Seeking mentorship with retired residential electrician

[jeffreylee7469]

I’m an electrical contractor and most of my work is in the commercial area. I have help learning to navigate this area, but the contractor doesn’t believe there is any money in the residential areas. I have done a lot of residential side work, but I have not picked up traction. I get the, “I have friends that can’t get a contractor to show up”, but all I see are electricians. Need help with estimating residential and pricing. I have bid a bunch of re-wires in my area and seem to be high. I live in the Pittsburgh area and could really use some help.

 

[five.five-six]

I’m an electrical contractor and most of my work is in the commercial area. I have help learning to navigate this area, but the contractor doesn’t believe there is any money in the residential areas. I have done a lot of residential side work, but I have not picked up traction. I get the, “I have friends that can’t get a contractor to show up”, but all I see are electricians. Need help with estimating residential and pricing. I have bid a bunch of re-wires in my area and seem to be high. I live in the Pittsburgh area and could really use some help.

I feel you. I cut back on residential about 10 years ago because I somehow convinced myself there is no money in resi. That all changed when we had a slab leak and I did a “remodel” on my own home. I took the roles of homeowner, GC, GC’s helper and EC. That was a lot of work. Now in my area at least, it’s tough to even get a contractor to show up these days and when they do show up, they have you over a barrel. The amount of money I found myself paying for often times what would be called marginal work at best, convinced me to start getting back into resi. The thing I observed was a lot of these guys are shameless. Manny of them are really awful a their trades and charge premium++

This is what I’ve been doing and it works OK for me. Either look at a job and figure out what your materials cost is going to be then +50% for profit and I always underestimate the cost of incidentals, figure out how many hrs the project will take multiply by your and your workers hourly rate and add 30% because everything takes longer than you remember.

The other method is to build a schedule of itemized pricing every box may be $150 and $3,500 for a 200A service and $1,500 for a sub panel. Work out your pricing schedule and just count and add it up. Be generous to yourself.

I will tell you this, I love doing electrical and I hate doing bids and invoicing. To bid an average 2,000 sqft house I might spend 1-3 hrs preparing the bid. Your bid is the foundation of the job. It’s where expectations are defined and before expectations can be meet, they must be defined. Leave as little as possible to interpretation, be clear in your description of scope and payment schedule. You are the professional and the customer will expect this from you.

My first post in years on this site, not bad

 

[jeffelectric1992]

I’m an electrical contractor and most of my work is in the commercial area. I have help learning to navigate this area, but the contractor doesn’t believe there is any money in the residential areas. I have done a lot of residential side work, but I have not picked up traction. I get the, “I have friends that can’t get a contractor to show up”, but all I see are electricians. Need help with estimating residential and pricing. I have bid a bunch of re-wires in my area and seem to be high. I live in the Pittsburgh area and could really use some help.

You know why residential electrical work is often so suspect and unprofessional?
Because the tradespeople who do it are often not professionals!
They may be electricians, but they aren't professional residential electricians.
They are commercial electricians, or industrial electricians, or maintenance electricians, or handymen trying to be electricians.
The company I work for specializes in Residential electrical work. Everyone who works there had years of experience in other aspects of the trade as well as years of experience in residential electrical installation. We developed a flat rate pricing guide that we use for pricing every job. From soup to nuts, its in our pricing guide. If the homeowners want us to swap a fixture, change three outlets, install a surge suppressor, and add an exterior outlet for their Christmas lights we look up each task in our price book and add them all together, easy peasy!
The time consuming work is developing the pricing guide, but most electricians are familiar with building units, you just price each item as a building unit and estimate the labor based upon eighty percent of the worst case scenario for time of installation.
The requirements for installations in my area are going to differ greatly from yours so our pricing for each new construction opening ($245.00) is going to be different for you.
Determine a standard unit for an outlet for you, J-box, outlet, trim, fifteen feet of wire,(EMT and Wire for us) connector, 0.6 man hours and determine what your cost should be. Now all you have to do is count up the number of openings and multiply.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that a man hour is just what you want to make per hour, it's what you need TO CHARGE per hour to stay in business.

 

[kwired]

I have bid a bunch of re-wires in my area and seem to be high. I live in the Pittsburgh area and could really use some help.

I haven't done much for rewires for a long time outside of when there is also a major remodel going on. Most of them want a Cadillac for the price of a Chevette to begin with for a rewire with no concurrent remodeling. They are hard to estimate/bid without giving a high price just to make sure you have covered all possibilities. One may go pretty easy and the next may be more involved then you ever thought it would be. The more of this work you do the more you get the feel of what you may encounter though. Then you get the occasional house that is impossible to work in as they have a huge mess of some sort to work around. You may be lucky if it is just stacks of items they probably don't need vs trash, pet waste, etc.

They can't get anybody to come in part because nobody wants to do these jobs as a general rule, won't do it unless they are going to have a pretty good profit, but it still is only something they will do when their usual work maybe has a bit of lull in activity.

Yes there are jobs that don't fit all the bad stuff I mentioned. Many those houses already have been rewired at some time though. Working on a house that isn't being lived in isn't so bad most cases.