Coaching for Electricians
Electrical businesses have unique pressures compliance, licensing, fast-moving technology and a market that’s more competitive than ever. Keith Collins helps electrical business owners get off the tools, charge what they’re worth and build a team that doesn’t need them on every job.
SOUND FAMILIAR?
The Challenges Every Electrician Business Owner Faces
You're undercharging and don't know it
You price against what competitors charge, not what it actually costs you to do the job. Labour, overheads, insurances by the time you add it all up, the margin isn’t there.
Work-life balance is non-existent
You’re first on site and last to leave. Evenings are spent quoting and admin. Weekends disappear into call-outs. You started this business for freedom where did it go?
Finding qualified sparkies is a nightmare
Good licensed electricians are scarce. You spend months trying to hire, then struggle to keep them. Growth is impossible when you can’t build the team to do the work.
The business is totally dependent on you
You’re the one who knows how everything works, where everything is and how every job gets done. Nothing moves without you and that’s your biggest problem.
25+ years coaching trade and service business owners just like you across Australia.
HOW WE HELP
What Keith Works on With You
Profitable Pricing
Build a pricing model based on your real costs. Know your break-even, your minimum margin and how to quote confidently without flinching.
Time Back in Your Week
Identify the tasks only you can do – and build systems so everything else gets done by someone else. Get your evenings and weekends back.
Hiring & Retention
Attract good sparkies and keep them. A culture, onboarding process and career path that makes your business somewhere people want to work.
Sales Without the Awkwardness
A simple, repeatable sales process so you win more of the right jobs – without discounting or chasing leads that go nowhere.
Operations & Systems
Document how jobs get done. Scheduling, materials, compliance checklists – build the systems that let your team work without you hovering.
Planning & Growth
Set a clear 90-day plan and annual target. Know exactly what needs to happen each quarter to hit your revenue and lifestyle goals.
CLIENT STORIES
Hear from Real Trade and Service Businesses
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.
Client: Matthew Kent
Business: Mariljohn
Industry: Design & Manufacturing
We’re a design construction company in the hospitality space. We haven’t been taught in the business sense of running a business, to maximum profitabilities, on how to know our numbers and that sort of things.
Experience with Action [Victoria] I believe has been really beneficial for the overall company. As in the Director’s getting their heads around business development. We’ve now been able to identify what our strengths are, and target those strengths and now we’re looking at bringing key personnel to replace where we are weak and that allows us to be even stronger in those separate fields. And that’s probably been the biggest shift in the business is to start getting the right people in the right spots.
Before we were across everything. You just can’t do it. You don’t have enough hours in the day. It’s tough to implement everything but without someone structuring it, making you and keeping you on course, we tend to drift straight into operations and day-to-day issues you have with the business, and not really spending enough time dedicating to developing a business.
In the last three years we’ve able to take our company from about a seven-odd million dollar company to 12 million dollars. We have a goal to get to twenty million dollar turnover by 2020. That’s our goal at the moment, but we want to do it the right way.
Probably the biggest benefit we’ve seen from having coaching involved for a number of years now, is the fact, we are still flat out, we still have to do a lot of hours in the business and we don’t want to change that, but when we do have our time of either a golf day or going away with family we have back-up and resources built into the business now that you can handle the issues of day-to-day through using your team. And that wasn’t there before, if you went away, it was your job, and basically you had to get back on the phone with the builder and solve that.
Now we have great project managers and we’ve put infrastructure in place that we can at least cover any of those holidays and that allows us all, between the team, to be able to have some time away and catch up with family.
Ready to Build a Better Electrical Business?
Book a free, no-obligation strategy call with Keith. In 30 minutes you’ll get clarity on what’s holding your business back – and what to do about it.