Getting More Electrical Work in a Small Town Without Buying a Single Lead

There are a great many articles about how to get more electrical work. Read a few and you notice they mostly end in the same place, which is a company that will sell you leads.

That advice is not dishonest. It is written for a market where there are more homeowners searching than there are electricians, and where a lead has a price because it has competition behind it. In a county of twenty thousand people with four electricians in it, almost none of that holds.

What holds here is that electrical work in a small town arrives through two completely separate doors, and most shops are only standing at one of them.

The two doors

Service work. A breaker that trips, a dead outlet, a panel that hums, a ceiling fan, an outbuilding that needs power. It comes from households, one at a time, usually on short notice, and the customer picks whoever they can think of.

Contract work. New construction, remodels, additions, commercial fit outs. It comes from builders, remodelers and the occasional business owner, on a schedule, in larger pieces.

These are almost different businesses. Service work is won on being retrievable and reachable. Contract work is won on being reliable to a very small number of people. A shop that is excellent at one and absent from the other is leaving half its market alone, and usually does not notice, because the door it is standing at keeps producing just enough work to stay busy.

The first useful exercise is to sort last year's revenue into those two piles and look at the ratio. Most one van shops find it is ninety to ten one way or the other, and almost nobody plans it that way.

The service door: be the name that comes back

Service work has the same structure as plumbing. Something stops working, the customer retrieves a name, and the decision is over quickly. So the whole game is being retrievable at that moment.

Three things do most of the work.

The van. Lettered, readable at speed, parked in driveways all over the county all day long. In a market this size it is a serious piece of advertising and the cost is one time.

Something with your number on it, left in the house. A sticker inside the panel door is the electrician's version of the magnet on the water heater, and it is better than the magnet because the panel is exactly where the next problem announces itself. Somebody standing in front of an open panel with a tripped breaker is looking directly at your phone number.

The town Facebook group. Somebody asks why their breaker keeps tripping. The answer that wins is the useful one, not the pitch. Explain what a breaker doing its job looks like versus a breaker failing, say which one usually needs an electrician and which one usually does not, and stop there. You have given away one small call and demonstrated to everybody reading that you tell people the truth about whether they need you. The ground rules for the group are worth reading first.

The fourth thing is the map listing, because a fair number of these searches happen on a phone and end at a map result rather than a website. That is the Google Business Profile, and it is the higher priority of the two.

The contract door: four names and a reputation for scheduling

Contract work in a rural county is decided by a group small enough to write on an index card. The builders, the two or three remodelers, maybe a property manager, maybe the school district or a municipal authority.

What they buy is not the lowest bid. It is the sub who does not hold up the job.

Electricians sit in the middle of a build, after framing and before drywall, which means a slip by you is felt by everybody downstream and the builder pays for it. So the things that win repeat contract work are boring and specific: you rough in on the day you said, you are reachable when a question comes up on site, you flag a problem the morning you find it, and your certificate of insurance arrives without three reminders.

None of that is marketing. All of it is why one shop in a county has a year of booked contract work and another with the same license and the same van is quoting service calls.

If you want more of this work and do not have it, the approach is not advertising. It is finding out who currently wires for the builders you want and why, which in a county this size is usually one honest conversation at a supply house.

The work worth chasing is the work that leads somewhere

Not all electrical work is equal in a small market, and the difference is not the ticket size.

Panel and service upgrades put you in the house at the point where everything else electrical gets decided, and they very often turn into the next three jobs in that house.

Generator installs are increasingly common in rural areas with unreliable service, they are a planned purchase with a real consideration window where being findable and credible matters, and they create a maintenance relationship.

Remodel wiring introduces you to a contractor, which is a door into the other half of the business.

Small service calls pay this week and do not compound on their own. They are worth doing well mainly because of what they lead to, which means the leave behind and the way you explain the problem are the actual product.

Sorting your work this way changes what you say yes to when the schedule is full, which is the only moment marketing decisions are actually made in a busy shop.

The number worth watching

Booked days out, tracked weekly.

For a shop with one or two vans, the useful question is not how many calls came in. It is how far ahead you are booked, because that single number tells you whether to push for more work, whether you can raise prices, and whether it is time to add somebody. It moves before revenue does, which makes it the earliest honest signal you have. There is more on choosing numbers to watch in the five numbers a service business should watch, and the pricing side is covered in raising prices without losing the town.

Three readings to take this week

• Split last year into service revenue and contract revenue. Whichever pile is small is where the unworked half of your market is.
• Open the last panel you worked in, in your memory or in a photograph, and ask whether anything in it has your phone number on it.
• Name the builders in your county and mark the ones you have never worked for. That short list is the entire contract side of your marketing plan.

Adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, out now on Amazon in paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).