value, you provide customer service, you can offer reliability, but they know what they can expect from you. You're gonna make your rounds at this day per week. This is what I'm gonna do. And I just gotta sit outside and wait for the ice cream truck to come.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

This is how you do it, man. If you can lock in that value strategy, right? And if you watch even guys, you could do like the business breakdowns with Hormosy on YouTube, and he's looking at, oh, here's a garbage truck company. How do we make him profitable? Well, it's the same strategy. Hey, we need as many people in as small a range as possible. That's how you scale a low-price service in a very competitive market that is clearly commoditized. But the thing is, even if you do this, Joe, do you know what the next danger is? I'd be a flat tire at this point. So many things it could be. That's good, but imagine if you actually unify you unified, unified, I don't know how they say it, but like a working union. If you actually get that group of people together and you lock them all in, then what's to say the next electrician doesn't come by with his tricycle or little electric van and just start turning the heads his way and saying, Oh, well, I'm just gonna do a little bit more for a little bit less. And this is the bigger problem that leads us out of the joke and back into the real world, which is it's a race to the bottom. How could we even compete? At some point, someone will always undercut us and look at this as like their big prize, and we're looking at it with all the experience going, man, I'm not making much here already. How do I cut more? And that's that whole commodity market that you talk about so well, Joe. What are your thoughts on this?

SPEAKER_02 7:17

You know, the first thing that I had in mind was that like almost as like a pseudo-retirement plan. You know what I mean? Like the electricians who's like, you know what, I've ran my van, I know what I'm doing, I've done commercial, industrial, my knees pseudo-work. I got robotic knees at this point, my back's been straight now with some titanium. You know what? I can go run these calls. I know these neighbors, they know me. I've done their homes, now their kids are calling me. But you know what? I got the name, I got the reputation. I'm just gonna do this. That's how I kind of see this thing working long term. If this is actually like a practice that would be implemented by a real person, that's that's how I kind of envision that.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

You could imagine this is a full-time job to only still be undercut, and that's what we've said the whole time. It doesn't matter how low you go, there will always be someone under you. You'll always have a reason to jump into a Facebook group and go, What the heck, guys? I came in at 5k and someone just came in at two. What in the H E double hockey sticks, as we say, north of the border? And it's because they don't have overhead, they don't have a concept of business or profitability. What they see is oh, if I charge$2,000 and all it is is my work and the materials, and the materials are only a thousand, I can do this all day long. I've got another thousand dollars. Do you remember thinking that way about money, Joe, in the early days?

SPEAKER_02 8:36

I really do, and it's a sad reality because you know, no one taught us business. You know, granted, we came in trade school, we knew how to turn the tools, but we didn't know, no one taught us business. So the thought of I remember being like 165, being like, Oh my god, we're so expensive. Everyone's telling us that we're expensive. And now I'm looking at like you're mind. So, yes, I do remember it, but the funny thing that comes out of all of it is that if you really try to look at it on a side by side, your override has to be next to nothing. Like, okay, I don't have a shop, I'm working out of my parents' garage. Sure. Um, I don't have a van. You know what? Why? I bought a$2,000 beater. That's all I needed. I don't care if it falls up a cliff, it doesn't matter. I paid in cash. Like that kind of mentality of I'm just gonna take this little bit of money, I'm gonna stack it, and this is side money. That's what I can see someone looking at and saying, Okay, I need this much by this time, with this much effort, I can make this work. This isn't a feed my family, this is buy the next, you know, you know, sub to my car. You know what I mean? Like, that's what I'm looking to do.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yeah, heck, reduce cell phone bill and get uh big expandable cobra set of radios, give everyone the frequencies, yeah, let them call you on the mic um to continue that joke. Yeah, it's such a it's such a problem, though. And really, this all comes back to like, okay, well, if we can't do that, then what do we do instead? And I just did a uh uh interview uh recently with Josh Fultinsky in Australia, and I love this interview, Joe. I wish you were there for this one, but I know that you'll you'll watch it, you'll get to hear Josh's story at an even deeper level. But one of the things that really stood out is he's like, and he's Australian, so I had to stop saying man and start saying mate. So I'll use that reference here too and say he was like, mate, uh I just work alone here, but I just had my first$70,000 month, and I have time left. That's because I've appreciated myself, not in the sense of like, oh, you're you're a good mate, but like in the sense of I've appreciated my value by doing more for people than I've ever done before, and even though I'm charging way more than I ever did, like three X more for this individual, right? He's got six kids at home, a wife he loves, really cares about, right? And finally, he's had a company in the past and it just about wore him thin to the breaking point. In fact, I think he did say his first business failed. He took years off, and when he saw the signs to go back into business, it was terrifying for him. Terrifying, like he was praying to to God and saying, like, you've got to be wrong. This isn't it, this can't be it. I did this, and he made a reference of uh, I think it was the the fisherman story. Uh, was it Joseph?

SPEAKER_02 11:28

I I'm not the best which which fisherman, if it's biblical, I could probably help you.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Yeah, it was a biblical reference where Jesus told him, Well, cast a net on the other side, Peter.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

Yep, Peter.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yeah, great reference. And he just said, Okay, I've got to cast a net on the other side. So he just took another look at it and just said, I have to do some things different. And what he really did was appreciate himself. And now we've got a guy that's like, Well, I could build this company up, but this is pretty cool too, even though he still does everything, everything's good, it's better than he's had. 70k month, and he's got time left over to spend with the kids and the wife, home for dinner on time, you know, weekends off. Just an incredible position. So, the question we all have to ask ourselves out of this episode is do we want to be Bobby or do we want to be Joshy? Right? Do we want to be the guy with more time, money, and happier clients, even though we couldn't serve everyone? And I think that's what gets a lot of electricians that idea of like, I can't let them go without trying to do something for them. Do you remember that, Joe? You you know that feeling of John?

SPEAKER_02 12:35

You know, I remember, and I actually I can remember a specific moment when it terrified me. It was, I think, our first or second year, and we just got into summer, but because we were so new, we'd had the reputation not yet, and we took a uh Home Depot kitchen or like a kitchen renovation on, and we're like, we have to take this job because it's the slow season, you know, we're going into spring and nothing's coming. So we took this job, and the problem was is that the job just stretched forever and we couldn't get out of it. And we were turning people away because they were calling us from these profitable projects, but we were so locked in we couldn't do it, and we're pulling our hair out, like, oh my god, we we should start working evenings, let's start getting the mornings, let's start working the weekends because we're trying to serve everyone, and you know, that was the biggest downfall, and you needed to serve the right person at the right time for the right price, and then it's an honor to have a project drag out because you've already priced accordingly, yeah, compared to I underpriced it and I have to turn away profitable work at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Thousand percent man. I I remember doing work for free thinking I was like adding so much value to a relationship that was gonna pay off somehow, right? Like, literally, here's a couple hours of work. You know what? This one's on me. I always biggest reason for that is how low my rates were at the time. It was incredibly like embarrassing. And the guy was even like, uh I'll pay you, it's okay. It's okay. No, I want to do this for you. And there were reasons for it, like he owned a vineyard, you had many, many guests there. He was right down the block from me. It was this similar thing. I was trying to be a Bobby. Like I could just spider web out from this if I just do this one good deed. Yeah, go ahead. Let me know.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

No, I remember this this one situation. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I had the same mentality. I remember the first pool. Now, you know, I hate pools, but this is the starting of hating pools. Um, we had underquoted it because I did what the customer asked for, but we didn't count. I think either we didn't count for the bonding or a certain amount of material that went into it. So we gave a number, he approved the number, we started it. And not only did we miss the pricing model we were supposed to, we weren't even close to the price where we're supposed to be, but then the job lingered because like we hit slate as we're digging the trench. So it turned out to be a three-day pool install above ground, three-day pool install. And the total net profit we made for three days was$50. Oh, yeah. And I remember this client being like, in my mind, I'm like, you know what? I tell my partner, I was like, it's gonna be worth it because he's gonna tell everyone about us, and we're gonna be great. And you know, he did. And every client we got from him was a hoarder, or they had their house smell like cat piss, or they were negotiating price because that's what he was selling. He's like, You gotta get these guys, they are so cheap, and that's what we attracted, unfortunately. So the investment didn't pay out.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

I was gonna say, I mean, no offense by this, but you got everything you asked for.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

I guess so, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Right, work for cheap people and ask them to tell all their friends what happens next.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

All the cheap calls came in, and they were like, you know, I remember him being like, Well, listen, I sent you over all these calls, like you know, it doesn't seem like you want to work with any of them. I'm like, I had to hold my nose. Like, like the there was a cat literally pissing on the counter next to me. Like, like, I don't want to change the outlet anymore, man. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Oh man, I'm so proud of you for getting over that phase. I'm glad you made it out, Joe. And I'm glad we got to do this now instead. Uh that wraps up. That's all the time we have for today. This is a nice, short, and sweet one, guys. I want you to answer this question below, whether you're on YouTube or anywhere else that you're seeing this podcast. Are you a Bobby or are you a Joshy? Just answer that down below. One word, Bobby or Joshie. You heard it here first. Joshy doing 70k on his own. Bobby trying to do a hundred bucks an hour for many people, be full-time, overworked, underpaid. Which one do you want? Which one are you headed for? All right, Joe. Any closing comments, brother?

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Just want to say, as always, it's an absolute honor to serve you guys. And I love being able to teach you from experiences to not take. I don't want you being the guy doing three days of pool install for$50. So learn from our mistakes. Let those mistakes guide you to a better path and maybe be blessed going forward.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Absolutely. Don't forget to check out more to give Joe's show on YouTube, where he's going to lay out all the best options, real presentations, and all the best and newest technology to increase those options bigger than ever before and get some yeses with them. God, that's good, right? Great information. And my show on Fridays, RTFM. Read the fucking manual. That's going to help you simplify your business, understand the bigger picture to this, and kind of relate it to electrical theory in some way electricians can really have breakthroughs from. Can't wait to see you guys there. Have a great week. We'll see you next time, million dollar electrician.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Take care, friends.