Industries
Business coaching for electrical businesses in Adelaide
The strategic question for an Adelaide sparky is rarely the one generic trade content answers. It isn't whether to work harder or charge more. It's the mix: how much of the year comes from domestic callout and small works, how much from commercial contract and fitout, and how much from recurring maintenance. Each of the 3 behaves completely differently on cash, on the shape of your week, and on what happens when the phone slows down.
ADL Business Coach doesn't deliver coaching. It's a matching service, so the useful thing this page can do is set out the question properly and then introduce you to coaches whose background fits a business that's carrying it.
Coaches pay me a fee for each enquiry I pass on. That's how this free service is funded, and it means I introduce you to coaches in the network rather than every coach in Adelaide. How this works
What actually goes wrong in Adelaide electrical businesses
- You run domestic and commercial side by side, and if somebody asked which of the 2 paid for last year, you'd be guessing.
- Quotes go out in volume, a small share come back, and you've never worked out what separates the ones that land from the ones that vanish.
- The commercial claim gets paid in 45 days and the wages go out every Thursday regardless of that.
- Certificates and job paperwork get done at the kitchen table, after dinner, for jobs that finished 2 weeks ago.
- Solar and battery work swallowed a quarter of the year, and the maintenance customers who were there before it went quiet.
- There are 40 commercial customers on your books who'd say yes to scheduled testing, and nobody has ever asked a single one.
- The 2 vans out on jobs ring you 9 times a day, because you're the only person who can make a call on anything.
The 3 revenue lines, and what each one does to you
Domestic callout and small works. Paid fast, often on the day, which makes it feel like the healthiest work in the business. High volume, high admin, and the margin that looked strong per hour gets eaten by travel between suburbs, the quoting nobody charges for and the jobs that turn out smaller than the phone call suggested. It also depends entirely on the phone ringing, which makes it seasonal and weather-driven in ways you can feel but probably haven't measured.
Commercial contract and fitout. Bigger jobs, priced against other contractors, and paid on a claim cycle 30 to 60 days out while your wages leave weekly. The margin per job is often thinner and the total is bigger, which is a good trade only if the cash gap is funded deliberately rather than out of whatever the domestic side happened to bring in that week. It also needs supervision, so it changes what your own week looks like the moment you take on 2 sites at once.
Recurring maintenance and compliance work. Scheduled testing, thermal scanning, emergency-lighting and RCD work. Smaller per visit, repeatable, and the only 1 of the 3 that lets you say in January what part of the year is already sold. In most Adelaide electrical businesses it's also the most under-sold, because it gets mentioned on site rather than offered as a defined piece of work with a cycle and a price.
Nearly every electrical business runs all 3 at once and can't say which one paid for the year, because overhead is spread across the lot and the labour hours were never split. That single piece of arithmetic is where most coaching engagements in this trade actually start.
Why size makes this harder than it should be
South Australian businesses of any type with 5 or more staff. Across the state, 67.3% of businesses employ nobody at all.
An electrical business with 5 or 6 on the tools sits inside that 19,820, which sounds like a compliment and is really a description of a problem. There aren't many owners around you who've already solved what you're solving. The other sparkies you know are mostly solo or 2-handed, the bigger contractors are a different animal with a full office behind them, and the business advice aimed at your size assumes a management layer you don't have.
That's the point at which an outside conversation starts earning its fee, and it's also the point where the wrong outside conversation is expensive. A coach who has only ever worked with solo operators will talk to you about your calendar. A coach who has only ever worked with 200-person firms will talk to you about org charts. Neither is the conversation a 6-van business needs.
The recurring-revenue conversation nobody has with you
This is the part generic tradie content never reaches, and it's the single biggest structural difference between an electrical business and most other trades. Compliance and safety testing is work that happens on a cycle whether or not you're the one doing it. Somebody is testing the emergency lighting in that aged care facility, scanning that switchboard, and tagging the leads on that factory floor. In a lot of cases it's either a contractor who asked, or it's nobody.
Building that line changes 3 things at once, which is why it comes up so often. It gives you revenue that doesn't depend on the phone ringing, so a slow domestic fortnight stops being frightening. It gives you scheduled, low-variation work that an apprentice or a second-year can be sent to, which changes what you can hire and when. And it converts customers you already invoice into customers with a reason to speak to you every quarter, which is where the bigger jobs tend to come from anyway.
What a coach works on isn't the sales script. It's the arithmetic underneath it: what a scheduled visit actually costs you in travel, labour and reporting, what a sensible cycle is for each type of site, how many of your existing customers are candidates, and who in the business owns the conversation, given you're on the tools. If growing this line is the direction you're weighing, growth and strategy coaching is the wider version of the same decision.
Quoting volume, and the strike rate nobody has counted
Ask an electrical business owner how many quotes went out last quarter and you'll usually get a shrug and a rough number. Ask how many came back and the shrug gets bigger. That's not carelessness, it's what happens when quoting is done at night by the person who was on site all day, but it means the most expensive unpaid activity in the business is the one nobody has any data on.
Counted properly and split by job type, the pattern is almost always the same 3 groups. There's a category where you lose on price and probably shouldn't be quoting. There's a category where you win nearly everything, which is a strong sign you're too cheap. And there's a large group that was never followed up and got quietly filed as lost, when in reality nobody ever picked the phone back up. The follow-up costs nothing but time to fix, and it's usually the biggest of the 3.
What a coach works on with an electrical business
- 01
Splitting the revenue lines apart
Domestic, commercial and maintenance, each with its own labour hours, its own materials and its own share of overhead. Until they're separated, gross margin is an average that describes none of them.
- 02
Counting the quoting
How many quotes went out last quarter, how many came back, split by job type and value, and how long each one took to prepare. The strike rate is nearly always a surprise, and it usually differs wildly between the 3 lines.
- 03
A follow-up that exists
What happens to a quote 3 days after it's sent, who does it, and what gets said. For most electrical businesses this is the single largest gap between work quoted and work won, and it costs nothing to close.
- 04
Building the recurring line
Which existing customers already have testing, thermal scanning or emergency-lighting work happening on a cycle, what a scheduled visit costs you to deliver, and how it gets offered to somebody you already invoice.
- 05
The cash gap between commercial and domestic
Domestic pays on the day. Commercial pays on a claim cycle 30 to 60 days out while you fund labour and materials in front of it. Growing the commercial side without mapping that gap is how busy electrical businesses run out of money.
- 06
A second person who can decide
Which calls the vans currently make to you, which of them can be handed over with a written rule attached, and what has to be true before a senior sparky can hold a site without ringing.
Where coaching stops
Electrical contracting is one of the most heavily regulated trades in South Australia, and a coach has no role in any of that. These are the lines.
- Electrical licensing, certificates of compliance and the technical standard
- Consumer and Business Services and the Office of the Technical Regulator. A coach has no standing on any of it and shouldn't pretend otherwise.
- Anything with a legal consequence
- A lawyer. Terms, agreements, staff matters and what happens when a customer refuses to pay all sit with a solicitor rather than a coach.
- Returns, lodgements and what the business owes
- A registered tax agent, with a bookkeeper doing the weekly work. A coach reads the numbers alongside you, they never prepare them.
- Equipment finance, cover and money already drawn
- A licensed financial adviser and your broker. Whether the business generates enough to fund a purchase is a coaching question. Which product to use is not.
- The electrical work itself
- You're the electrician. Nobody in the network is going to offer a view on cable sizing, a switchboard upgrade or an inverter.
Coaching isn't financial, tax or legal advice. Business coaching covers things like pricing, margins, cash flow, hiring, systems and planning. It isn't financial product advice, tax advice or legal advice, and the coaches in this network don't provide those unless they separately hold the licence or registration to do so and tell you that themselves. For advice on investments, super or insurance, see a licensed financial adviser. For tax, see a registered tax agent. For anything contractual or employment-related, see a lawyer.
What it costs
- Monthly cadence, for a solo contractor or an owner with 1 apprentice
- $800 to $1,500 a month
- Fortnightly, typical for an owner with 2 to 5 on the tools
- $1,500 to $2,800 a month
- A single session to work through the revenue mix
- $180 to $280 an hour
Indicative Adelaide ranges, ex GST, checked September 2026. A coach's fee band is disclosed before any introduction, and engagements in this market are now mostly on rolling 30-day terms. See the full Adelaide pricing guide.
Set that against the arithmetic on this page rather than against a feeling. A quoting follow-up that was never happening, a maintenance line that was never offered and a commercial cash gap that was never mapped are 3 concrete pieces of work, and you can decide for yourself what each is worth. Whether coaching is the right way to get at them is a separate question, and the 10-question readiness quiz is willing to tell you it isn't. Every band on the site is published in the Adelaide coaching cost guide.
How the matching works
- 1
You tell me what's going on
A short form: your industry, how many people work in the business, what you want to change, and roughly what you can spend. It takes about 3 minutes.
- 2
I read it and check the network
I read every enquiry myself. I look for coaches whose actual background fits your industry, your size and the problem you've described. If nobody in the network works on it, I'll tell you that.
- 3
I tell you who and what they charge
Before any introduction, you get the coach's background and their current fee band. You decide whether you want the introduction made.
- 4
Up to 3 coaches get in touch
I pass your details to up to 3 coaches in the network, and only after you've ticked the consent box. You take a first conversation with whoever you want to, and you're under no obligation to go further.
The full process, including the 13 checks a coach goes through before joining the network, is on the page explaining how the matching works. If the business is closer to 1 van than 6, small business coaching in Adelaide is the better place to start reading.
Questions Adelaide electrical contractors ask first
- Domestic or commercial: which one should an Adelaide electrical business be chasing?
- A coach won't answer that for you, and any coach who answers it in the first 20 minutes hasn't seen your numbers. What they'll do is make the question answerable, by splitting the last 12 months into domestic, commercial and maintenance and giving each its own labour hours, materials and share of overhead. Owners are frequently surprised by which line was actually carrying the business, because a job that looks profitable per hour can be losing on travel, quoting time and unpaid variations that never got recorded anywhere.
- How would a coach help me sell maintenance work to customers I already have?
- By treating it as a defined offer rather than a favour. That means knowing what a scheduled visit genuinely costs you to deliver, what it's worth to the customer to have it happen without them remembering, what the cycle is, and what the conversation sounds like when you raise it with somebody who already has your invoice on file. Most electrical businesses have never packaged it, so it gets mentioned casually on site, forgotten by both parties, and quietly picked up by a contractor who did package it.
- My strike rate on quotes is low. Is that a pricing problem or a sales problem?
- You can't know until it's counted, which is where a coach starts. Split the last quarter's quotes by type and by value, mark won and lost, and 2 patterns usually appear: a category where you're being beaten on price and shouldn't be quoting at all, and a category where you win nearly everything and are almost certainly too cheap. The third pattern is the common one, which is quotes that were never followed up and got recorded as lost when they were actually just left alone.
- Solar and battery work is most of my year now. Is that a risk worth talking about?
- It's worth mapping, because concentration is the thing that hurts electrical businesses that were otherwise doing well. The pattern shows up as a single work type that scales fast, absorbs the crew, and pushes the older customer base to somebody else while it's happening. Coaching on that goes to what share of revenue sits in 1 work type, what your position looks like if the volume drops, and what it would take to hold a base of maintenance and commercial work alongside it rather than instead of it.
- I'm the only one who can make a decision. What does a coach actually change about that?
- Nothing quickly, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you a feeling. The work is deliberately unexciting: list the calls that came to you over 2 weeks, sort them into calls that genuinely needed you and calls that needed a rule, write the rule for the second group, hand them to a senior sparky in order, then check a fortnight later whether they held. It's slow, it's boring, and it's the only version of this that survives contact with a busy month.
- Is coaching a fixed monthly cost, and what happens in a quiet month?
- A retainer is monthly and it doesn't flex with your revenue, which is worth knowing before you start. Adelaide bands run $800 to $1,500 a month for a monthly cadence and $1,500 to $2,800 for fortnightly, ex GST, checked September 2026. The market here has largely moved to rolling 30-day terms, so ask in the first conversation what notice looks like and whether an engagement can be paused. A coach pushing for 12 months signed upfront is worth being careful about, and you're under no obligation to anyone I introduce you to.
Tell me about the business
Step 1 of 4
About 3 minutes
Related pages
- Small business coaching in AdelaideThe pillar page, for the owner-operator whose business stops when they stop.
- Growth and strategy coachingFor the business at capacity, weighing a second crew, a new revenue line or a different pricing model.
- Coaching for Adelaide tradiesThe wider trades page: quoting at 9pm, mate's-rate pricing and coming off the tools.
- Coaching for plumbing businessesThe callout model, van stock tying up cash, and moving off pure hourly pricing.
- Coaching for builders and construction businessesFixed-price contracts, progress claims and retentions, for the owner carrying the contract.
- Business coaching in Adelaide's northern suburbsSalisbury, Playford and Port Adelaide Enfield: trades, transport and manufacturing.