Safety Inspections Lead the Way to Profits
by Tom Watts
April 27, 2010
Lon Lockwood Electric is now on the right road to becoming a successful, long-term business, and one that allows Lon Lockwood the ultimate gift in life: having the ability to spend more time with his family and friends. And, having his name on the front of the building in Webster, N.Y., means something too.
“Being able to spend more time with my wife, Heather, and my four children, Cameron, 17, Cody, 14, Jessica, 13, and Sarah, age 8, and my friends, is something that I greatly enjoy,” said Lockwood, whose hobbies include downhill skiing, Frisbee® golf, and hiking. “Being with my family more often is the best payoff I could ever have.”
Joining Electricians’ Success International (ESI), “Has paved the way for me to enjoy more time with my family and finally take more vacations,” said Lockwood.
But, early on as a young electrician, Lockwood said the last thing he ever wanted to do was own an electrical company. Necessity often becomes the mother of invention. “After working for someone else in the electrical field for 10 years doing residential and commercial service work, my wife had lost her well-paying job at Xerox,” he recalled. “We could no longer afford to live on what I was making as an electrician.
“I decided that if the company I worked for could do it, then so could I,” he said.
STARTING A BUSINESS
In August 2001, Lockwood and his wife, Heather, decided to start their own business. “I thought all we needed to do was be five dollars an hour cheaper than the company I worked for, and get a Yellow Pages ad,” he said. “The amount of money the Yellow Pages ad cost was a very scary thing to do, which was about $400 a month. This was money that we didn’t have and it was a great leap of faith that this was going to work.” The Lockwood’s “signed our life away” by betting everything they had on the future.
Many a contractor has taken a naive approach to lowball pricing the market, eventually finding there is a better way. One of the first lessons Lockwood learned at ESI was about pricing, but the first couple of years on his own weren’t that bad, especially considering that Sept. 11, 2001 happened. “The economy took a downturn and we thought we were done before we ever got started,” said Lockwood. “Our first year went rather well considering we had very little knowledge of how to run a business. And then in our fourth year of business, things started to show — we really did not know how to run a business.”
PROFIT DAY WITH ESI
In March 2006, Lockwood traveled to Texas for a Profit Day with Electricians’ Success International, and it was there that his life as an electrical contractor started to change.
“There we learned all the things we were doing wrong about being a service company and running a successful business,” said Lockwood. “We decided that we had nothing more to lose. We were at the end of our rope and looking to go out of business because no matter how much money we had coming in, there was more money going out.”
He joined ESI and attended his first Expo in Atlanta, Ga., in Sept. 2006.
“Given the tools and the know-how from ESI we started putting “service” into the electrical service business by providing the things our customers really wanted,” said Lockwood, “which was professional-looking trained technicians, answering the phones when they need us, making appointments and keeping them, providing a price quote before we start the work, and guaranteeing our work when we are finished.”
BECOMING A SUCCESS
Lon and Heather Lockwood, middle, are surrounded by Steven Brown, left, and Chris Reibert, far right.
Lon Lockwood Electric educates their customers on what they find during safety inspections. He said the vast majority of customers want to live in a safe, secure home, and his company takes care of those problems. “This is very different from where we used to be,” confessed Lockwood. “Before ESI opened my eyes, we would just take care of the problem and say, ‘Have a good day,’ and rush off to the next job. Now we take as much time as we need with each customer, maybe two to four hours, just to go over our findings and educate them about the safety concerns.
“Taking the time with the customer is a win-win situation,” he continued. “We stay in one location and do more work, so it makes good financial sense for us, and our customers win because when we leave their home it is as safe and secure as it can be.
“Relationships with customers are also part of Lon Lockwood Electric’s formula for success. We try to build a good, friendly relationship with the customer so that when we leave we are not just their contractor, but their friend and someone they can count on,”
TIPS FOR INCREASING SALES
Safety has become a cornerstone of Lon Lockwood Electric. “It is our company philosophy that every home we go into should be electrically as safe as possible.”
A UNIQUE COMPANY
Lockwood said what makes his company unique is that they take care of the whole customer, not just the problem at hand.
Still, the more Lockwood learns about running a business, the more he realizes that there is still so much to learn. “Our mission for 2010 is to continue learning with Electricians’ Success International and service our customers even better than we have in the past,” he said. “We are going to do this by giving them service after the sales because I know our best customers for 2010 are our existing customers.”
Tom Watts
