no business,how bout you?

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larryl

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wrentham ma.
anybody else's phone stop ringing?,,
i'm a 2 man shop,doing mostly residential service work & installs,& lite commercial,"whatever"
i use to get a few calls every day,now i'm lucky to get 4-5 calls a week,,
any one else getting slow?
 
I still have a pretty good backlog and am quoting still. I'm into specialty work that is still pretty hot, so I think I'm good for a while.

Everything I read makes me believe the residential market is going to slow. Some areas more so than others. I personally believe we are in for a life correction (aka recession) sometime in the next two years. I'm preparing for it by getting completely out of debt and trying to stash some cash.

Oh yea, I've been called a pessimist before (I prefer realist though).
 
Things were slow for me Jan-Mar, but April rolled around and I got pretty busy. I've got most of May booked up at this point with remodeling jobs and service upgrades.

I think with interest rates rising, people can't use their home equity like they used to and don't have as much cash on hand for projects.
 
Re: no business,how bout you?

larryl said:
anybody else's phone stop ringing?,,
i'm a 2 man shop,doing mostly residential service work & installs,& lite commercial,"whatever"
i use to get a few calls every day,now i'm lucky to get 4-5 calls a week,,
any one else getting slow?
Click to expand...

3-4 months behind on work right now. Economy is flourishing for non-union in my area. Some of the larger union companies are very slow right now. Kind of like the automakers: Union based companies are struggling while the non-unions are fluorishing. Maybe these unions are all they are cracked up to be!
 
April was slow, everything picked up again in May..
But I can see people getting tighter with their $$
More people are asking"HOW MUCH" for little piddly stuff.

Jack Welch Ex CEO of General Electric said ...CHANGE BEFORE YOU HAVE TO.

Could this be the down fall of Unions?

Whoops... was that political?....Sorry
:shock:
 
Mass. has been slow for the past months. I'm also a EC from mass and have had the same problem as Larryl has had. Things are realy picking up now but other EC and retalers have told me they are also slow. We run 8 electricians and do residental service also.
Mass right now has a very slow economy and many people are leaving this state.
A lot of tire kickers are calling looking for very low prices and they are finding them as electricians are just looking for work not to make any profit.
We have a lame duck govenor who will be running for the republican
nomination for president ( Mitt Romney) which leaves an uncertain future for the state.
But as always with warm weather comes more jobs.
 
Larry,

While I've been very busy, I've spoken to a lot of guys who are slow.

Our inspections office has been slow. My father is inspector in another town and he says it's as slow as he's seen in a long time.

A friend of mine owns a company with about 25 guys, and he says it's not the kind of Spring he was expecting. He's taking whatever comes in right now. In fact he beat me out on a price for a recent service upgrade.

Willybud, welcome to the forum. We don't discuss politics here, though. What part of MA are you in?
 
It seemed once the gas shot up,it quieted down immediately. I looked again at my advertising and saw I had cut back on it. I started to rerun adds again and the phone really picked up in the last week. Gotta love the ups and downs. I was ready to go look for another career and now I am wondering how I am going to find time to coach my t-ball team with all the estimates I have to do. Hopefully they will turn into jobs. I did notice that there are guys out there undercutting prices by ALOT. I don't know how they're doing this but what can you do?
 
bobbyho said:
I looked again at my advertising and saw I had cut back on it. I started to rerun adds again and the phone really picked up in the last week.
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I used to drop my ads when I was busy or on vacation, but then I had customers tell me they thought I had left town or quit, and coudn't find my number! Now the ads stay forever. When I'm on vacation, I'll take time to return calls & schedule customers for when I return.
 
It was not meant to be political just economic. sorry. Our home office is in the south central part of the state and we cover the central and eastern portions of the state.
J. I'm sure we've done work in your town.
I've seen it slow before like back in the late 80's when everything went bust but this is just a little bump in the northern states road. I hope.
 
I think it's just a little bump, too. I don't see the signs of what happened late 80's, but I'm not extending myself very far just in case.
 
I used to always notice that things picke up just before the holidays as everyone was trying to get their house ready and then would just die from Nov-Jan. I would pick back up a little and then slack off right around tax time for a couple of months and then as people started getting their returns back it would pick back up.

Most of our guys around here are turning away work.

This is why it's so important to work hard during the busy times so that you have some reserve for the slow times. This is also why it's important to never turn away a potential customer. Find some way to do the work for them if you can. You may need them again someday.
 
Jumping in a little late here but I don't like what I am seeing. Prices such as gas, materials, insurance are out of control. I hold my prices to get the work and yet I am still losing out to lower bidders. Even the work I get comes with a really hard push to justify the price. My smaller builders are doing nothing as their houses sit collecting dust waiting for buyers. This is not good. :cry:
 
The company i work for is a two man outfit, we oth have our electrical licenses, and our handyman license, we have a sepertae business that is handyman things, like sheetrock repair and other stuff

Our electric side has almost stopped, not becaus of no jobs, its that when we schedule something one job will drop out and seem like everything else will drop out also. Weve worked on ventilation fans, sheetrock, and other piddly stuff this week, when we had a full electrical week planned.....the business is just not here
 
j_erickson said:
I think it's just a little bump, too. I don't see the signs of what happened late 80's, but I'm not extending myself very far just in case.
Click to expand...

WOW, i hope were not going back to that,,that was a nightmare,
89-90, i could'nt buy a job,,
got a couple calls this weekend,
not hitting the panic button yet,,
 
I agree with Scott, prices are insane. Yet, somehow I am losing jobs to other electricians that somehow seem to destroy my prices. I have not really jacked prices much in the past 5 years. I used to get just about every job and now if the phone rings (I said it picked up a few days ago, I was wrong,just a hiccup) they all tell me I am too high. Alot of the home improvement contractors are still working and I know they are not calling me. God help them if I see they are doing their own electrical. There will be a lot of phone calls to building departments made. Yeah, I am whining but there is nothing else I can do.
 
About 2 weeks ago I looked at 3 small houses for complete rewire. The were in the 1200 to 1400 sq. ft. range and completely gutted, total electric ( no gas ). There were no plans or layout. List of extra's were 8 cans and 3 fans and 6 dimmers on each house, they left out phone & cable. I gave a price and the contractor chocked. He showed me a bid of less than 2 dollars a foot if they were doing the service for free. The electrician that bid the job was from out in the country ( sticks ). I figure if someone is willing to drive 60 miles to wire a house for nothing that work must be slowing down. But there is always the possibility that they are just stupid so I'll have to wait and see. I really don't think the Fed. needed to raise interest rates this last time as the price of fuel was already slowing things down.
 
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