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Let's dissect this quotation. Welcome to Simplified Sparky Marketing. A few weeks ago, somebody has posted up a genuine post on a contractor's forum asking about his quotation. The backstory of this is essentially he has done a quote, he has sent the quote, he's done the work, and now he's getting complaints about that said quote. Now, there's a lot of things that were extremely wrong with the quote, including the pricing being way off. And this guy's posted up, and to be honest, that takes balls because you are jumping into a firing ring where people are gonna slate you, they're gonna give out to you, they're gonna call you too cheap, and this is mostly what has happened. Most people have said you're too cheap, but didn't give him an explanation why he's too cheap. Now that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna break this quote down piece by piece as to where it went drastically wrong. So to start with, with this quotation, essentially it starts with number three, I believe. The quote I've got in front of me, and he starts this quotation is his third quote. That's number one is what you need to do is if you are a brand new business, go into your software, start your jobs at 1651. Something like that where you know exactly where your job started. The reason behind this is psychological. The reason you want to do this is you want to make it look like you've been around for a little bit of a little bit of time. You don't want to look like you're an absolute rookie, and I believe that has a huge effect on what the outcome of this job is is that person is smart, he's strategic, that is getting the work done, and he's now clamping the person down, knowing it's a new business and squeezing them. Number two is the structure and style of the quote. Now, for fuck's sakes, you can get on a job management software essentially on a free tier that will have quote templates and manage your whole jobs. Do not send this stuff off something you vibe coded, do not send this thing off Microsoft Word, something like that, where it's just backward, it doesn't look professional. That is a massive component of your coding, is having it all on a software that's reliable, a software that is professional and it will convert. So, on the quotation on the topic of job management softwares, I myself use service med. I'm a big fan of service med. I have no affiliation with them. I just love the product, and if I love a product, I will plug it. And how he has broken down his quotation here, what he has done is he has put on the quotation that each line item has circuit breaker to RCBO, so there's a quantity 2.5mm by 20. I'll get into that. So it's stating the length of the run and the size of the cable. 1.5 by 20, again, size of the cable and the run. C boxes by 20. So that is, I don't know what a C box is. Says C boss on the left and C Boss on the right, which I'm gonna get into all this and why this is so so bad. What waterproof switch 4M 1.5 so on and so forth. It it goes along. One big discrepancy I've seen with this is it says supply and install uh double GPO IP65, which is weatherproof to you non-electricians out there. This is what I'm gonna get into. And there's a very cheap price on that. Now, this I think is a discrepancy as well. So that should really be supply and replace because I feel like that's a replacement. I feel like that's not a new install, because if that's a new install, that is insanely cheap. Okay, so I just went through the quotation and I'm fucking confused. I am an electrician and I am scratching my head what some of the things are on this quote. I get the 2.5 by 20 meter 20 m? 2.5 x 20 m. The fuck is that? If I'm if I'm an average Joe walking down the street and I said to you, hey, would you like some 2.5 by 20 M installed? They're like, What the fuck are you talking about? You need to step back from your electrician brain and you need to get into the client's head and think, do they know what this is? Starters never never itemize like a length of cable, which is the next point. This should this should be read in plain English that your mum or dad or cousin or little sister or little brother can understand what the hell you're on about. That is a vital component of quotations. Now, next up is the way that this quote is laid out. Never ever ever break down quotes like that. Never break it down to the C clip, to the cable, to the PowerPoint, whatever. How I quote my electrical work and how I suggest people to quote their electrical work is in bundled pricing. So servicemen has a feature, it's called bundle pricing, bundles. A lot of softwares do this. Essentially, all it is is you're packaging up one task, one item. So if you are installing a PowerPoint, it would be inclusive of clips, cable, the PowerPoint, a C clip, all those miscellaneous stuff, and it would be packaged into one, and it would go as follows supply an installation of a double PowerPoint in a new location. That might be your bundle title. Title whatever way you want. Then it would just outline what you're doing in the job. Not to every clip, but just an outline that beefs up the quote a bit. Run cable to power source, clip cable under house, run the cable to new location, fit and secure PowerPoint, fit off and terminate PowerPoint, test the PowerPoint. Not exactly that, but you get the gist of it. Say what you're doing on it, but but don't do not break it down to the clip. Next up is quoting the actual price on that. When you are pricing for the install, you need to not just price for you, you need to price for a pretty average electrician. So if you're quoting this and you're like, well, I'll knock that out of the park in 25 minutes, and you're doing your quotes based on 25 minutes, you take on an apprentice or a staff member, they are no way in hell going to work as quick and as hard as you as the business owner. So what you need to do is you need to quote this stuff as if it is an average electrician. And when you quote stuff like this, not on an hourly rate. I never work on an hourly rate, and there's a time and a place for hourly rate. Right now, I am focusing on the service and maintenance style of work. You can work in hourly rates if you wish. I don't condone it, I don't like it. And if anybody's like, I work on an hourly rate, I like it, go nuts. You go you go fucking nuts. I hate it for a few reasons. You get penalized for being a good electrician. If you are quick, you are efficient, and you've got 10 of these PowerPoints and you've got them at let's just say $300 each, and instead of knocking them out, you've allowed 60 minutes on them, but you do them in 30 minutes, your hourly rate goes up and up and up. And I think it's fair because going into that job when you quote things before you start the job, the client knows exactly what they're going to pay, they've signed it, they've agreed to it, there's no going back. It's like jumping on a plane to Brisbane and they're saying, I'm not too sure when we get there, it'll be I don't know, it could be a few hours. But if you jump on that plane and they're like, you will get there in hour 10, it's $500. You've paid that $500 and you've got there in the time that is set from Sydney. Now, if you if they happen to get you there in 20 minutes, you're still paying that $500 because that was the price you agreed at the start. And my argument to people that are like, oh, you got it done quickly, I'll usually throw a segue joke in. It's like when you do a thousand of these, you know, in a month, you get pretty quick at this. And I kind of leave it at that and I'll let that settle with them because there's an age-old story about this ship that was at sea and it was costing thousands of dollars because it couldn't, they couldn't get the engine going. And they tried two or three, four different technicians to come in and try and fix this thing. This one guy walked in, pulled out his hammer, walked around the engine, rubbed it a little bit, found this exact spot, tapped it, the engine fired up. He sorted this thing out in five minutes. So he sent an invoice for $10,000 and they said, Why, why so expensive? Why we're not paying that? That's that's too expensive. And he basically said it was $9,999 for my experience and expertise, and it's $1 for that tap. And that's the aspect you've got to take into consideration as well. As a professional electrician, you've at least as a minimum spent four to five years learning your craft, and now you've taken an an entire huge leap starting your own business, and you have to remember as well, this isn't a fucking hobby. This is so you can feed your family, so you can fucking have a nice life, so you can have the lifestyle that you want to buy nice things to buy a property. Have you seen the price of property in Australia? You if you want to get on the market or sustain more properties, if you have one property on the market, you need to be charging appropriately. Which is my next point. I will link somewhere underneath this video an hourly rate calculator and a little training video with that as well. What I want you to do is go through the training video, it's 20 minutes long, and then go through the hourly rate calculator. And what that is meant to do is scare the fuck out of you to be like, okay, I'm undercharging. And I want you to be as honest as anything when you are doing the calculator because it's reality, it's what you have to be charging. And in reality, we if you're doing service and maintenance work in particular, you're not going to be working eight hours a day, you're going to be most likely working only five five to six max. If you're docking and diving, going to the suppliers in between jobs, you're never going to be full billable hours for the day. Authority with your quotation as well. Something that you need to work on as well. I'm not too sure what was sent with this quote, but the layout and stuff is really, really bad. I'm not going to go through every single component of this, but I just want to give anybody listening or watching to this and to the gentleman that is has made this quotation. I just wanted to take this away. And I know for a fact this video is going to help thousands of people because there's people that are too afraid to speak up. There's people that do not know other electricians that they're willing to ask. There's people that go into business absolutely blind. And if anything, this was going to raise the standard of the industry because it's going to make people realize that shit, I should be charging more with authority, with authority with the quotation. Are you sending the correct documents with a quotation? Are you referencing somewhere where they're you're showing them your reviews? Are you showing them some of your previous work that you've done? Are you indicating why you're an expert in that industry or in that field? Like, do you specialize at service and maintenance? Are you just a Joe Blow that does everything for everyone? No job too big, no job too small? Are you just a generalist that is blending into the noise of the market that's out there? Something I am very adamant on is being a professional, being a specialist is what I'm looking for. Being a specialist for the for whatever sector you've got into because specialists don't get haggled on price. The turnout of the quotation, how quickly are you getting this quote out and how are you delivering the quote? When you're sending the quotation out, are you sending it again? Like are you sending this off JimmyThespark69 at gmail.com? Are you sending it off a professional email where you look like a professional business? Is it being sent with an email that beefs up your quote and authority again? Is that email worded correctly that contains your quotation that entices them to go ahead with your work as well? Your licensing, stuff like that, is that attached to your quote as well? I just wanted to quickly touch on this. I'm not going to fully break down and fully go into things. I just wanted to give just a taster of what you should be doing, what people should be doing with their quotes, particularly on this in the sector of service and maintenance. Obviously, if you're doing commercial, industrial stuff like that, quoting and quoting is a far different game. Different, different game than that. But I just wanted to bang this out quickly, just give a bit of value and go from there. But I'll link that stuff underneath. And if anybody wants access to me, links are underneath in the description as well.