Big John, I applaud you for looking for a good contractor to work for. Here are some questions you should ask of yourself (or a good employer should ask of you)
Service Related
1) Are you willing to handle emergency calls after hours and on weekends?
2) Do you write thorough invoices - including all material and labor used on a job.
3) Are your invoices legible - so the girl in the office doesn't spend 10 min/inv trying to figure out what you wrote
4) Are you computer literate?
5) Can you improvise? or do you only know one way to install things.
General
1) How much are you worth?
2) How much do you have to generate to cover your salary, overhead and make a profit
(For this last question, figure that labor -including burden- should be no more than 30% of gross sales. Material should be approx 15%)
(IE- you are worth $25/hr, burden is approx 18%, so your total cost is $25*1.18=$29.50/hr. You should generate $98.33/hr min.)
Are you willing to work hard enough on a new install to generate that money?
3) How do you feel about call backs due to a technicians mistake? should the tech get full hourly pay to redo something?
4) What special skills do you bring? Can you work with EMT? upto what size? CDL?
5) Are you willing to come in for 4-8 hrs/month on your time for in shop training?
There are a ton of questions for both sides. I think you are heading in the right direction. Just realize that it is a two way street. Give to get. A good employer understands that.
I will admit that a pet peeve of mine is the code book. I have met too few technicians that actually look in the code book, let alone understand it, to warrant us buying one for each truck. I prefer the technicians purchase their own handbook. What I provide is the unlimited teaching via phone and in the field (Tech support you might say)
I do agree with the Hot, LO/TO questions though. In 95% of the cases, the power can be shut down without any problems. The other 5% should be done by trained technicians.
Hope this helps a little
