"Pass me the 13 spanner."

Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing. Many of you don't know this, but my background, when I was younger doing my apprenticeship, I used to rip cars apart and put them back together. I just had a severe fascination for cars. Buying cars, selling cars, flipping cars, doing little tweaks to them, selling car parts and stuff like that. So I basically had to market the car while I was selling it, and it had to be extremely appealing for people to pick up the phone and call me, et cetera. And this is going back many years.

But I was thinking about it today, because I recently purchased a Raptor, which has been an immense pile of fun, and I've got a secondary car as well. At the moment I'm tossing up whether I should keep it or get rid of it. Space is going to be the issue. So I was thinking today about selling vehicles, and it's no different to advertising your electrical business.

Now, what I mean by that is, if you're going to sell your car, and let's say it's a specific make and model, and you go to sell it and you just give half assed photos, the car's still dirty, you put a description in there and you basically state the obvious. It's a two litre turbo. It's got such and such alloys. It's this colour. We know all that. That's pretty obvious. And particularly if someone's in the market for that particular model of vehicle, they're going to know exactly what they're looking for.

But what we want to relay to them is the point of difference. Why is your car the car in the range of vehicles out there, be it on Car Sales, Facebook Marketplace, wherever you're advertising? What's going to make your car stand out from the other vehicles listed there?

For example, if you're a genuine enthusiast, let's just say it's Ford, Holden, whatever car manufacturer you're into. I know there are a lot of heads that listen to this podcast that are diehard vehicle lovers. So let's say you're in the market for a specific model. Something you're going to be looking for is obviously the kilometres, stating the kilometres. That's a pretty obvious thing to list. But the condition of it, inside out, taking detailed photos of the vehicle that show the paintwork is immaculate. And if there are any dings or dents, it's about being honest and showing those little dings or dents in your listing, so that someone who's genuinely interested doesn't rock up, having travelled a long distance, and spot all these little things you've hidden. They're extremely pissed off, and then you're standing there like an idiot trying to hide these things, even though you knew it was going to come and bite you in the ass.

It's stating things like non smoker owner. So if they're pedantic about the inside not stinking of smoke, and you state that you're not a smoker and it's all genuine, that's a point of difference. Has the car been garaged? Is that evident when they come and look at it? Is the paintwork immaculate? Has it been kept under a cover, or is the car out in the open? Those little things basically give the customer the experience before they even come and view the car. They already know you're telling the truth, because you've been open and honest about it. Giving a detailed amount of photos, et cetera, so on and so forth.

So you're saying, "Alan, what the fuck has this got to do with electrical marketing?" Electricians make the exact same mistake selling the car incorrectly as they do promoting their electrical business. They give the bland, basic, given details that are the fucking obvious. They're givens. "We'll turn up on time. We're licensed. We're insured." These are all things people are expecting. They're expectations. They're no different from anybody else.

This is why, when I speak about messaging, and messaging to your ideal clients and the target you want to get work from, you have to speak to their pain points and bring them on a journey with you, indicating what kind of work you do, how you can help them in their house, and how you can make their life better by using your services.

A lot of people also talk a big game, saying, for instance, "You're Sydney's best electrician." You're making a statement there. You're not in any way, shape or form helping the client. You're making a statement and a presumption. Now, if you've got the reviews to back you up, you might have, I don't know, 100 reviews, 500 reviews, and you can leverage off those reviews. You can take snippets out of your reviews, take quotes of what people have said, and say, "This is what our reviews say about us," rather than having zero reviews and claiming to be Sydney's best electrician.

People aren't stupid anymore. And I'm telling you, people are getting smarter. Not themselves, but with the help of AI, that's how they're getting smarter. This week alone, on two different jobs, I was asked about RCDs.

The first job, an existing client was getting a rental ready. They spruced it up, redid the kitchen, she was adding power points to it. Whoever was doing the kitchen, the bastard snagged the switchboard. There was a brand new Clipsal switchboard, to be fair, it wasn't Chint. And as I was going through the job with her, she had this young gentleman in there, I'd say early 20s, very proper kind of guy. We were running through the job, I was putting in ceiling fans and power points, and he was asking me about the switchboard. He said to me, "Are there RCDs in there? Have we got RCD protection?" And I didn't ask him about this. I didn't get into how do you know about RCDs, why the obsession with RCDs. But I dare say he was the paranoid type, and he was probably asking about some of the electrics in the house because the painter had gone clean over the 1960s power points. So he was a bit concerned about them switching on and off. It obviously flagged something on a Google search, or wherever he searched, ChatGPT for example, that it had to be on an RCD. And this is a good thing for us. So that was number one. I was like, "Why, or how, does anybody ever ask about an RCD?" Times are changing.

The second one, this week I was installing an induction cooktop for a client. Now, I was dealing with that client's husband. I got to the job, she was kind of slightly in the lurch about what was going on. It was in an apartment. I love these jobs. I fucking love them. It was installing an induction cooktop, so I had to thread the feed through the gyprock, back of the cabinet, up to the switchboard above the fridge. There was a 400 mil cavity behind the oven, right to the side pillar where the fridge and the switchboard were. So it was an absolute dream of an install.

But I was running her through the job and I said to her, "I've got to run a new circuit over there as well." And she goes, "Oh, why?" And in hindsight I should have said, "Why not?" Because I've fucking told you, I'm the electrician here. But anyway, I had to explain exactly why I had to run a new circuit, because it's 32 amps, so on and so forth, a lot of load, and it was going to be shared with her oven. So that was fine. I did the job, and I felt she was a little bit paranoid about the circuit thing.

So when the job was complete and powered up, I actually hooked up their oven as well and put that on an RCD too, as requested by her husband. And when it was all cleaned up, schmick, up and running, water boiling on top of the cooktop, she asked me about the breakers. She goes to the switchboard and she goes, "Are the new RCDs labelled?" And I was like, "Yep." "And these are on RCDs, are they?" And I was like, "Yep, you can see here, there's the test button," so on and so forth.

So I didn't think about this until I was driving back in the van, and I realized that most likely, while she was tinkering away on her desktop behind the door I was working on... I opened up the door to get into the fridge, and she was sitting behind that, on the opposite side, working away. I'm thinking she was second guessing me installing the new circuit, and therefore she found out about RCDs. Now, that could be completely fabricated, but that's the thoughts that went on in my head.

So people are no longer in the lurch. Information is at their fingertips, not only by searching stuff. They just have to speak into a microphone and they'll get information back. So the days of pulling the wool over people's eyes, using strategies like saying you're Sydney's best electrician, Brisbane's best electrician, you're going to embed yourself into a sea of noise. You have to pick a point of difference.

Stick to a local area. I'm speaking to a lot of you guys lately, via DM or whatnot on Instagram, and a lot of you are Sydney wide, Brisbane wide, Australia wide. Dominate your own local area and start spreading out. You're going to be far more efficient. Use less fuel, lose less time. It's tricky to say. And you're going to build up your local reputation in that area. If you want to expand, get more vans, get more guys, branch outside your area. But don't go Sydney wide, don't go Brisbane wide to start with. It's actually ridiculous if you stop and think about it.

But the connection between selling cars and selling your electrical services is the same thing. If you sell your car as the same bland shit that everybody else is stating, and just give one or two photos, it's going to be the same as your bland electrical business stating the obvious, "We're the best electricians in Sydney, we do any job." You have to get very specific with what you put on your website, the way you portray it, the way you relay it to your client, the way you get them into your world, your web, so they see your messaging, see your marketing, put their hand up and say, "Yes, this is the company for me, because of X, Y and Z. They ticked all the boxes, my pain points, my fears, my worries, and I really want to use their electrical services."

That's all for this ramble this week. It just popped into my head today, so I said I'd push it out there. Catch you next week.