Instalz,

My .02

Sell yourself, not cable. I think that in the long run, you profit more from relationships than the act or art of selling. You do need to get your foot in the door, and gain some experience (great poker analogy about playing bad hands). We've all been where you have, and we still sometimes get caught up in a situation like that. Oh well.

As far as cable, 2 CAT5 and 2 RG6 is the way to go. The firm I work for uses the CE-Bus cable (2 CAT5 and 2 RG6Q in one jacket), but I hate it. Expensive, 250' rolls weigh 70 pounds, and it's just more work to strip it back. I'd rather have boxes of different colors of RG-6 and CAT5, pulled in groups with the same labeling tag. Save your back, looks cool, less of different lables, more cables.

I don't think most people need RG6Q, but it sounds better.

I don't think most residences need CAT6 either, but it sounds cool. For the extra money, I think you get 50Mhz more bandwidth. Sounds like a new thread...

As far as future proofing, running CE-Bus cable is good, but why not place a couple of strategic conduits here and there?

Yes they do, but a particular store can only be profitable when they have an obscene amount of business.

Also, if you were wanting to impress a date or have a very nice meal, even if McDonalds offered Filet Mignon, I doubt you would go there.

My point is simply this, there are two poles in the market, commodity/discount (McDonalds -OR- Alarm Installers/Electricians) vs. specialty/high-performance (Ruths Chris -OR- Integration Professionals). Ruths Chris sells a hamburger, at about $18 a pop.

The customers, marketing style, pricing strategy (ad nauseum) are completely different at each end of the market. You can't be successful doing both. In fact, I've considered opening a separate company to handle the production builder/value oriented customer.

How many Mercedes/Chrysler joint dealerships have you seen? Same company -- totally different customer...

Pick your market and dominate it.

Thanks Big Papa. I agree, I looked at bundled cable, but prefer to run multi colored. It lessons the confusion.
As far as I know, cat6 is 100 Mhz more than 5.
Thanks again trip109...

I dont pull wire anymore in new construction. I pay the cheap guys to do it right after I have trained them. They charge me the low rate, and I get to charge the customer a design, management, inspection fee that is my hourly rate. Seems to be working well so far. Plus, the puller buys the cable from me.

I was sick of getting beaten on price for these jobs. This way I still get to design, document and manage the project, but pass off the labor. I could never do the pulling as cheaply as the cheap guys.

As for Cat6 vs Cat5, pretty soon our customers are going to be calling us asking why their new Gigabit Ethernet cards wont connect at the 1 or 10GB speed rate. I hate the thought of telling them it wont work because you didn't pay the extra two cents per foot for wire. Direct Connect now makes a 2x2 cable with Cat6.

The bottom line is that we owe it to our customers to explain to them in plain language why they need the cable backbone in their home. I use wire samples effectively for this. If you can't convince yourself why its necessary, then you're going to have a hard time convincing them. Use real world examples from your own gone to hell installs. Things like: Modulation with a digital cable or SAT system is MUCH easier with two coax cables to each location. Extra Cat5 or 6 to distribute the DVD around the house. Wireless APs need wired connections. Phone systems need cat5 home run for each and every spot. All that stuff.

Some of the rade mags have printed good Structured wiring articles over the past few years - I have handed them out with good success. Might want to check Tech Home Builder, Res. Systems, and I think Eclipse Marketing has them posted too.

Early on I had a client yell at me after a project was done because he didn't have enough wire in the house to distribute a HD Cable receiver. He said: "If you had told me I needed another cat5 to each TV location to make this happen I obviously would have paid for it." Still haven't heard back from him. Won't happen again.

Instalz,
What price point houses are you doing? Can you do all the other stuff like security prewire, central vacuum, distributed audio, etc.. Try doing a TOTAL solution driven package. We have had decent success offering COMPLETE packages. When bundling them together (kinda like what Qwest is offering right now), you ussually have more margin dollars to play with and builders/homeowners like the "one stop" approach.
EMail me for more info.

its simple...act like a whore you'll be treated like a whore. act like a mistress and stick to your guns and sell your expertise.........

a whore and a mistress are the same thing but who gets the money, house, cars furs.....its all marketing. always be the mistress!

Ditto!

For the sake of your business and family.... get over this attitude.

You only want PROFITABLE jobs. You can lose money sitting at home watching TV, why spend the energy in an attic or crawl space losing money.

If you are not doing thorough job costing, you have no idea how much profit (loss) there is in a particular type job.

We found that we ALWAYS lost money doing straight prewires. If a customer understands the value in validation/certification and is willing to pay a premium for this then we will do it, but we still sub out the actual labor.

Business Success Axiom #1: Revenue does not equal profit.

If you want to show the client something, you can put a flier in his hand that Open House has already produced on smart wiring. Let them do the printing and you can pass it out to give the client food for thought.

I suspect others (On-Q, Channel Plus etc.) must have those flyers as well. Ask your distributor to get you a fistful.

Trip109, I must be one of the lucky ones. I have never lost money on a job. To be honest with you, unless something happens that involves damage, I don't see where you can lose money. If you are doing a new construction prewire, and your quoting per outlet, how do you lose money? If it's a retro job, you quote it by the hour, again, unless something occurs, ie; property damage or whatever, how do you lose?
I guess I'm not following you. There are jobs that I prewire that may take me a bit longer, but I have never lost money. I guess it boils down to what you have to make to pay your business bills. I keep mine as low as possible. I advertise in the yellow pages, 450.00 per year. I maintain a website, 150.00 per year. I make my own business cards that I must say look really professional.
Yes, there are occasions when I may only make 150.00 for a days work, but you can't hit a homerun everytime. Gotta take the good with the bad.
Thanks.... Bobby...

I see so many people selling "Per Drop". I prefer to put together a package and explain what and why they need the wire to different locations. That way I come up with a price for an "Operational system". When they come back with a per drop question explain to them why they shouldn't be paying per drop, after all if the outlet in their office is behind the wall with the distro and it is only 10ft of wire, why should they pay the same as the loction that is 100ft away? I have found that when you sell it as a "system" people see it as more of a value, when you start selling it per drop people are going to say, "well, let's save $80 and get rid of the phone in the guest bedroom, we can always get a cordless phone in the future if we need one". In the end, you are still making the same amount of money, you are just making yourself appear to the client as being more professional, and as we like to call ourselves "custom".

no disrespect to anyone but why would you sell a structured wiring package by the drop? we are dealing with people who want a custom installer to do his/her work. sell them a custom job. complete package not peice meal......

some of you are triing to treat everyone like a track home......

per drop is for the track builder not someone who wants to hire a custom installer...otherwise they would have the electrician do the job for them.......

maybe i'm all washed up on this but i would never sell my services by the drop...not even to a builder.

ed

ceied,
In my market, I compete with electricians. I have posted in the past that I actually do prewires that only want 3 to 5 catv and 3 to 5 tel. I probably prewire 4 homes per month like this. I am just now getting some of these builders to prewire surround in their livibgrooms on their spec homes. The majority of my market are homes with a price tag of 300,000 to 400,000.
I am working hard trying to seperate myself from the electricians, but if I decided that I was only going to take bigger jobs than I would be out of business. My typical surround sound install runs between 2500 to 8000. The biggest one I've done was 15000.

instalz...no disrespect intended.......dont try to compete with those guys because you cant......sparky makes all kinds of money doing the electric and can do low voltage at a loss and still malke money .....sell yourself and expertise you will loose some but you will win more and get better customers....

ed

So are these YOUR subs that your paying, or are they the sparkys that your paying. By your post, Im gathering their your subs, and you bill the customer for the labor.

If so, how is this different than just quoting the customer $40/drop for example. Yeah, maybe WE need $70/drop to be profitable, but if we can pay a sub less, and still bill the cust $40/drop, its all the same to the customer isnt it? Its just that you pay an employee/sub to pull the wire, instead of YOU PERSONALLY pulling the wire.

Am I looking at this wrong?