On October 13, 2017 at 18:13, 3PedalMINI said...
+1
This past year (2017) has been one of my best and I’ve been at this for 10 years. I will do ~290-320k as a one man shop. I play in the 15-80k job arena which is my bread and butter. I’ve been at this for 10 years and this is the first year I’ve nailed down my billing.
I will hope to pay myself 75k after all expenses. This has been the busiest year and I have some very very long days in. Margins are low, taxes are high and after a very long 12-14 hour day there’s 2-3 more hours in the office todo billing, ordering RMA requests, emails the list goes on and on. A lot of these hours are dealing with garbage equipment and service calls that don’t have a single thing todo with you or your installation. You “eat the cost and the time” manufactures do not pay for your time to deal with their crap.
I would STRONGLY suggest rethinking your idea of joining this industry. It takes YEARS to build a business and tons of money to get started. Word of mouth doesn’t come easily and quickly. Now it’s 80% of my work but it took 10 years to get to that point.
It sounds like you have Just tinkered with stuff and have the itch to get into this industry. That is how most of us got into this industry, but most of us got into this at a different time. This day in age to be successful you have to be a network engineer and then an AV integrator. Tinkering on your home pieces are entirely different then in the real world. You HAVE to choose brands and products that you can partner with and know they will make your life “easier”
I wish you the best of luck but I would strongly consider something else. Also you had better have some damn thick skin because dealing with the public and your phone ringing off the hook by a irate client because Netflix isn’t loading can and will start to wear down on you.
If I had started ANY other business 10 years ago I would be a very different place then I am now. There use to be a time where you could make a very good living in this industry, but they were also the times of 20k plasmas and HDMI didn’t exist. Sorry to hear about your divorce. (I just got married haha) I started my business when I was in high school, I built this on a shoe string budget and also when credit was easy to get. It took me until 2012 to pay off all my debt I had accrued starting this!
It was NOT easy.
Agreed. Referrals are a way of business for most of us but it takes years to build the trust and confidence of your client that's needed to grow your business. I've been in the industry 18 years and have had my own company for the last 3 years. Myself and two full time guys had $850K in sales last year and I took home in mid $100K range but it's non stop work and didn't take overnight. I've been fortunate enough to have nourished these relationships for years so it made the transition into running my own biz a bit easier. Good thing about SoCal is that we've got lots of people with big bucks!
