what's going on my friends i am dustin stelzer with electricianu and uh today i have a good
answer to a question i think i had somebody ask a question about
business about kind of like making the leap and going into business
so i think there's some good insights to be had with this comment so enjoy
advice on starting a business i'm looking into starting a side business mainly doing service
calls and smaller new construction jobs this will primarily be on the weekends and evenings i'm
currently a master electrician that's good and this is a side business that would not be going
against my current employer that's arguable i've got a good set of tools and some money
saved up for this that's also good after getting a contractor's license and setting up everything
with the government side what would be my next steps i have a shop on my property already so
that portion is not a problem i'm curious how you would go about a work truck also what do you guys
do for billing and accounting i'm nervous about starting a venture but i'm constantly getting
asked about side work and wanting to do this completely legal okay so i mad respect that um you
realize you're doing side work to say that you're not like going against your current employer i get
what you're saying about that but anytime you're going out and getting business and getting jobs
you're in competition so you got to at least be honest with yourself about that if you have a
boss that's cool with you doing it you know that's a whole different thing but there are companies
out there that they find out you're doing side work they're you're gonna fire you because you're
taking money out of their pockets so to speak so as long as you you know have the conversation with
the person that you're working for let them know hey i'm not gonna take any of your customers i'm
not trying to do anything silly that i'm just trying to go out on my own and make my own way
i think it's absolutely respectable as far as the shop on your property uh you could start
out in your garage in your house like really you just need a place to throw material most of what
you're going to be doing is going out to supply houses right you already know the deal you're
a master electrician you've been doing this long enough but you're going to be going to like home
depot you're going to be going to supply houses stuff like that so if you got a place you know
in your garage so you don't have to go pay a bunch of money to build a shop or anything like that but
if you have a shop like you're saying like awesome that's that's already one big thing out of the way
if you're just doing this yourself you don't really need a big shop you're not gonna keep
in this massive amount of overhead you're probably not doing service work primarily
it's probably going to be more new construction if anything so you don't really need like stock
in a shop somewhere you just need a place to put some [ __ ] you know before your jobs go out
as far as the work truck i would not go into debt to buy a work truck a lot of people are
like oh i'm gonna go get like a a k-nig big bet on my truck i'm gonna get this brand new panel
uh van for like forty thousand dollars don't do that [ __ ] until you've got some cash flow
coming in you need to prove that you can pay your bills before you just go
into debt i never recommend that people go into debt to go into business i think that
going into business and figuring out that you have a proof of concept that you can take care of you
know your bills that you can bid correctly that you can weather some seasons and you know when the
highs and the lows come and just kind of how things go and once you've got a positive cash
flow you're profitable you have a you know a few months worth of customers lined up
and works really good and you can start hiring some people that's when i would start thinking
about getting a nicer vehicle but if you can make you know like your old 1992 chevy pickup
make that thing work it just needs to get you from point a to point b reliably that's really
it you don't have to have anything fancy of course when you go to a job and somebody sees
a nice truck from their window they're like oh wow these guys really have their stuff together
i get that whole argument absolutely but they're not startup companies you know and
you're not going gonna be just getting all these jobs because you drive a shiny truck
you're gonna be getting all these jobs because people are going to google.com and they're
searching the word electrician wherever the hell i live and they're just picking somebody or they're
getting word of mouth word of mouth is really huge i've gotten so much work over the years
probably fifty percent of the work that i've gotten over the years has been
uh maybe even more than that i don't know uh but the the word of mouth thing is really really big
as i'm sure you already know um so i would just kind of hang on that and and uh don't go too big
into investment debt um or don't go into consumer debt so that you can run a business go into an
investment debt um it's a very different thing consumer debt is what people are like oh i want a
tv i'm gonna go into debt for that instead of wait for a while there's no cash flow there's no money
coming in so it's just a poor investment it's not even an investment it's just a waste of debt
but if you can leverage debt into an investment that's going to pay you back you know a nice truck
if it can get you more work done like say you're going from a regular truck to a bucket truck
well a bucket truck gets you a whole ocean of new type of work so that can cash flow that
actually has a return on your investment over a long enough period of time so that's wise
but don't do that right away and do that once you're already getting profitable in your business
billing and accounting good old excel seriously if you can put yourself on a budget if you
can account for every single day and make a good spreadsheet so you can see your entire
year in front of you difficult thing with budgeting is that you really can't account
for much accurately you don't know when jobs are going to come in draws get pushed out
on new construction jobs things take much longer so you don't you can't really rely
on an exact budgeting method i've used housecall pro in the past there's things like
service titan where it you know helps you usually a little bit larger companies but it kind of helps
you track jobs and do invoices and things like that quickbooks um you do have to pay for like
quickbooks online but it's really cheap i mean comparatively to like how much money you're going
to be making as an electrician it's worthwhile you track everything in there you can write invoices
in them you can send them they can click pay right through the email and pay you so it's really
really easy to do but that's my tips based off of what you asked i could talk about this for like
way longer i've already been talking about it way longer than i probably should have so that's my
tips for you my dude so if you liked this episode and you would like to see more of these please
definitely leave some comments below you're more than welcome to email us at support electrician
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and isn't that great let's join discord there's a bunch of electricians in there
always talking about your mess um really good group of people though like uh it's a
it's a good like safe group of people that all you know care about education and teaching and
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once in a while you're gonna get a troll in there but like everybody for the most part is
it's a well-managed group and uh well-taken character so you should definitely check out
the discord link in the description below love you crazy people and i'll see you in the next one
descant music and video.