Day in life of The Local Guys - Test and Tag Franchise Partner

Yeah. So a typical morning looks like we base it around Sunny to begin with for the start of the day. So basically we will be getting him ready for childcare. While Stacy's getting him ready, I'm making myself a coffee. I'll check the computer, see what jobs I've got on for the day and then make sure I've got the right ppe, any equipment that I need, stock or anything like that for the day, take him off to childcare and then I'm off to my first job. So once we found out that Stacy was pregnant and after working so many hours on hospitality, we sat down and had the chat and said, this isn't going to be sustainable. How are we going to be able to keep working six days a week and long hours and available on the seventh day and all the rest of it? So we, we had the hard chat and said, look, we've got this other thing that's been sitting here the whole time that's been fantastic for us. As far as the test and tag, why don't we just focus on that? We know that it gives us the quality of life. It was giving us great work life balance. What are we doing mucking around with these other things? Let's just do what we know and what we've been doing for years. So we decided that we want to go 100% into the electrical test and tagging and that's honestly been the absolute best thing for us possible.

There's so many benefits to Jarra being in test and tag full time now. You know, the work life balance especially is just, you know, second to none now. You know, before test and tag, both Jared and I were in the restaurant industry and, you know, we were doing six to seven day weeks. You know, the hours were long, you know, and we were always on call to the restaurant. You know, even on the weekend, towards the end of us being in the restaurant, you know, I was nine months pregnant behind the counter, you know, doing chips and making burgers and, you know, it was hard. It was, you know, it was really hard. And we sort of had the chat to each other and we sort of thought, how are we going to do this when we have a family? Like, we want to spend time with family, we want that work life balance. So we thought, you know what we're going to do, test and tag 100% full time. So that's what we did. And we honestly, it's been the best decision we made. Jarrod can take Sunny. We've got two young kids, so he can Take Sunny to childcare in the morning. If he wants to come home at 3 o' clock and pick him up at 3:30, he can do that, you know, and we're not working weekends, he's not working weekends. It's honestly all round, it's just so much better for our family.

So we just dropped off Sunny at childcare, just off to our first client. Now I like to get there and book in my first job at 10:00am that gives me the opportunity to spend some time with the kids in the morning and then I can head off to the first site and miss PKR traffic. And that's the thing I love about electrical test and tagging is the clients are more than happy to work. I mean they don't mind what time I start. As long as I book in with them at whatever time I want to sort of do it on, then they're completely fine with that. So I mean, yeah, that's why I love the work life balance. So a typical client for electrical test and tagging, well, we only deal with commercial, so we don't deal with residential at all. So a typical client might be an office at school, university, hotels, your local hairdresser, all the way up to multi site large factories. So it really varies every single day. So the great thing about test and tag is it's either every three months, every six months, every 12 months, depending on the type of client and the environment. So you know, we're quite often going out to see guys in the construction industry every three months or other people every six months. So you know, you really build up relationships with your clients as well. So you know, it gave us a lot more security in what we were doing as well. I guess if you've got a job, you've only got one boss. Because we had 100 plus clients. It gave us a lot more security in the fact that if we had an issue or a business didn't do well over here and they couldn't take up our services anymore, we had 99 other businesses that we were working with. So from a security perspective we feel a lot more secure in what we're doing now than anything we were doing in the past. Some of the sites that we get to visit is where the general public and most people don't ever get to visit because you get to go behind the scenes for a lot of businesses in a lot of places. So you know, we've been everywhere from the federal police to where they tap phone calls, to concerts, behind the scenes showgrounds, out to remote aboriginal communities we see so much diversity every single day. It's really cool to see how much interesting places that you actually get to visit and to get those things done and build relationships with clients in so many different industries. It's one of the things that I absolutely love about it and why I haven't been able to get out of the industry for over 10 years and don't intend on getting out of the industry. So our first client today is an office. I've been servicing them for about five years now. We're going to be going out and doing electrical test and tagging, RCD testing, which is safety switches, fire extinguisher testing, testing and emergency exit lights. So we've got a real range of things that we're going to be testing today. I've gotten to know this client quite well over the last five years. So that's one of the things that like I love most about the test and tag side as well is the fact that you do build up relationships with people. Oh. It sort of says once you've sort of built up your client base and you've got one year's worth of work, you should have about 10 years worth of work. Plus, as long as you notify the clients of when your testing's due and you look after them then. And we've got a very low drop off rate, which, you know, repeat business is fantastic. It just means that you don't have to be out finding new clients all the time. You can just continue to service your existing clients, which is great. We do the electrical test and tagging and RCD testing like a lot of companies. But we also do the fireside as well. So fire extinguisher testing, fire blankets, emergency exit lights. And that's great because it helps the client out. We're a one stop shop where we can do that fireside as well as the test and tag so they don't have to have multiple contractors out doing that stuff as well. As for from the bottom line perspective as a business model, it works really well as well because not only can we go out there and test the electrical stuff, we can also go out and test the fire stuff and then that brings you into the sales side as well. So you know, every five years you've got to replace fire extinguishers, so will replace those and there's the profit margins that come from that as well. So yeah, it all adds up. So the process of electrical test and tagging is there's really three parts to it. So the first part is a visual Inspection of the appliance, making sure that there's no wear and tear, scuff marks, cut marks, anything visually essentially that looks wrong on it. Any burn marks. There's a long list of things that we'll check for to make sure that it's passed visually. We then move on to an electrical test where we plug the appliance into our portable appliance tester and it runs a series of tests to make sure that it's safe electrically. And that's from my aspect, that's just as simple as just pushing a button really. And then finally, if it's passed both of those tests or if it's failed, we'll do the reporting side of it. So marking where the appliance was, whether it's passed or failed, assigning it an asset number, and then labeling the appliance that it's passed and then moving on to the next one. So you don't actually need to be an electrician to join the test and tag industry. Prior to me getting into electrical test and tag, I didn't have any. I didn't know what test and tag was, to be completely honest with you. I had no electrical background at all. I joined 10 years ago when I did my first course and I'd had a bunch of different careers previously, so I would have been about 30 years old when I joined. So I was later in life and that was the great thing. The course was only two weeks and I was up and running, so I didn't have to have some four year apprenticeship or anything like that, which was great. I think work life balance is definitely one of the things that I enjoy the most. The ability, you know, I've worked in industries before where it's so demanding and weekends and after hours and nights and stuff like that. So, you know, having an industry where it's Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, I used to start at 10 and finish at 3, so that way I'd miss peak hour traffic. And then I was home to spend time with the kids and stuff like that. So that's definitely one of the things that I enjoy about it most. So we're just heading out to our second client for the day, which will be our last job for the day. So this is a relatively new client. It's a retail store, it's a health food store. So this one will be just for electrical test and tagging. So I won't need to carry all my kit like I did at the last job. It'll just be my backpack with my test and Tag gear. So I've just received a lead, so I'm going to send off a quote to a potential client. I like to try and get it out as fast as possible. We've got a two hour window that we're able to see it, get them out. So I try and make a game of it to try and get it out within the first couple of minutes, just to give myself the best chance of winning the quote possible. So test and tag is definitely necessary, not only from a compliance aspect, the government are getting a lot stricter and stricter on it every year, as well as insurance companies, but also from a safety aspect as well. You know, a lot of the stuff that we do see is common sense. Stuff like the stuff that will fail on a visual aspect is common sense. But when you get out there and you see some of the places that I've seen, you start to realise that common sense isn't actually that common. And some of the things that we've seen. I remember going into a school, a really remote school, and they had all of these industrial. It was in the school kitchen and they had a lot of all of these industrial fridges and freezers and they had basically the whole kitchen which were all these appliances were drawing huge amounts of power, all running through one power board, all into one double adapter. And the double adapter was basically like glowing red. And we were out there during the school holidays, so there was no kids out there. And I think like another few days of this thing happening and it would have been easily looking at a fire. So they're the sort of things that we're going through sites and we're looking out for. And it's quite often, you know, you're not expecting a teacher or someone else to be going through and thinking of the site in that mindset. And that's why important to have that person that's trained up and is deemed to be a competent person within electrical safety to be able to look through it and assess it through those eyes. So, yeah, it's definitely extremely important for all businesses to be getting it done. So I think some of the worst things I've seen doing test and Tag for over 10 years now are probably when people try and do repair jobs themselves. People think that they know how to fix something or how to rewire something and that can be the biggest cause of concern. I've had all sorts of ones where I've had vacuum cleaners where people have the plug tops come off, so they've tried to rewire it themselves. And they've just taped it up with normal clear tape. They've wired it incorrectly. There's fray wires coming out of it. And the concern is, you know, especially in the workplace, is that, you know, they get called off to this, that the other. And then they're leaving this appliance there that's unsafe. Someone else goes to plug it in, doesn't know that they've had someone try and, you know, incorrectly repair it, and all of a sudden someone gets electrocuted. We've had in schools, it might be someone who. A teacher that thinks they're quite handy and they go to try and repair something. We've had that situation and they've rewired it back up again, wired the polarity around the incorrect way, and that's gone back into use in a tech room. If we hadn't have pulled that one out of circulation, essentially because the polarities around the wrong way, the safety switch wouldn't work. And it could potentially be the loss of life of the student. So, yeah, there's some pretty bad ones that I've seen. The list is pretty long, to be honest. So one of the things I love about the test and tag industry is that you don't have to carry a lot of stock. It's not like, you know, some other industries where you might have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stock. All we've really got is just some tags and even just like our fire extinguishers and things like that, we pick up as we need them. So, you know, we don't have to worry about stock going off or bad, or having to have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stock. I reckon most people carry maybe $2,000 of stock and that would be really stocked up. So, yeah, no, it's really convenient from that side. So now we're finished, we're going to head home and we'll send our reporting to get typed up, get a certificate of compliance typed up as well. So we can pass both of those documents onto the client. So they can hang the certificate of compliance up to show that they've done the right thing and getting test and tag done. They've got full report which has every item that we've tested, the locations of those items, whether they've passed or failed. And then we just send that along with the invoice and then we won't see the client again for 12 months time when they're due next time.

So at the moment I'm just working on some invoicing. So basically, Jarrod's come home from work and he's given me some invoices that need doing. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes of my day, but I really like doing it because, you know, it gets me not away from the kids because, you know, don't want to say that I love being a mum, but, you know, just something different for me to do. And I like to still be involved in the business and just as we've gotten busier as well, I'm just, you know, it's nice for me to be able to help him out, you know, Jarrod can spend some time with the kids while I get the invoicing done.

But, yeah, I also love the fact that I'm on the road by myself. When we're at home and we've got two young kids, there's lots of family time of craziness and all the rest of it. So it's great to have that time where I can be out and I can put my own radio station on and I can relax throughout the day and then I'm going out to different sites every single day, dealing with clients that I might have dealt with for years. So it's an enjoyable industry. The fact that as well, it's not a stressful industry and it's not a demanding industry. It's not like if something breaks down at 3am in the morning, I've got to be out there at 3:15am as long as I get the work done in the month that the client's tags are due, then they're happy with that. So I can plan my family life or my personal life around that, which is great. So if we want to have time off and go away in our caravan, we can do that. We just book it out. And I just don't take any jobs on through that time and then I just make them up before or after. So, yeah, that's one of the things that's fit into our family life so well. And why I definitely, you know, couldn't see myself ever leaving the industry because I just wouldn't want to give those things up. The profit margins are really high in test and tag. I mean, our only real expenses is, you know, tags, which are essentially stickers, fuel and then my time, really. So, you know, coming from the hospitality industry, the expenses were hugely high, labour was hugely high, rents were hugely, really high. We don't have those concerns in the test and tag industry, which is fantastic. You know, we're not. We don't have a big loan, we don't have anything like that. So it's just a lot less pressure, and it just makes us, you know, if things happen like, you know, Covid or anything like that. It does. We can weather those storms so much easier than, you know, in another type of industry where, you know, it might be the end of that business.