All right, I'm here with Ben Carpenter, a master electrician for the last 16 years, electrician for the last 31. Then we get the question, what do you charge per hour? We get that a lot. How do you answer that, Ben?

What do Electricians Charge Per Hour?

Now the customer's sitting there wondering, well, how long has he been gone and did this just cost me another a hundred, 200, $300 more on the job? And what was he doing while he was gone? Was he getting lunch? Was he eating a candy bar? Was he dinking around? What was he doing? Or was he going as fast as he could? Because right now, the only thing I see is the dollars that I'm spending for every hour of labor that he's committed to on this job. So this is what almost, this is what most electricians have gone to, if not all have been moved to this. They've moved to a system called flat rate or upfront pricing. And what upfront pricing does is it allows a customer to know to the penny exactly how much something's going to cost before the electrician even starts. This way, the customer knows even if he's got to go get parts or something goes wrong or something goes a little bit sideways and took him longer, they know exactly how much it's going to cost on top of the upfront or flat rate price that the customer gets.

Well, that is a really good question. So there used to be a time when a customer wanted to know how much an electrician was going to cost. It wouldn't be untypical for an electrician to maybe bill out at $60 an hour, $70 an hour, $80 an hour, maybe even a hundred dollars an hour. And in that labor rate, on top of the per hour labor rate, he also sold his parts. And so if he bought a plug for maybe a dollar, he might sell that plug for a dollar and a half. If he bought conduit for $5, he might sell that conduit for seven or $8. And so he would add in his labor rate plus the material. And it was always got a little bit confusing. The most confusing thing. And I think the most frustrating thing, and the feedback that we got from our customers, which was a big reason why we changed our system and process, was if an electrician comes over and he doesn't have all the parts on his truck and he has to go to the parts store, well, depending on the parts store, it could take him like another hour or two.

All the parts are included all the time is included, all the little pieces and everything else that we used to have to charge. In fact, it wouldn't be unusual for you to see maybe 10 or 15 or 20 different little line items of all these different things that we would charge. If you a customer would be like, well, tell me about that. Where'd that piece go? I don't see that part. Where's that? Not realizing that all those little components that we had to use may be buried in a wall or in a switchbox or something like that. And so now we've got a level of accountability that has just stepped up big time, allowing customers to know exactly how much it's going to cost, even if it takes five wire nuts versus the three that I originally thought it was going to take. Even if it takes 30 feet of wire when I only thought it was going to take 20 feet of wire, guess what? The customer knows. The price doesn't change.

That's the same with the time. So if one of my technicians goes in and they see a job that should take one hour and it takes them two, guess who has to pay for that time? We do not the customer. And so it ends up being a huge win for our customer because they know exactly what it's going to cost on the front end. And to add into that when a customer is given choices or some different options as well for the installation, it just makes the experience, the customer service experience so much better. One last thing I would say, and that is to go back to the old school way, there are still some people out there, some electricians out there that are billing out at maybe 80 or 90 or a hundred dollars an hour, $120 an hour, whatever that is. The other thing I would say is there is a level of cost that goes into a business running and being profitable that allows the customer to be served at a greater level than if those services weren't there. For example, very simple. Anybody who's gone into a small town and tried to call a small town plumber, a small town electrician, and you call in, what do you get?

Either. Nobody answers machine or rings. It rings and rings or an answering machine, and all you're thinking, is anybody ever going to get back to me? And then maybe three or four days later, somebody actually does call you back. Many times they don't. And you have to keep calling and pestering and pestering. Well, the guy that's charging 70, 80, 90, a hundred dollars an hour, fortunately, that guy probably is not in a position where he can afford someone who can do what? Jamie? Answer the phone. Answer the phone. Yeah. It's such a simple little thing, but it is such a big thing for customers to know that when I get on the phone, somebody's going to be there to help me and to help me work through my problem. And of course, little things like that, little services like that add into the complexity of the pricing that we give every single customer, but we want to make sure that our customers are very well taken care of. And so again, when we come out, we give you a price. We stick to that price even if it takes us longer to do it than we originally thought. And that's what you'll love about upfront pricing.

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