no QQQ...

I THINK he said take your JOKES as EXPERIENCE!

:-)

avdude

OK, I guess it's OK then.

avdude i agree with you, this topic should be on a secure forum as i know many of my customers referr to this site for info on products.
ANd buying that amount of wire does play a pivital role in the price. I only hope oneday my company will be that sucefull to use that amount of wire.
I Emaild you the otherday about getting verrified on intergrationpros.com, but never heard back. Any updates? and is there going to be a secure forum there just for the pros?

Lonny

Sorry for the bad number on volume for the year, 35,000 not 350,000.

yes to all...I thought I replied...sorry

avdude

Design for your that extra "0" does a lot!!! haha

Lonny

Design4U:

All I did was give a link to a retail site so as not to quote wholesale on a web site and to show that even a consumer can easily find Cat 5E for 7 cents a foot.

As far as your Cat 6 pricing, I'd like to know whether you are quoting per 500' or per 1000'. Either way, I am positive that AVAD has NOT just cut the price of Cat 6 in half.

I really have no desire to flame with you and I'm sorry if I went after you hard. It's not meant personally. Peace?

p.s. I do however reserve the right to disagree :-).

This message was edited by QQQ on 02/29/04 12:33.

Final post from Design4u. Tripple Q like you I focus on the possitve and look toward future business and how to inprove what I do for my company. I beleive that I am better and worth the additional cost. As a whole we do not compete with anyone and when we do we WIN.
I simply was trying to get the awareness out their for something I feel is wrong. I trully beleive that AVAD will long term affect all of us and am lookig for every way to seperate use from the masses. I hope with all the veiws that people are more aware than before. It seems to me that you are on this forum to mask the truth and tell people that they should put their heads in the clouds and not worry about the future. There will alway be clients that only whant a custom house to do their work because they know they will finish the job and it will work right the 1st time. These are our Clients and I love working with them and becoming their Friend for years to come.
So thanks to all for your veiws and posts, and happy fishing as RM9 has stated many times.

Q,

peace, love and understanding...

The number of times your solutions to my questions have helped me and others certainly qualifies you as an expert. Since I know Design4U... let me clarify a few things...

The comments are based on a dislike for AVADs business practices (namely D2B) which we all thoroughly trashed in an earlier forum. We, as a collective, pretty much determined that support for AVAD makes them stronger (duh) but that they took the money we've supported them with and used it to directly compete with us unless we paid money to join their club. The custom builders we have spent so much time courting and changing the philosophies of are now being solicited by someone who is using part of my dollar to print up the solicitation. Sorry, I know its capitalism, business, the way it is, etc. but it chaps my ass and makes me turn my support elsewhere while making sure that a place like this... frequented by professionals all over the world... gets my opinion blared out.

Couple this with the thing that we all do vent about often... bad wiring jobs that we have to fix. Heres a real scenario we dealt with. Old customer... did his old house. Builder... building beautiful new 1.7 million dollar spec homes. We solicit builder to do wiring correctly. He has us do one lone house... loves it... helps him sell the house. Brings Sparky in who learns how to wire subsequent houses based on our design and then bids it for no profit while using AVAD cable.

We know where to get cheap cable but we like to bid with Tributaries... we feel its a hell of a lot better. Tributaries priced cable puts us upside down if we want to come close to sparky's bid. Design4U figured this cable was a way to get these houses wired with at least some degree of Cat6 and cheap RG6QS but then got mad when I informed him that Pro-Connect was owned by AVAD. The thread started was actually to divert people from buying that cable when trying to compete with sparkomatic Eddie... to use Anixter or something else besides that.

My story ends with old customer selling old house and buying new spec home from builder that was wired by low bid electrician. Turns out Cat6 isn't even in there and there ain't no CAt5e run with the volume controls which at this point relegates us to Matrix Audio systems or rip down of venetian plaster (the former being the less expensive option). We want these spec homes because we've had a rather successful rate of conversion when the house sells that we've wired. In the $300,000 market... we don't really care... those are busy work and turn us a few dollars of profit while not having to use Impaqt's line "sorry guys no work this week". The big specs are where we want in though. Chasing the f---d up wiring in houses drops labor efficiency. With gear so hammered out there (read that clients... the current state of electronics pricing is good for you! Don't beat us up any more!), labor and service are where the money is made (again clients... please read... we HAVE to make money somewhere or we won't stay around to service the systems you've bought from us!).

Anyway... it's a semi sunny Sunday and a rare day off... weather too good to compute any more.

Bye

rhm9:

Looking at the scenarios you laid out above, have you implemented any strategies to address them? I don’t know your market but here are a few ideas I came up with as I read through your post.

1)Are you making money on the pre-wires (when you do get them)? Or is the only reason for doing the pre-wire to get the equipment sale? If the latter, have you considered partnering up with the electrician and/or builder and specifying what/how the wire should be run. Granted, this would mean you would have to stop looking at the electrician as the enemy and instead as an allay. Then establish upgrade options for the builder. See point # 4.

2)An alternative attack would be to establish a great relationship with one of the clients whose homes you have to correct after the electricians poor wiring job. Get the homeowner to write a letter to the builder telling him how disappointed and upset he was to find that the low voltage wiring provided to him for his brand new house was inadequate and didn’t even provide for the basics. How many letters do you think it would take like that before the builder would be afraid to let that electrician do another pre-wire?


This message was edited by QQQ on 03/01/04 17:12.

3)We all know that most electricians only want to deal with the wiring. Start talking about infrared distribution or anything else and they don’t have a clue and don’t want to deal with it. Perhaps you could provide something with your pre-wiring packages that the electrician would never want to touch. Something that might only add a few hundred dollars to the cost but would be an easy sell to the builder and homeowner. If I had to, I wouldn’t charge for it until the house was sold if that’s what it took.

This message was edited by QQQ on 03/01/04 22:18.

4)Why not structure your pre-wires, whether you are doing them or the electrician is doing them (at YOUR direction) so the builder can include several upgrade options to the homeowner and he shares in the profit? No way the electrician will be able to do that on his own. The advantage to the homeowner is they get to build it into their mortgage. The advantage to the builder is extra profit. The advantage to you is that the builder no longer has ANY interest in working with the electrician if you can make him some extra money. Nor do you need to cut your profit. Charge the same as you always would but make sure the builder can add in his percentage. You could offer:
a.A basic volume control package.
b.A multi-zone package.
c.A home theater package.
Make the differences between the packages significant and clear cut so the client sees value in the upgraded options. None of these options require a single extra dollar on your part as long as the wiring is in place. In the mean time, the builder could even have you meet with the client to present the options to them.

In closing, my experience is that the builder and electrician do not have to be your enemy. They can also be your friend. And like it or not, unless you are working exclusively for the client, the builder calls the shots if it’s a spec home, even a high-end one. Make him your partner and let him share in the profit and you won’t be losing business to electricians any more.

Maybe you’ve already tried some of these ideas maybe not. All I can tell you is that there’s no way I’m going to let your average electrician (no offense meant Brijaws and Larry :-), you’re not average) steal business from me. I’m going to figure out some way to make him my partner OR take him out of the equation.


This message was edited by QQQ on 03/01/04 17:34.

p.s. I would also probably define that any extras above and beyond the upgrade options are yours and your alone. That might need to be open to negotiation if it's built into the mortgage. And you may even find that building things into the mortgage allows you to sell larger systems than usual.

p.p.s. I've got a lot of other ideas too but I'm tired of typing. Suffice it to say there are all types of ways to structure something like this and you need to be careful to keep as much control as possible and make the builder need YOU as much as possible. The beauty of it is that all the builder is going to care about is his cut. If you do it well he is no longer going to be concerned with whether you are the lowest price because the client is buying the upgrade options. I would also create options you could demo to the clients at YOUR showroom. Can the electrician do that?