Twin Electrics

“We just did our figures for the month and we have a gross profit higher than [all] last year “
Client: Brian Cross
Business: Twin Electrics
Industry: Electrical

My name’s Brian Cross and my company is Twin Electrics and Plumbing. My brother and I started the business 38 years ago, from our backyard at home and now we’ve turned into a company with 38 people working here full time. I’ve been working with Action Centre for about 18 months - my brother and I, my two sons and my brother’s son. There’s five of us in total who work with them [Action Centre]. Construction area was very tough, wasn’t much margins though we worked on actually get out of the construction area and going to service/maintenance oriented with better margins.

Action Centre helped us make those decisions and we’re slowly seeing the benefits, right now, of what our decisions were 12 to 18 months ago. I just done our figures for the last four month and we’ve got a gross profit higher than we’ve for the whole year last year. So it has changed, and a few decisions of putting a rep on and instead of having estimators which cost me a lot of money we’ve got a rep and we’re getting our face in different companies and it’s working very well.

Our next goal is to push more into the refrigeration and carpentry. My brother and I were having a day a week off and now we’re back to two days a week [off], we only work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays. It’s helped us get that extra time off, obviously we want to retire in the next few years so we try and slowly work down to it. And the boys have taken on more responsibility.

Having a coach is good. Obviously, coaching you’re paying for it, it comes as a cost, it’s tax deductible, but you get out of it a lot. I believe you get a lot out of it. I was quite surprised. I’m happy we’ve done it. I’m happy for my sons to have done it. It’s forced us to have time off. Next year they want us to have a month [off] periods, at a time, and try to have more time off. I think the boys would be happy for us to have more time off as well. Get rid of Dad.