How to get repeat business as an electrician

Quiet week coming, so you are back on the lead sites, paying for the same jobs every other electrician within twenty miles is bidding on. I have done it. You buy the lead, you ring it eleven minutes after it lands, and the bloke tells you he has already had four calls and one of them will do it for £40 less.

Before you spend another penny on that, go and look at your phone. Every customer you have already worked for is in there. They know you, they let you in the house, they paid you once and did not argue. Most of them have not heard a word from you since the invoice went out. That is the cheapest source of electrical work you own and nearly every sparky I meet ignores it.

Ringing past customers works, and that is the problem

The usual advice is to pick twenty names from the last two years and give them a call this week. It does work. Do it properly, not as a sales pitch, just a straight message asking how the house is getting on and reminding them what else you do, and you will pull work out of it. I am not knocking it.

The trouble is what happens next. It only happens while you remember to do it. It comes off the back of a quiet Monday and a bit of panic, and the week the work comes back in you stop. Three months later the diary is thin again and you are back on the lead site, paying for strangers, while the people who already trust you sit in your phone going cold.

Turn customer follow up into a system instead

A system is just the same job, decided once and then happening whether you are in the mood or not. It does three things for you, and all three are worth money.

It keeps your name in front of them. People do not remember tradesmen, they remember the last one they heard from. If you show up in their inbox or their letterbox a few times a year, you are the electrician they already have rather than the one they have to try and find.

It tells them what else you do. This is the big one. You changed a shower switch for somebody in 2023, so to them you are the shower switch man. They have no idea you fit EV chargers, do EICRs, rewire kitchens or sort out the outside lights, because you only ever talked about the job they booked. That is not their fault, nobody told them.

It makes you easy to get hold of. The moment somebody needs an electrician they want a name and a number within about ten seconds. If finding you means scrolling back through two years of texts, they will Google it instead, and then you are competing with the lead sites for a customer you had already won.

What a customer follow up system looks like for a one van business

None of this is clever, which is why it works. You are one person in a van, so it has to survive a bad week.

• Get the list out of your head and into one place. Name, address, phone, email, what you did and when. Your invoicing software already has most of it. This list is the most valuable thing your business owns and at the minute it is spread across a phone, a notepad and your memory.
• One thing a month that goes out to everybody. An email or a card. Short, useful, sounds like you. Never a whole newsletter, nobody wants that from their electrician.
• Reminders tied to the job, not to the mood. An EICR expires in five years, a landlord certificate sooner, a boiler service every year. Set the reminder the day you finish the job, four months before it is due, and write it as a note to the customer rather than a note to yourself.
• A list of what you do, in front of them once a quarter. Five lines, plain English. Half your repeat work comes from people finding out you do something you always did.
• One obvious way to reach you. Same number, same email, on everything, plus something physical in the house. A sticker on the board, a magnet, a card in the meter cupboard. The consumer unit is the best advertising space you will ever get and it is free.

Set that up over one wet afternoon and it runs for years. The month you are flat out it still goes out. The month you are quiet it is already working, and quiet weeks stop being a surprise.

What repeat business is worth to an electrician

Repeat business is the cheapest work an electrician can get, so it is worth putting a number on it. Say you have looked after 300 customers over the years, which is nothing for anybody a few years in. If a system like that brings a tenth of them back with one job a year at an average of £300, that is 30 jobs and around £9,000 of work you already owned. No lead fees, no bidding, no explaining who you are, and those customers recommend you to their sister because they have heard from you recently.

Compare that with the same money spent on shared leads and you can see why I go on about it. One is renting other people’s customers. The other is finally getting paid for the trust you have already built.

Start with one afternoon

You do not need a marketing plan to get repeat business as an electrician. You need one afternoon. Do not try to build all of it this week. Get the list into one place, write one short message, send it to everybody, and put one reminder in the diary for every job you finish from now on. That is a system. Everything else is polish.

If you would rather not work out the wording, the timings and the tools from scratch, that is exactly what we build inside My Electricians ToolBox, along with 300 or so other electricians doing the same thing. Marketing for electricians who would rather grow their own work than rent it.

One question before you go. If a customer from two years ago needed an EICR on Friday, would they know how to reach you?