Hal, you are 100% correct.
Two years ago I was facing looseing a couple of good Commercial accounts. These guys supplied me with a large amount of work.
This is what they did:
They started hammering me on my invoices, whining about how long it took to do this and how much material cost.
They hired a maintinence man (handy-man type) to do light work, elec,pluming, drywall.... (who soon took over all maint)
They then asked to see my margins Profit, O/H and Material Mark-up. They blamed that on Corprate.
They started delaying payments in to 90-120 days. (Oh that invoice isn't even in our system yet...are you sure you mailed it?)
I tried to convince them the pricing was fair and to talk to other EC's to compair the numbers.
This obviously went on for a while. The stress level got real high, so I dumped them and a few others too. My wife said we were done for financially and I was scared.
But you know that was only the begining of realizing that I could actually charge a little more money with fewer customers as long as the quality of workmanship remained high.
As a note in my experiences the type of customers most often trying to beat you up were Property Managers, Commercial or Residential & a few GC's
I am a company with no employees now, so this can be different with other companies or in different areas.
This is only my opinion in my little corner of the world. Sometimes you have to take a big chance to correct things.
Respectfully submitted
Rob
[This message has been edited by sierra electrician (edited 07-30-2005).]
