ElectricalBossPro Blog — Running an Electrical Business

Owner Time Management in an Electrical Business: Getting Off the Phone and Back to the Work That Pays

Ask an electrical business owner with a few vans how their week went, and the answer is often “busy.” Ask what they did, and it's harder to say. A dozen phone calls about where the tech is. An hour on invoices at night. Rearranging tomorrow from the truck. Answering the same question about a customer's panel three times. Very little of it is the work only the owner can do.

Where the Owner's Time Actually Goes

In Following Up on Estimates in an Electrical Business So Approved Work Doesn't Slip Away, the biggest quotes went to the owner for a personal call. That's the kind of task that should fill an owner's week. Most weeks are filled with something else.

Try this for one week: write down every interruption. Every call, every text, every “quick question.” At the end of the week, sort them into three piles:

• Only I can do this. Pricing a complicated job, a hard customer conversation, a decision about hiring.
• Someone else could do this. Booking, rescheduling, sending invoices, answering “when are you coming?”
• Nobody should have to do this. Reading a gate code over the phone, looking up a panel model, typing up an invoice the tech already finished.

Most owners find the second and third piles are bigger than the first.

Let the Software Take the Third Pile

The “nobody should do this” pile is mostly information that should be somewhere other than the owner's head:

• “What's at that house?” The equipment saved on the property shows on the tech's job card.
• “What's the gate code?” Access notes on the address show with the job.
• “When is the tech coming?” Automatic night-before, next-up and arrived texts, plus the live map in the customer app.
• “Did you send the invoice?” It's created when the tech taps Complete, and a card on file can be charged.
• “Is the generator customer due?” Plan visits come due on the Waiting List on their own.

Each one is a phone call that stops happening. None of them is a big deal on its own. Added up over a week of three vans, they are often the difference between an owner who gets home for dinner and one who doesn't. The first month after moving this information into one place is usually when owners notice how much of their day it used to eat.

Hand the Second Pile to the Office

The “someone else could do this” pile belongs to an office hire, even a part-time one. Booking, rescheduling, two-way texting with customers, billing, past-due follow-up and booking from the Waiting List are all work a good office person handles without the owner. The two hiring articles in this series cover when and how: Hiring a Dispatcher for Your Electrical Business: When, Who and What They Need and the office manager guide that follows it.

The hardest part of handing off isn't finding the person. It's letting go. If the owner keeps answering every call, the office never learns. Send the calls to the office and only take back what truly needs you.

Protect Blocks of Owner Time

Once interruptions drop, protect what's left. A few habits that help:

• Batch the callbacks. Return non-urgent calls at set times, not as they come in.
• Set estimate days. Put site visits for large quotes on specific days instead of squeezing them between service calls.
• Read the day once. Check each van's completed and skipped jobs at the end of the day instead of all day long.
• Hold a weekly review. One sitting for open estimates, past-due invoices, overdue plan visits and anything the office flagged.
• Turn the phone off sometimes. If after-hours calls are on a rotation, the owner doesn't need to answer them on their nights off.

Spend the Time on What Grows the Business

Freed-up owner time is only useful if it goes somewhere. Good places to spend it:

• Pricing and reviewing your service list.
• Following up personally on the largest estimates.
• Building relationships with property managers and commercial accounts.
• Training techs and the office.
• Thinking about the next van, the next hire, or the next kind of work.
• Taking an actual day off.

Measure It Again

A month after making changes, repeat the one-week interruption log. If the second and third piles shrank, it's working. If they didn't, look at what still comes to you and why. Usually it's one missing piece of information or one habit nobody broke yet.

For the rest of the owner's side of running an electrical shop, return to the electrical business software overview.