Tool box Keeping Motivated

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[00:00:00] Ben: You wire a light, you test it, you wire a socket, and then you test it. You wire another light and then you test it. You wire another socket and obviously you test that as well. Things can be the same a lot of the time when you're doing the same jobs every day. But us as electricians, we like to be a little bit more creative, and we like a challenge every now and again.

So in today's podcast, I'm gonna give you some great ideas how you can keep motivated. When working as an electrician and before you say it, no. Don't charge yourself up by sticking your fingers in a sock toolbox. Talks for electricians, helping electricians gain back time, reduce stress, and earn more money.

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. My name is Ben Polter. Your host of Toolbox talks for electricians here today to give you tips. On. Keeping your job as an electrician, exciting. All jobs can be a bit repetitive and feel like you're doing the same thing every day.

Especially when you're testing, doing them e ECS for letting ain maybe on so many properties. They're sort of quite repetitive and you, everyone, you're having a cup of tea, so you just need the toilet half time. I've done that before. I've gone round for the whole day just doing ecs. Ecs, it's all you're doing.

It's a bit of a. A ball ache sometimes. There was one job I had years ago. It was purely testing. I was given a van. I was given all the kit and a list of places to go. I lasted at a job a week. It wasn't for me. It wasn't the pay, because that was great. That was good pay. I was doing the same thing every day, just testing completely, testing everything, and maybe writing down the remedials.

It was to me like it was working in a factory on a production line. I. Just got bored. It wasn't challenging enough. And yeah, driving around, it was all over the country in the uk so yeah, there's a lot of miles and it's a bit boring. And I think as electricians, we enjoy a challenge every now and again. We enjoy looking for that fault and thinking, yeah, you find a sense of achievement when you actually fix it, make it work, but, and it's gonna work efficiently for a lot longer.

And I like doing that. I like fixing faults. And with the new smart light in technology as well, it's interesting to see how it all works. It's, it is quite interesting to see the new technology, what's on the market and how it works. And all the l e d lights that are a lot more efficient, things are getting better every day.

So it's interesting to install different things. It does make your job as an electrician a little bit more exciting every day. Cause if you are getting plenty of small jobs and you seem to be spending your time traveling from property to property every day, rushing around to get to the next job, you should put your prices up.

So you get less jobs and make more money the more jobs you have in one day, it's harder to plan your day cuz as you may, well know that not every electrical fault is gonna be a 30 minute job. It's gonna be an easy fix. Sometimes you've gotta dive a lot deeper and some jobs like fault finding maybe can take you all day to find that fault.

And it messes up the rest of your day. It puts off scheduled and you've gone back and you've gotta let this person down. , it's a little bit stressful. So my advice is to have a set plan for every job. A , set price for the first hour in that hour. Let the customer know that I'll tell you what the fault is and what you need to do to repair that fault.

And of course if it's just a loose cable or something, then you're just gonna tighten it up there. And then I go, there you go. That's your, your cost, your hour, the hour that you're paying me. Just pay me that hour. Cause I'll just tighten that loose cable up and we're all happy to go test it.

We're done. But if you are gonna need some materials or have to replace maybe some wiring, this is gonna take up a lot more of your time. So booking more time to get that job done. And I'm not sure, I'm not the own electrician who has made this mistake. When you find a fault, you sometimes think, yeah, that's an easy fix.

I can get that done for 'em today. That'll be very easy. So you go ahead and start in ripping the floorboards up. You disconnect the wire in chop , the maybe melted wire or the, the faulty piece of wire in. Now I'm thinking, yeah, I'm just gonna rewire it from this position. Then you get the floorboards up and it's a complete mess and you can see why it's gone faulty, but you've got it all up and you're going to need the whole day to sort it out and you've started.

So you cannot leave that job. Maybe it's controlling the heating. So you can't leave that job with the heating off. You've gotta get it done and does it completed to a decent standard before you can go home. So it. Messes your whole day up. For myself, when I started out working as an electrician, this used to happen to me all the time.

I tried to fix the problem, tried to be the hero there, and then I need to find it as a bigger problem. So it took me a , lot longer, and I had to say to the customer, excuse me, I need to get materials. , I need to do this. I had to sort of elaborate as I went along on the job, and it was, it was just a nightmare.

It was stressful as well. So this is why now these days, It's best just to give the customer a quote to let them know what it'll cost, what it could possibly cost, given them the worst case scenario of like, say your board knee's changing. It's complete wrecked. So if your board knee's changing, well that's gonna be the worst case scenario.

Then I'm gonna let you know. Or to be honest with you, the best bet is just to say, look, I'll give you an E C R I. And I'll test and I'll tell you exactly what's wrong with that property, and this is how much of that E C R I is gonna cost you. So you can let the customer know what's wrong, and then in effect for yourself, you can book a day in to do that E C R I and check and you know exactly what's gone on.

And then you'll be able to give the customer a detailed quote of saying like, right, so that hot tub supply you possibly wanted outside. Yes, that can come from this fuse board. You'll know a lot more what's going on. And sometimes if you're looking for a fault, if that goes majorly over and you think, Hey, well, is this gonna cost you?

Well, it's gonna cost me four more hours and it's gonna cost the customer up. Obviously another 200 quid. Well, you need to let the customer know first to, to see if they, they're gonna pay you. Cause they're basically the ones that are gonna pay you your wages for doing this job. So you're gonna let 'em know what it's gonna cost them.

Fir first. And the thing is, with being an electrician, I think when it's going good, only just, it only just gets better all the time. You get more and more customers, more and more work, and then it gets in your head, I dunno, but it got in my head that if you slow down or you take maybe a new direction, you take some more people on, then things are gonna fall apart.

And it's not. Sometimes you, if it's not broke, don't fix it. But the truth of the matter is, If you are building up your customer base by maybe collecting emails, collecting phone numbers and addresses to stay in contact with your customers, this can never, ever, ever happen. The customers that you've worked for in the past, if you've got along with them, they'll always come back to you.

So I took a couple of years off myself, not so long ago , when I was working as an electrician, and when I started back up. The customers that I had previously through throughout all the years, while as an electrician, working as an electrician, they were so happy. There were jobs that they'd left because they couldn't find a decent electrician.

And once someone finds a good electrician, they trust in their house. They , trust around their belongings, they trust. When their kids sold pets or on their drive, they trust that electrician. They trust that tradesman. They'll keep their number forever. So many people do it, and so many people say that to me.

I haven't got this job done. I haven't got these light in circuit sorted or , this fixed because you weren't being an electrician anymore or you weren't working at the time. So they left it so they were happy as Larry. When I, , went back to be an electrician, so going back to if you are bored over like maybe repetitive days, you're doing the same odd job, the same thing all the time.

Try your hand at something new now. Okay. Call me a big headed electrician, but Sparks can do a number of different things. And it's probably why we get asked all the time to do extra things like network cable in cctv, tv, aerial, sky, satellite. There's a number of things that any good electrician can sort of turn their hands to, I think.

And in your career, you should maybe give network cable in a go. Maybe there's one of them. Network cable or or TV aerials or satellite. You might have done a rewire, a house where, yeah, you've run in a few network cables or you've run in a few TV aerials or some satellite, but give it a go. Maybe just doing it purely for one week.

Because you might know that you can make a successful business out of maybe network cabling, tv, satellite area. You might enjoy it a lot more cuz there's so many people that do that. So many people that I know that, yeah, I did my first year as an electrician and I didn't like it. So now I just do network cabling.

And they're making a fortune. They do a f a fantastically set. , a successful company doing network cabling or maybe just doing TV aerials cuz they just wanted to bridge down that road. , they made money, they made a successful career. Sticking tv errs up for everybody. Terrestrial three of you. If you geek out and know that specific subject, then you are gonna be the man to call.

Now, I know a few people these days that if I do a rewire or anything and they say, oh, can you do cctv? Yeah, I know a guy that can, but I'm not getting involved with it. It's not my forte. I I don't wanna do that anymore. And the reason is, is because there's specialized tools for. Each type of job you do.

When I started to try them out, I was offered all types of work all over the place and the amount of kit I had to carry in the van was crazy along with the spares. It's a spare. RJ 45 is a spare 305 meter of cable that all the stuff, I had all the connectors full of TV aerials. I had to carry around with me.

My van was packed. And these days I stick to doing the electric side of things. And like I say, if a customer asks you do cctv, do you net? Do network cabling? No. But I know a fantastic company I can recommend. And then that company recommends me for the electrics too. So is it win-win in every scenario?

Now, maybe I'm the only one or the first one maybe to admit it, but what motivates me about being an electrician is the money I make. The reason I do a good job is to be recommended to get more customers and for them customers to recommend me to their friends. If I could get paid for sitting at iron pecking my nose, I'd probably do it.

Uh, some electricians. I know they love their job so much , so that they'll like to go home and read the i e Regs book in bed at night and just to make sure that they're installing everything exactly as the regulations say you should with the right distances and the right depths, like. And I like these people.

I'm glad these people are around because if I have a technical question that I'm not a hundred percent sure about, I will give them a call and say, look, I can't be asked to read the book or refreshing upon it. I'm not a hundred percent sure about it. You tell me. And they're Fanta. They're like an encyclopedia.

This is the older guys, the older electricians that are fantastically good that went on to be an office clerk now maybe doing designing jobs. They're the sort of people that you wanted to ring up and say, look, this is this little question I've got. I know you know the answer and I can't be asked to get the book out.

They will tell you, and it's brilliant to have them on hand, but for me, I enjoy fixing things and making things work better. I did leave school and become a mechanic. I got an apprenticeship as a mechanic cause I like to fixing cars as a kid. And after finding out what a 40 year old mechanic earn and after experiencing a bit of the mechanic trade, you're quit.

And not trying to mock the mechanic trailer at all. There's so many great independent garages out there that earn good money and. I'd rather take my car to one of , them independent dealers than one of the main dealers to me messed around. It's just that being a mechanic, I thought, yeah, it wasn't for me.

And to be honest, at one point, being an electrician wasn't for me either. I got swamped under with work. I was out the house at 6:00 AM. Answering calls all day as well wise to carrying out these jobs and doing quotes and invoices in the evening and then get to bed tired and in a mood at 10:00 AM all to do the same thing the next day.

I even continued to answer emails and work calls, was on holiday with the family. I just couldn't switch off from work. So notice in this, I thought, wow, I'm gonna do something about it. So yeah, I'll quit. I shut off 100% to do with electric electrics and stopped being an electrician and just jacked it in.

And then when I did eventually go back into it, I went into a bit more of a plan and if the work pulled up, I put my prices up, which has happened three times since I've started back as an electrician. And the customers who don't want to pay that amount of money, they will. They'll go elsewhere and you'll lose jobs.

But some days you'll also have nothing to do, but the customers who value the work and what you do for them, they'll be paying you. What you are worth, they'll be paying your increased prices, so you'll be making more money anyway. So your money will basically stay the same. You just have a lot more time.

And then with that time, don't just sit there and watch Netflix. Get yourself a hobby. Go train, spotting. That's your cup of tea or motocross, running, cycling, chess, traveling, anything you want to do, just make it feel like that you live in your life. One thing is for sure in this life is that you're gonna die.

So have some fun while you're alive. So today, make a plan. If you haven't got a hobby list on your phone, everything you wanna try, like a little bucket list of things you want to do, then aim to do it. Never think that something is not achievable. Cause I can tell you now if you want it enough. And you can go out and get it.

But this is electrician's podcast after all. So remember, brown is live, blue is neutral and green, and yellow is earth. And for the electricians are the other part of the world. Uh, you're gonna have to tell me what colors you use in the Facebook group. I will leave a link in the show Spino. So jump in there, let me know where you're from and what colors you use for live, or you use for neutral, or you use for Earth in your neck of the woods.

So until next time. I'll see you again.