Jarrad Goulding and a peer discuss test-and-tag business fundamentals: why repeat customers create stable revenue, how franchise partners fire unprofitable clients, and why you don't need to be an electrician. They cover realistic daily output, workflow efficiency, and the shift from handwritten tags and trolleys to software-driven testers and cloud apps.
That's great as far as having a business model that's very repetitive, very reliable, very much, you know, you know, whatever work that you've done last year, you can pretty much, as long as you're good at your job and, you know, you're providing good customer service and doing the testing well, you can pretty much guarantee you're going to have those clients again the next year. It's just getting into the market.
Yeah, it's just the tough part.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah, absolutely agree. Interestingly enough, we do get my long-term customers who've been around testing and tagging for 10, 15 years have actually said, look, I've got so much work, I need some help. Anyone you can recommend? Some of them are the older guys are like, I'm going to finish up now. I want to retire. I want to sell my work and sell my business. Do you know anyone who's out there looking for it? So it's very common to hear people are overloaded with too much work.
Yeah. Which is a great problem to see.
Yeah, absolutely it is.
And we've got franchise partners like that that might have been in for for 3 or 4 years now. And now they're starting to sort of fire some of their customers where they were in the earlier days, they were happy to the customers that are a little bit more difficult and always complaining about price and stuff like that. Or they might offer that work off to some of the newer guys that are getting up and running. But as an industry whole though, I think you'd probably agree with the statement that it is it is a good industry to be in. I think I've been around 13 years now. I don't know, how long have you been in the industry?
16.
16 years. Yeah.
In the UK.
So yeah.
Yeah.
It's a rewarding industry.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely is.
Yeah, definitely. Okay. All right, cool. Is there anything, any misconceptions or anything like that that you guys, you deal with new test and taggers as they're just getting trained up and all the rest of it, you would see similar to us, obviously. Is there any common themes that you see with people coming in that is a misconception until they kind of get in?
Until they get in? Well, the first thing is, is that you've got to be an electrician to test and tag. That's one of the biggest ones. Yeah, it's an absolute— that's a, that's, that's a false— totally false. The— I guess the time it takes to do testing and tagging is one as well. Like when you start a new job or a new process or new anything, you're not as quick as you think you should be. And I think when people say they've done— I've done— I can do 500 tags a day, you think, hang on a sec, how did you do that? What's going on? They don't tell you that they might be sitting there. Well, 500 is a total exaggeration. Say 300. They might be sitting there testing laptop computer, laptop computer leads, which means they sit there and not moving. Yeah. Visual check, electrical test, done. Yeah. Next, next, next. Meanwhile, if you go into, say, a workshop where you've got to crawl under the desk, unplug the computer, do everything like that, takes time. Yeah. So it's, it's— I always get a bit hesitant when I hear people say, look, they've done 300 tests a day. It's like, how did you do it? Yeah. What are the reasons? But yeah, if you're starting afresh, don't expect to be doing that.
Yeah. And I tell my guys that as well.
You just, you just need to be able to find your mojo, find your rhythm, and then once you've got that, you'll get faster. Find commonalities with when you're testing leads and bringing things together just to try to group your work to make yourself efficient.
Yeah. And I think there's a massive thing in that. And I think that's probably been a big point of difference for myself and for the local guys across the whole is I know when I first entered into the industry, there was still people, a lot of people still doing it now, handwriting tags and very slow or they're pushing around this old trolley where they've got to, if they are using a laptop and a label printer, they've got to plug it in everywhere they go and all this sort of stuff and very slow and cumbersome. And I remember coming into the industry just thinking, this is nuts. Because as you say, the job's about efficiency. So I know at The Local Guys, from the equipment that we use to our processes and all that sort of stuff, software that we've now implemented from our own custom test and tag software to make sure that our guys can be as efficient as they possibly can because they get paid per item. Yeah, so it's a really important thing. I've seen, you know, whiz-bang $10,000 test and tag machines which are these massive monstrosity things which look great, but the problem is you've got to cart this thing around everywhere you go. Um, even just like little things like, um, I love the idea of a lithium battery. Lithium batteries are great. The problem with it is, is if the battery dies, you're stuck.
Yeah.
You know, if you're organised, it's fine.
Yeah.
But, you know, if you've got the AA's, you can quickly whack them out, chuck them back in again and you keep going.
So interestingly enough, because we sell all the testers. Yeah, they all have their pros and cons. Yeah, they really do. So some of the larger testers, they connect to the cloud so that yes, you're lugging a big heavy thing, but The database is managed by someone else.
Okay.
The lithium batteries is the next stage of battery evolution.
Yep.
Just don't put them on a plane. Yeah.
