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Electricians Not Systems Thinking! | 165 · Simplified Sparky Marketing

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Or electrician has left.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: He said you were the guy he worried about most.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: So he's recommended you.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: A few years ago, probably two to three years ago, I had a job in Alexandria, and what the job entailed was pulling a 10-mil cable from the front of the house on this terrace under the floor.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: It was a bit of a shitty run.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: And fishing it right out the back to the kitchen.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: So the builder was doing a renovation.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: I just had to get the cable out there, put it to a little sub-board out there.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: And Bob's your uncle, he tapped off of that.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: I put underfloor ventilation or sub-floor ventilation in as well on that job and other few little bits and beats like change lights and stuff.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: When I went out to look at the job, I was greeted with this fantastic couple who I've done loads of work for since.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: And they've referred me along their street as well, which is fantastic.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: But when I got out there, I seen the client was walking around with a quote printed out, and I could see the exact name on it.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, What is she doing?
1:01
SPEAKER_00: So I said, So what are you looking to do here?
1:04
SPEAKER_00: When I went out to look at the job, and then they ran through it.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: But before we got started, and she noticed I seen the cause, kind of giving it a bit of a corner eye.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: She said, Look, what's after happening is we had a great electrician, and he has literally just disappeared.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, What do you mean disappeared?
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Because I knew the company name because I remember rewinding right back to 2016, 2017, even 2018, when I started my business, the electrical business, I was like always looking at my rankings and listings on Google.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: So as you do, and you will do this too, depending on what stage of business you're in, is you will daily, if not weekly, fortnightly, depending on what you're doing, particularly service and maintenance, you will keep looking at your rankings, where you're ranking Google on your suburb for specific keywords, etc.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: Because you're like, are the SEO company doing their job?
1:54
SPEAKER_00: Is what I've done on my website working?
1:56
SPEAKER_00: Is this how it all operates?
1:57
SPEAKER_00: Am I ranking here?
1:58
SPEAKER_00: Am I ranking there?
2:00
SPEAKER_00: This particular guy and this company, I believe was a small company.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: It could have just been him or him and a tradesman, but he was always ranking super high, particularly in the eastern suburbs.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, What's his game?
2:13
SPEAKER_00: What's his like he must be killing it?
2:16
SPEAKER_00: The business looked solid, the website looks solid for the era, and I was then told that he had just disappeared off the face of the earth, and he I never ever met him, always seen his page ranking.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know he knew who I was, but we then somehow serendipitously never met, but he's referred me work, and I spoke to the client and said, What do you mean he's just disappeared?
2:41
SPEAKER_00: What had happened was at Ukraine, Russia, at war, he had a connection to it, literally dropped his everything, and then just went.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: And when I mean everything, he even left his website lapse.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: So I tried to email him to thank him, and I tried to call him, and there was nothing.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: It was just like everything, emails were bouncing, the phone was going nowhere.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: I actually tried his website, and what it turns out is that he left his domain laps, and therefore somebody else snatched it up because it became available, and some electronics company, quite clever, had snatched it up to sell their electronic garbage on it under let's just call it Alan's Electrical, because it's quite a similar name to that.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: It's just the gentleman's first name, and electrical.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, you can buy electronics on that website now, but I was like, it's such a shame that he hadn't it in place or it set up in such a way where he could have just right, shit.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: I gotta get out of this, let's offload the business to somebody else.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: It literally just wound down and it went to shit.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: And that is what got me thinking about systems thinking, and something I'm driving into my members' heads inside Simplified Sparky is to systems think from day dot.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: And I mean when you're even starting your electrical business, and I am doing this to them now because when it comes to actually taking a staff member on, or in particular, what we're aiming at first is to delegate out all the monotonous admin shit that nobody wants to do.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: That's what we're really focusing at the moment, and that is what we are building the systems around right now is the focus on figuring out your money flow, which I'll get into in a separate podcast at some stage, and how your money comes into your electrical business and how it turns back into your electrical business.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: There's a few steps in between.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: But when you map that out, you will see that there are high-level systems, and then in the high-level systems, there's going to be constraints in your business of where the biggest headaches are.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: As I explained last night, I said my headaches aren't lead generation in particular.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: So my leads are coming in.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: But if you did have constraints in your electrical business and it was around lead generation, let's say, for instance, you were quiet and you're like, I don't know what to do.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: So, for example, you could get that assistant to do work on your website, you could get them to do posts, you could get them to do socials or whatever, and there's going to be some fucking dick listening to this now going, I'm just going to use Claude.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: Use Claude, but you will get what we call AI slop.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: You still need a human touch on this shit right now.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: People are getting pulled up on this.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: I even seen Woolworths trying to use fucking AI and they butchered it.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Like it the plane was in fucking cut in half on their thing when the guy zoomed in on it.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, you can do all that, but you still need a human touch, and it's the human touch for the little bit of money you will pay, particularly for people overseas to become your assistant, it'll return the investment tenfold.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: And I can't stress it enough.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: It's it's an example I always give the people that answer my phones.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: If I didn't answer the phone, I wouldn't get that job.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: So it's an investment for me.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: But what I want to do is systems get the systems thinking into their head immediately and see how they can leverage their business and grow and expand.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Now, it starts for me.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: The first thing you should be offloading as a small company is the admin stuff.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: It's not fucking go get a tradesman immediately, it's offload the monotonous back-end stuff.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: And then what you want to be doing is building your systems for a person.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: So, for example, if you want to bring in a staff member, like an apprentice or a tradesman into your electrical business, you need them to come into a system, not they come in and you build a system around them.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: And that is where I made a massive, massive fuck up when I hired my first employee.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: I had no nothing in place.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: I was basically pushed into hiring an employee because the coaching platform I was on at the time was like, hire staff, hire staff.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: And I did, and they didn't bring anything to the table.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: I literally hired a guy and I was like, What next?
6:49
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, just get him on board.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: And I did, and I had nothing in place.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: And I looked back at that hire, and it was such a bad hire, didn't work out at all, hired on attitude, as people say.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: He had a from the interview with a good attitude, but then as we moved along, his glass was half empty most of the time, and everything was against him, and it was just a very bad hire.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: But I can't just blame him.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm putting my hand up to say, like, I wasn't prepared.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: I was not prepared for this hire, I didn't have the processes in place, I didn't have the documentation, I didn't have the contracts were kind of in place, uniform was just about in place, stuff like that.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: Where when an employee comes on board, they need to come into a culture where they look at your business and you say to them, This is how we do things around here.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: And the problem is with companies that that grow too rapidly, is when you try to embed systems culture into a company that's already doing things, it's like teaching an all-dog new tricks.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: It's always that we used to do it that way.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: Why is it why are we gonna do it that way?
7:52
SPEAKER_00: So that's why I'm drilling this into their head now at a small stage.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Even guys with staff with two or three staff, four staff, five staff that I'm working with, they don't have systems in place, but we're gonna start embedding that into the company now.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: And by doing that, it just takes weight off your plate as the business owner, it makes the company run smoother because there's accountability, there's checklists, there's systems, and it's just it's something that should be done at an early, early stage in business.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: And I'm excited for these guys, not only now, but well into the future.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: I can see these businesses being well-established businesses all throughout Australia, and I will have played a part in that, and that's that's what fucking makes me tick because I'm a weirdo.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: That gives me ultimate satisfaction.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: I can look 10 years down the line and say, like, I had a hand to play in that.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: Don't end up like that, gentlemen.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: Even if you don't want to sell your business or you never ever want to sell your electrical business, build it that you're in the position that you can offload it or you can sell it.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: Start to embed a little system, start to templatize, start to build your pricing, have specific ways you do the job, document that, and you will have a valuable asset at the end of it.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: If something I'm looking at doing is offloading my electrical business at some stage, I don't know when, but at some stage, because I want to go fully focused on the mentorship, because that's where my passion is, and that's really realistically why you don't want to scale with staff as well, because I don't want the headaches of staff in my electrical business while I can do this business that I actually love and I'm very grateful for the absolute legends I have in there.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: Build your business as if you're gonna sell it, and you don't have to sell it.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: What happens when you turn 60, 65?
9:32
SPEAKER_00: You want to retire.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: You just don't want to just wind it down or let it go for like the price of the van.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: Food for thought.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: Catch you next week.