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Why the f#$k would I pay for a switchboard? It works! | 173 · Simplified Sparky Marketing

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Get up and let the old lady sit down in the bus, give her a hand tucking away her little two-wheel trolley.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: The vegetables are about to fall out.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Today's podcast is going to be hating on people that are too nice.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult, but you try to be a nice person and sometimes it can come back and bite you in the ass or shoot you in the foot.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had a conversation with one of my good friends today and he is running a very successful electrical business in Sydney and he says this thing keeps happening to him where he does a fix to get somebody out of a hole to come back and do the job again to do the proper job.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was a temporary fix first time around, and they seem to like the temporary fix and not want to proceed with the actual electrical work once the electrician has left.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're going to get into.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Very early doors in business.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I went down a rabbit hole of podcasts and I started listening to this one with this American guy on it, and his whole business model was mainly replacing garage doors.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't repairing, it was replacing.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So what I used to do was people used to come to him with a semi-working garage door, or it was on the way out, or something like that.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And one of his pet peeves was, and he used to always just basically have a go at the people that did this, but there used to be old schoolers that were proudest punch.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: They'd hold apart in their garage, they'd hold it in the van for four years, and when the time came and their garage door was about to cack it, this old schooler would come around, assess the door, it's on its last legs, but lo and behold, this guy pulls like a little component out the back of his truck, proudest punch, holding it in the air.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I knew this would come in handy one day.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So he goes in, does a minimal job, replaces the component, and it works for maybe a month, two months, maybe a year, and it cacks it again.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And what that guy used to stress was to do the job once, to do it well, and just get it done there and then and replace the whole unit rather than repair a shitty door that now doesn't have any warranty.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: But if a brand new door goes in, you're going to get the warranty on that for a number of years.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if something does happen, you've got that backup.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it's kind of similar to me how I stress ceiling fans as well.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've been requested a few times that people want me to come out and replace a capacitor or the ceiling fans on the blink.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Can you come out and repair it?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Realistically, it's bad, but with landfill and all of that, but it's more cost effective for them to buy a new fan and to have me replace it or you replace it, then me go there, assess it, get the part number, try and find this component online, get the component, come back, install it.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It might work.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And like the garage door situation, when I replace that component, it could be a capacitor, it could be some function of the motor, which I wouldn't even touch anyway.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I might replace that, and a week later it's cacted again, and then they're coming back at me going, You fixed it, warrant this stuff.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why it's better off to just do a clean sweep replacement.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there's been two situations that this Sparky has told me today that were quite interesting.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't the exact story of what's happened, so I'm going to put my own take in it.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was something along the lines of he had a tripping power circuit, the lead that came in.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So my mate's staff member went out there, and I don't know why they couldn't do it on the day, but they couldn't.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we're not all perfect.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he might have had to go to another job, he might have nodded the components in his truck.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Mr.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect Electricians out there going, he should have had them.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Fair enough, he should have had them, but it should be sunny every day.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: But some days we get rain.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: When he went to the job, there was a 20-amp circuit that was tripping.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Went out there, explained the switchboard, and the guy was like, Yeah, happy to do the switchboard.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Signed on the quote and all that.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then he was like, At least can you get the power circuit going today because we need it for X, Y, and Z.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, Okay, yeah, perfect.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: We'll swap out that RCBO, get the power circuit working, found the fault or whatnot, and got them up and running.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And a few days later he called up to book it in.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, You know what?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: The power circuit's working, we're happy with that new safety switch on that or whatever.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: We don't really want to do that right now, so we're going to decline that.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're not, we're not interested.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the issue when you do things like that, is the temporary fix, they think it's a fully, fully fledged fix.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's happened to me as well before where you do something to help somebody out, and you actually lose out on the juicy work.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Prime example of this this week, I was on a job in a complex which is purely coincidental, but I worked in number one, it was a block of townhouses, and I upgraded their switchboard, and I worked in number three the other day.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Purely coincidental, they came from different avenues in the exact same block, and I noticed the board had been done in number three, and I pieced it together and I said, When were these boards done?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they said basically it was like two years ago.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: What would what happened was I went and I upgraded the board in that townhouse, and then he was in the strata committee or whatever, and then he read it that these boards are substandard, and lo and behold, that fucking Sparky for the strata gets handed a golden ticket to upgrade the switchboards.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't get asked, I didn't get questioned to do it, but I pieced it together.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Was this requested from Strata?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it was.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what I should have done back then is gone direct and said, Look, I'll talk to your strata and I'll do that, but I just don't do strata work, so it's kind of it's bittersweet for me.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: What can you do?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: The second situation with this guy was he went to this apartment, there was an exhaust fan, and it was rattling in the bathroom.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember the bits and pieces of the story.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: There was something to do with a run-on timer that he altered or changed and it stopped the rattle, but the fan itself was pretty fucked, and there was something else not working up there.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he he ripped it apart and was like, okay, you need this, this, and this.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: We need to replace this.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Again, sign on the quote, whatever, perfect.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Put the fan back up, the rattle had stopped because he disconnected the run-on timer, he did something to it, moved it adjusted.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: The bearing still, let's just say the bearing's gone as well.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was just, I know, momentum's keeping it up.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: The client came back again and was like, We we're we we don't we don't need to go ahead with it now because it's we we hear it's working and there's no point in you replacing this if it's working, even though they agreed and it signed on the quote, and this is why he was actually better off assessing it, leaving it broken, getting the quote approved, coming back and doing it.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: With the switchboard, it's questionable to have a power circuit down for a number of days, but if he was able to come back the next day, what you could have done is said run out a lead, plug it in, plug your fridge in to that power circuit over there, do this, do that.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: But this is the purpose of this podcast today, is just a value bomb to you.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And like this guy's extremely successful, he's in business many years, but he's only learning his lessons now because he's seeing this this thing of when people get a little quick fix, they don't understand the whole electrical system, they just see it as my PowerPoint's working again, my TV's on, my kitten's on, the oven's working, the cooktop's working.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Why the fuck are we going to spend a couple of grand on the switchboard when there's no need?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like putting a set of alloys on a car, it already spins the wheels, and I go from A to B, but I don't want these fancy alloys.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know the purpose of actually changing these out.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And look, people listening to this can argue that well, he didn't explain himself correctly or he didn't educate the client correctly, which possibly, quite possibly, but that's today's podcast, and today's podcast is a lesson to don't put a band-aid over people's electrical work if it actually fixes their problem temporarily, but it can essentially fix their fucking problem and they'll they'll change their mind when they want you back.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll catch you next week.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Don't do it.