Charlotte Electrician

Thursday, May 24, 2012


 Matthews electrician ,  . This is a somewhat  angry blog about one small business owners experience with advertisers and marketers . Over the years I have tried so many different types of marketing it really boggles the mind . When I first started in the trade I joined a networking group with about 50 people . Everybody in the group seemed to be really adamant about the fact that this is a great form of marketing . After about a year in the group I realized that the only people I was doing work for was the people in the group . They would throw you an occasional bone hoping that you would somehow give out their name and then refer them to some of your customers . I found it to be ineffective for the time that I had to spend every week going to the meetings . Not a great return on my investment . The next thing that I tried was a business card sized ad in the Yellow Pages . This cost me about $330 a month and although it was affordable it was as well ineffective and had a poor return on my investment . Over the years from 2000 to 2007 my Yellow Pages advertising got larger and larger . The number of customers grew but the amount that they were charging me was more than the profit I was making from the customers they were sending me . All in all a bad investment .
     Over the years I've tried different forms of advertising such as the Yellow Pages , billboards , radio ads targeting Charlotte , I even bought an office on the edge of the freeway and employed banners for one year . Over 100,000 people passed this office each day on the 77 freeway . After one year I had to sell the office and try and employ other forms of advertising . One thing is clear to me after all the money that I have spent on advertising . Virtually nothing out there is worth putting your money into it except for online Internet marketing . When the people from the Yellow Pages came out and when I recently spoke to an online company I always ask him the same question . How many people in Matthews or Monroe North Carolina can you guarantee me or at least give me a rough estimate about how many will contact me . The answer is always the same . They have no idea . The irresponsibility of marketers is really staggering to me . I've actually come to strongly dislike this industry to be honest with you . Most of the time they really seem to have no idea whether their form of marketing is right for your company or not . They just want to sell you a contract . That is , after all... their job . Human beings throughout history seem to have accepted this flawed argument . If it is my job and I'm getting paid to do it then certainly it must be moral and ethical . After all so many people are doing it , and this is a capitalist's society . Then it must be right . I hate to bring up World War II but this is the exact same rationale that people used to justify their jobs at Auschwitz . Just because everybody's doing it and it seems to be socially acceptable does not make it morally correct .
 
      Now there are certainly far worse things that are treated as an industry in the United States these days but for the sake of this article I will stick to the point . Mindlessly going through your work day putting other people out of business so that you can afford a BMW is an empty and hopelessly vile existence . My industry be a lowly and non-glamorous provides a service to the community . I wonder if the people that are claiming to provide profitable customers to others ever sincerely think about the fact that the contract they are getting a local florist to sign may in fact put them out of business . well the first week in the field as a Yellow Pages sales representative they may not . But after years of phone calls from failing businesses I would think that there would be some small percentage of accountability .
 
      I would think that they would give people a few heads up about researching the different types of marketing that may or may not be beneficial to them . As an electrical contractor is not in my best interests to put the businesses that I deal with out of business . Advertisers however have no such ideas in their heads it seems . If they sell you a contract for advertising that is effective , and you go out of business they simply move on to the next person . And I'm sure in their psyche they rationalize this as you being a poor business person . Not knowing how to run your business properly . When they go home at the end of the day there wife does not asked him whether or not your business succeeded or went bankrupt . There wife asks them how work went and whether or not they can go to the beach this weekend .

    The truth is that most advertisers and marketers could care less whether or not your business succeeds or fails . I have heard multiple other electrical contracting companies go onto the radio with advertisements . The story is always the same . After about a month or two the advertisements stop . This was their little experiment into the effectiveness of radio advertising . The same holds true for television advertising . The only company in Charlotte that I know the can afford television advertising is a national franchise . They pay their employees minimum wage and after that they are relegated to make money via a commission system . Don't gouge the customer don't make a profit that's their motto . They have to gouge the customers to pay thousands of dollars every month in franchise fees . And where do you think the thousands in franchise fees goes . The college educated
 marketer who is selling a product that is not worth the paper it's written on . Many people that don't go to college don't realize that it is the sole purpose of many people who went to college to enslave those who did not go to college and profit from their ignorance . One should always seek to benefit themselves by not only benefiting their family but benefiting the community as a whole as well . This is known as civic responsibility .


      Well I am a workingman who has chosen not to remain ignorant and become a slave of college-educated marketing sales people in suits and skirts . I chose to start studying Internet marketing myself . while I was pleased with what I found the Internet offering as well as Google and Bing it only served to reinforce the fact to me that for decades in America this marketing monster has been gobbling up businesses and brainwashing the public to eat corn syrup and fat enriched diets to the detriment of the entire society . But hey they got to go on that vacation with their wife and their children went to college so that justifies the ends to the means ... Right ?

     Along with web development and search engine optimization . After five years of study am a proud to say that all of our marketing is done in-house . I do it all myself . Web development . Search engine optimization . Google ad words . Every day I get calls from people literally saying they're going to put me at the top page of Google . The obvious question to me as an educated individual is What do the people have to type into their computer ? and which page on Google's website will I be at the top of  ? You see Google is a website . There pages change constantly based on their algorithm . But you cannot be at the top page of Google . This statement insinuates that you would be at the top of their home page . There are no search results on their home page .  They throw this question out there because they know that the people who answer yes are ignorant about how a search engine works . Get me the top page of Google , yes that's me . As if it were like a television channel that you could be on . Or the Charlotte Observer . Be on the front page of the Charlotte Observer . Really ? For which day ? For how many days ? Anyway that's my rant about marketers . They love the ignorant . So if you want to be taken advantage of and go out of business , remain ignorant . When you do go out of business they will just move on to the next ignorant schmo who just opened up his own business .

Electricians and electrical contractors in Charlotte . The truth is there are so many electricians in the Charlotte area that the market share is extremely chopped up and completely saturated . There are a lot of guys out there that are just working out of the back of their pickup trucks with little or no marketing budgets whatsoever . These guys charge a very low rate if you can find them . The trouble is nobody can find them and that is why they charge such a low rate . They usually spent two or three years muddling around chopping off all the other contractors at the knees . Then when they realized finally that they've gone in the $40,000 in debt they go to work for somebody else . Then the next year they pass two or 300 more people at the State Board of examiners electrical contractors test and the cycle continues .

     All this right to work state law is doing is saturating the market with a bunch of uneducated people who think that they can run a business because they know how to wire a house . Nothing else could be further from the truth . I've taken four years of small business classes web development search engine optimization and marketing classes and still have so much to learn . The truth is the average guy who goes down to get his license from the state Board of examiners of electrical contractors has no business of getting into business for himself . I have had guys call me and ask me to estimate work when it was obvious that they were a new contractor going into business for themselves and had no idea what to charge . Trying to get me to do their estimating for them , really pathetic . The mentality that because you're good electrician you can become an electrical contractor and start your own business is really childish . I went into business for myself 20 years ago with this exact mentality . I certainly know better than the people I'm currently criticizing .

     However one thing distinguishes me from 80% of the people who go into business for themselves . I did not quit . Time after time when people showed up to tell me that I could not do what I was trying to do I did not quit . Time after time when employees came and work for my company only to leave and take advantage of me , I did not quit . That is the only real difference between somebody who is in business for themselves in somebody who work for someone else . When you're in business for yourself every problem in every solution is up to you . Electrical contracting and working in the fields electrician is not an easy job . Sweating under houses and crawling through attics is not glamorous in any way either . It is been a long week and as I sit here right this blog I am thankful that I now work in the office and do not have to do work out in the field very much anymore .
     The majority of electricians that work out in the field look at their bosses and think that they have an easy job working in the office . Why am thankful to be doing a different type of work and working in the field as an electrician I can certainly tell you that is not easy . I have to do cardio five times a week just so that I don't feel like a mounting a heart attack from the stress . My body makes me well aware of the fact that I should not be sitting in a chair for 10 to 12 hours a day staring at a florescent lighted computer screen .

     That having been said I am thankful that I'm able to offer a service to the community and I am selling something that is of real value . When people's electrical goes out and have their house is not working things that they take for granted everyday send me become precious . We are there to restore the power and restore the normality of their lives . Selling something tangible and real that affect them directly personally and instantly and for years to come . Those marketers that are out there selling garbage marketing contracts and sending us the small-business owners of America under to you I say shame shame shame .
Recessed Lighting Monroe
Matthews Electrician-Electrical Contractor 
Monroe Electrician-Electrical Contractor