Should electricians charge for quotes?

Thursday night, half nine, and you are sat at the kitchen table working out a price for somebody who rang round four electricians and will pick whoever comes in lowest. You drove there, you spent forty minutes in their hallway, you have spent another hour on the write up, and the odds are you will never hear from them again. Nobody paid you for any of it.

Do that twice a week and you have given away most of a working day, every week, all year. That is the real cost of free quotes, and it is not the driving. It is the evenings.

Should electricians charge for quotes?

Straight answer: for most domestic work, no, and I would not start. Charging for a quote on a kitchen rewire puts you outside what people expect and you will lose jobs you should have won.

But there is a difference between a quote and a survey. Writing a price for a defined job is selling. Spending two hours crawling round a loft, testing, checking a board and telling somebody exactly what their house needs is a job, and it should be paid for like one. If you are being asked to diagnose, design or report, that is chargeable. If you are being asked what you would charge to do a thing they have already decided on, that is free.

The problem is not the quote, it is who you are quoting

Every spark I know who is drowning in free quotes has the same habit. Somebody rings, they say yes, they get in the van. No questions, no filter, no idea whether this person has any intention of paying what the job costs.

Yani and Costas ran scuba dives off the same beach in Crete for the same money. Costas was the better diver by miles. Yani had the queue, because Yani looked like the expert and Costas looked like a bloke on a beach. People choose long before they compare prices. If you are being used as the third quote, it is usually because nothing before the quote made you look like the obvious choice.

So the fix happens earlier than the price. It happens on the phone.

Qualify on the phone before you get in the van

Five minutes on the phone saves you a wasted evening. You are not interrogating anybody, you are finding out whether this is a job.

• What is the job, and what made you want it done now? Somebody with a reason and a date is a customer. Somebody who is thinking about it is a maybe.
• Have you had anybody else out? Not to be nosy. If you are the fourth electrician through the door this week, you are the price check, and you can decide whether you want to be.
• Have you got a rough budget in mind? The question everybody is scared of. Ask it politely and people answer it. If the number is a third of what the job costs, you have both saved an evening.
• When do you want it done? Someone who cannot give you a month is not ready, and that is fine, put them on the list and keep in touch instead.
• Will everyone who decides be there? Half the quotes that go quiet went quiet because you spoke to one of two people.

Ask those five and you will visit fewer houses, quote fewer jobs and win a higher share of them. That is not being difficult. That is respecting your own evenings.

Price on the doorstep where you can

The longer the gap between the visit and the price, the colder it gets. If you can price standard work while you are stood there, do it. A price list in your head for the jobs you do all the time, an extra socket, a board change, an EICR on a two bed flat, means you can say the number, watch the face and answer the objection there and then rather than guessing at it three days later on WhatsApp.

For bigger jobs, get it out within twenty four hours. The electrician whose quote lands first, looks tidy and spells the customer’s name right wins a surprising number of jobs he was not the cheapest on.

Make the quote do some selling for you

Most electricians’ quotes are a number and a line of text. That is a receipt for a decision nobody has made yet. Put in what is included, what is not, how long it takes, when you can start, what happens to the mess, that you are scheme registered and insured, and the certificate they get at the end. Then one line of what somebody else said about your work.

People are not buying volts. They are buying “will this bloke turn up, will he make a mess of my house, and am I going to get ripped off”. Answer those three in writing and price stops being the only thing left to compare.

Follow up, because that is where the money is

Most quotes are not lost. They are forgotten. The customer had a week, the dog was ill, the in-laws came, and your price is at the bottom of the pile.

Two follow ups. One a couple of days after, checking they got it and asking if anything needs explaining. One a week later, telling them when you could start and that after that you are into the following month. Both short, both friendly, neither of them desperate. That alone will win you jobs you have already done all the work for.

And the ones who still say no do not disappear. They go on the list and they hear from you a few times a year like everybody else. Plenty of people who said no in March ring you in October because you were the only one who kept in touch.

What to do this week

Do not announce that you are charging for quotes now. Do this instead. Write the five questions on a card and stick it on the dash. Ask them every time the phone rings. Price the standard jobs while you are stood in the house. Send the bigger ones within a day, with the detail in. Follow up twice, always.

You will spend fewer evenings at the kitchen table, and the ones you do spend will be on jobs that were actually yours.

Getting the wording right, the questions, the quote template, the two follow up messages, is the sort of thing we sort out inside My Electricians ToolBox with around 300 other electricians. Tools, training, mentoring and somebody to tell you when you are giving too much away, rather than another set of videos to watch on your own.

One question before you go. Of the last five quotes you sent, how many did you follow up twice?