I am running a one man shop, just started it this past summer. So far there have not been any surprises. I started off 20 years ago wiring apartments and houses, decided that was not what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing, so I moved on to a commercial company and from there to a heavy commercial and industrial company. I ran anything from new assembly lines in factories, Chiller plants with 10,000 Amp services, big box stores, Hospitals, teaching motor controls classes, you name it. Later on I was moved into the office to supervise jobs such as these. That is when I saw the ugly side of things. I was managing 40+ people, in charge of the safety program, bidding some of the smaller jobs, trying to change the way things “have always been done”, but it seems like I spent half my time babysitting men out in the field.
Everyday is like a vacation now, it is very rewarding to talk to customers myself, do the work myself and go to the put the check in the bank myself. I had the two or three months of friends and family type work, then ran a small add in the local newspaper and have been getting a couple calls a day from that to supplement the other jobs I have going. For the time being I am planning on staying a one man shop.
One word of advice, if you are doing service work, I keep a clean drop cloth and a small vacuum on the truck and always clean up cleaner than before I was there. The other thing is to keep a small label maker on the truck and label everything you do in the panel and on junction boxes; you wouldn’t believe the compliments and call backs I receive by just paying attention to details. Try to treat every customer like they are you best customer. I went to one of the questionable parts of town last month to install a motion detector. I finished the job and several weeks later got several referrals from this customer for some decent jobs, so you never know.
This board has helped me out tremendously, Thanks to everyone out there.
