tryinghard
Senior Member
- Location
- California
An analogy of the difference between residential and commercial can be divorce court law compared to murder trial law. There both law but really are different businesses requiring different skills and practices.
I found in my business with these we had to have separate books literally, different margin, tools trucks, crew, pay, schedule, staging (move in & out), purchasing, estimating, management... If your company is already well established and adds residential their overall overhead really wont change much.
They can either split their overhead into categories and track them throughout the year (to do this requires tracking the categories individually), or they can lump it all together and use the same mark-ups, usually resulting in an increase in volume but less understanding of where to concentrate in hard times ? cut backs. Residential requires more overhead (operating expenses) then commercial but it is often easier for an electrician to start on their own in residential, these are usually your competition.
I found in my business with these we had to have separate books literally, different margin, tools trucks, crew, pay, schedule, staging (move in & out), purchasing, estimating, management... If your company is already well established and adds residential their overall overhead really wont change much.
They can either split their overhead into categories and track them throughout the year (to do this requires tracking the categories individually), or they can lump it all together and use the same mark-ups, usually resulting in an increase in volume but less understanding of where to concentrate in hard times ? cut backs. Residential requires more overhead (operating expenses) then commercial but it is often easier for an electrician to start on their own in residential, these are usually your competition.
