Flat Rate Pricing for Electricians: The Complete Guide

Why Most Electricians Leave Money on the Table with T&M Pricing

Time and materials billing feels safe. You clock in, track your hours, add up parts, and invoice when you're done. No risk, right?

Wrong. The traditional T&M model has a fatal flaw: it penalizes your best electricians. If your top tech finishes a panel upgrade in three hours instead of five, he just cost your business money. You billed two fewer hours. Meanwhile, a slower tech who takes all day gets rewarded for inefficiency. That is a broken incentive structure, and it quietly destroys margins for most electrical shops.

Flat rate pricing fixes this. It also fixes the other major T&M problem: customers who stress about the clock. When a homeowner is watching your guy work and doing mental math every 15 minutes, that's not a great customer experience. It breeds distrust, it invites disputes, and it makes the sale harder on every single job.

Here's the model that top electrical service companies - including national franchise operations - have moved to: flat rate pricing, sometimes called menu pricing or upfront pricing. You quote a fixed price before any work begins. The customer knows exactly what they'll pay. You know exactly what you'll collect. Everyone moves on.

The data backs this up. According to one industry survey, 92% of homeowners prefer flat rate over T&M pricing. That is not a marginal preference - that is an overwhelming signal about what customers actually want when they hire a trade contractor. If you're still defaulting to T&M on residential service calls, you are fighting the market.

I learned this the hard way when I charged $50 for my first marketing project - a menu rewrite for a restaurant. I was so excited I put the check on my wall and never even cashed it. Fast forward seven years, and my agency was closing $50,000 to $120,000 annual contracts for similar marketing work. The difference wasn't just experience - it was learning to sell value instead of competing on price. When you frame your electrical work as 'this repair will prevent a $15,000 house fire' instead of 'this repair costs $400,' you're suddenly in a completely different conversation.

What Flat Rate Pricing Actually Means for Electricians

Flat rate pricing means you assign a fixed price to a specific scope of work - not to the hours it takes. Replace a 20-amp breaker: $X. Install a ceiling fan with existing wiring: $X. Upgrade a 100-amp panel to 200-amp: $X. The price is set in advance, includes labor and materials, and doesn't change when the job takes longer than expected.

The mechanics look like this:

• You build a price book - a catalog of every common service you offer, each with a predetermined price
• Your tech arrives on site, assesses which task applies, and quotes from the book
• The customer approves before work starts
• You invoice that amount regardless of actual time spent

This system works in your favor when your experienced techs do what good techs do: work fast. A tech who completes a flat-rate job in two-thirds of the estimated time just generated pure profit on those recovered hours. Scale that across a full day of service calls and the math gets very attractive. Electrical service companies running flat rate properly can see 30 to 50% profit margins on daily service tickets - numbers that T&M shops rarely hit consistently.

There's a consistency benefit beyond margins, too. Using a price book creates consistency for the company to manage margins, and consistency for customers from a price-integrity standpoint. That matters at scale. When you have three trucks running five calls a day each, consistency in quoting is not optional - it's a survival requirement.

How to Calculate Your Flat Rates (Don't Skip This Step)

The single biggest mistake electricians make when switching to flat rate is guessing at prices or copying a competitor's numbers. Don't do that. Your rates need to be built from your actual cost structure, or you'll either underprice yourself into a loss or overprice yourself out of the market.

Here's the framework:

Step 1: Calculate Your Real Hourly Cost

This isn't what you charge per hour. This is what it actually costs your business to have a tech in the field for one hour. Add up everything: wages, payroll burden (taxes, benefits, workers' comp), vehicle costs, insurance, tools, admin overhead, and non-billable time like driving between jobs, stocking the truck, doing paperwork. Divide your total annual overhead by total billable hours. Most electrical shops are shocked when they see this number - it's usually far higher than their gut instinct.

Non-billable time is where most of the accounting errors hide. If a tech works 8 hours but is only billable for 5.5 because of drive time and admin, your real cost-per-billable-hour is significantly higher than your wage math suggests. As a reference point, on average electrical contractors factor in overhead to account for roughly 13-20% of total sales - and that overhead has to be covered in your flat rate structure or it comes out of your pocket.

A practical approach: if your annual overhead (insurance, tools, office, vehicles) totals $60,000 and you run 1,500 billable hours per year, that's $40 per billable hour that needs to be baked in before you've accounted for profit at all. Run that calculation with your actual numbers, not guesses.

Step 2: Assign Time Estimates Per Task

Go through every service you regularly perform and estimate the time it takes an average tech - not your fastest, not your slowest. Include setup, cleanup, and any code compliance checks. Build in a buffer for unexpected complications on jobs that commonly have them (outlet troubleshooting, for example, can vary wildly).

A useful real-world practice: base your flat-rate times on worst-case scenarios for jobs with unknowns. It's easier to lower a price when a job turns out simpler than expected than to go back to a customer asking for more money. This isn't being dishonest - it's being sustainable. One contractor who built his own book did so by going through years of invoices and finding safe averages based on the jobs he did well on. That historical data is more reliable than theory.

Step 3: Add Materials at the Right Markup

Material costs go into your flat rate too. The markup you apply needs to cover more than just the parts - it covers your time ordering, sourcing, transporting, and storing those materials. Many experienced electrical contractors use a sliding scale: higher percentage markup on lower-cost items, lower percentage on expensive components. Your materials markup should also account for price fluctuations in wire, copper, and panels, which move frequently. Build in a buffer, and review your material pricing at least quarterly.

One critical distinction that trips up a lot of shop owners: markup and margin are not the same number. A 50% markup on a $100 part gives you $150 - but your gross margin on that transaction is 33%, not 50%. Confusing the two means you're systematically underpricing your jobs without knowing it. Get your accountant or a trade-specific financial model to help you set markup multipliers that actually hit your margin targets.

Step 4: Apply Your Target Profit Margin

After you've covered your cost-per-hour and materials, layer your target profit margin on top. This is the number that lets you reinvest in the business, handle slow months, and actually pay yourself properly. Don't treat profit as what's left over - treat it as a line item you build in from the start.

Industry benchmarks give you a starting anchor: electrical contractors should aim for a net profit margin of around 20% after all costs. On a gross basis, high-performing electrical service businesses target 65-67% gross margins across their service tickets. If you're at 20% gross margins on T&M jobs, that math explains why everything feels tight even when you're busy.

Step 5: Gut-Check Against the Market

Once you have your math-based price, check it against what licensed electricians are charging in your area. Flat rate prices for standard services like outlet replacements or breaker upgrades typically run in the $150-$600 range depending on the job and market. For ceiling fan installations, the range is commonly $150-$300. A full job average, across all service types, sits around $350 nationally - but that varies significantly by region, with urban markets running considerably higher than rural ones. If your number lands way outside that range in either direction, something in your cost structure needs a second look - but don't lower your price just to match a competitor who may be undercharging and struggling to stay in business.

What Goes in Your Flat Rate Price Book

Your price book is the operational backbone of your flat rate system. It needs to be comprehensive enough that your techs can handle nearly any service call without calling the office to ask what to charge. Here are the categories every electrical contractor's price book should cover:

• Outlets and switches: standard outlet replacement, GFCI installation, dimmer switches, USB outlets, specialty outlets (dryer, range, EV)
• Lighting: ceiling fan installation (with and without existing wiring), recessed light installation, fixture replacement, under-cabinet lighting
• Panel and breaker work: breaker replacement (single/double pole), panel upgrade (100A to 200A), sub-panel installation, ground fault breakers
• Circuit additions: dedicated circuits for appliances, adding circuits for home offices, garage circuits
• Safety and code work: AFCI/GFCI breaker upgrades, smoke detector wiring, whole-home surge protection
• EV charger installation: Level 2 charger (with existing circuit, without existing circuit)
• Service upgrades: meter base replacement, whole-home rewiring (quoted per scope)
• Diagnostic fee: flat fee for troubleshooting, credited toward repair work if customer proceeds

The diagnostic category is important. Pure diagnostic work - finding out why something isn't working - is hard to flat rate precisely because scope is unknown. Many successful electrical shops charge a flat diagnostic fee to cover the assessment, then present a flat rate for the actual repair once the problem is identified. This hybrid approach is transparent, fair, and gives customers a clear decision point.

EV charger installation deserves its own callout here. It has become one of the most requested flat-rate service additions for residential electricians. For standard installations where the panel can handle the additional load, the scope is predictable enough to flat rate cleanly. It's a high-ticket, high-margin service that flat rate presents well - especially when you offer tiered options (standard Level 2 install vs. install with panel assessment vs. panel upgrade plus install).

Good, Better, Best Pricing: The Upgrade That Multiplies Revenue Per Job

One of the biggest underused levers in flat rate pricing is the Good-Better-Best presentation model. Instead of quoting one price for one solution, you present three options at three price points - and let the customer choose where they want to land.

Here's how this looks in practice on a simple breaker replacement call:

• Good: Replace the faulty breaker. Problem fixed, nothing else.
• Better: Replace the faulty breaker and add a whole-panel surge protector to protect against voltage spikes.
• Best: Replace the faulty breaker, add surge protection, and perform a full panel health inspection with a written report on any code deficiencies.

Each option has a clear flat price. The customer sees the value difference between tiers immediately. You're not upselling - you're presenting options. Most customers who see three options pick the middle one. Some pick the top. Almost none pick the bottom when it's framed next to better alternatives. That is called anchoring, and it consistently increases average ticket size without any pressure selling.

This is the structure that the most profitable home service companies - not just in electrical, but across plumbing, HVAC, and any trade - have standardized. If your current flat rate system only quotes one option per job, you're leaving real money on every single call.

The Good, Better, Best approach works across every industry I've consulted in. One agency I worked with was getting 2.5% response rates on their cold emails until we restructured their offer into three tiers. Their response rate jumped to 4.98% in a single week - nearly double - because prospects could self-select into the option that matched their budget instead of just saying yes or no to one price. For electricians, this means a customer who came in thinking they'd spend $300 on a basic outlet repair might leave having spent $800 on the premium option with surge protection and a warranty, simply because you gave them the choice.

Flat Rate vs. Time and Materials: When to Use Which

Flat rate isn't a one-size-fits-all answer, and the best electrical businesses know when to use each model.

Use flat rate for: any job with a clearly defined scope and predictable labor. Standard installations, replacements, upgrades, and code compliance work are all flat-rate-friendly. These are repeatable jobs your techs have done hundreds of times. Fixture swaps like replacing outdated light fixtures or ceiling fans are predictable tasks that lend themselves perfectly to flat-rate pricing because the work is standardized and experienced electricians know exactly how long these jobs typically take.

Stick with T&M for: complex diagnostic work, large commercial projects where scope genuinely can't be determined upfront, and maintenance contracts with established commercial clients who require an hourly rate and materials markup to do business with you. Some commercial and industrial accounts specifically require T&M billing - have that structure ready as a fallback. Most maintenance-type companies will require an electrical service company to have an hourly rate and an agreed-upon materials markup percentage in order to do business with them, so don't abandon T&M entirely.

Many of the most profitable electrical shops use a hybrid model: flat rates for residential service calls and standard installations, hourly for commercial diagnostics and large custom projects. The key is being intentional about which model applies to which job type - not defaulting to T&M out of habit.

How to Present Flat Rate Pricing to Customers (and Handle Pushback)

The beauty of flat rate is that it's genuinely easy to sell - when you frame it right. Customers don't want to wonder what the final bill will be. They don't want to feel like they're being charged more because the job hit a snag. Flat rate removes all of that anxiety. When you hand a customer a clear, fixed price before you touch anything, most of them feel relief, not resistance.

The script is simple: "Here's what this job costs. That covers everything - parts and labor. The price doesn't change once we start." That's the entire pitch.

Where electricians run into trouble is when they haven't built their price book correctly and their flat rates feel obviously inflated. If a customer can look up a rough hourly rate and calculate that your flat rate implies 8 hours of labor on a 2-hour job, you'll get pushback. That's not a flat rate problem - that's a pricing math problem. Build your rates from actual cost data and they'll hold up to scrutiny.

For upsells, flat rate creates a natural menu-style presentation. While you're there replacing a breaker, you can present options: basic fix, better fix with surge protection, or premium fix that includes a full panel health check. Customers can see exactly what each option costs and choose. This presentation style consistently outperforms trying to upsell on a T&M job where the customer is already watching the meter run.

One more thing on pushback: some customers will ask to see your hourly rate. The honest answer is that you don't bill hourly on flat rate jobs - you bill by the task. You can explain that this actually protects them, because if the job takes longer, their price doesn't change. Frame it as a customer benefit, because it is one.

Here's how I teach clients to handle the 'your price is too high' objection. The difference between a $200 website and a $50,000 website isn't the actual work - it's the framing. When someone pushes back on your flat rate pricing, you're not selling outlet installation, you're selling 'this prevents electrical fires and increases your home value by bringing everything to code.'

How to Handle Permits and Inspection Costs in Your Flat Rate

This is a section most flat rate guides skip, and it creates real problems when electricians hit permit requirements mid-job. Permits need to be in your pricing system from the start, not treated as a surprise add-on after the customer has already approved a price.

Here's the approach that works: build permit costs into the flat rate for any job that commonly requires permitting in your area. For jobs where permit requirements vary significantly by municipality, have a clear line item in your quote presentation labeled something like "permit fee (varies by municipality - your tech will confirm before work begins)." That sets expectations without locking you into a wrong number.

Permit fees for electrical work can run anywhere from $75 to $900 depending on job size and location, so for larger jobs like panel upgrades or full rewires, the permit cost alone can be a significant line item. Burying it in your flat rate on high-variation jobs is risky. Surface it, explain it, and let your transparency work for you rather than against you.

The same logic applies to inspection fees and re-inspection costs on jobs where first-time approval isn't guaranteed. Build your system so these things get addressed upfront, not after the invoice has been sent.

Getting Your Team to Actually Use the System

One of the most common fears about switching to flat rate is tech resistance. Electricians are skilled tradespeople, not salespeople - and a flat rate system requires them to quote prices confidently and handle customer questions on the spot. That's a different skill set than running wire.

The fix is training, not forcing. Your techs need to understand the why: flat rate protects the company's margins, which protects their jobs. It also incentivizes efficiency - if your shop shares performance bonuses when flat rate jobs come in under estimated time, your best techs make more money, not less. Align the incentives and the resistance disappears.

Consistency is also critical. If two different techs quote two different prices for the same job, you have a problem - with your customers and your reputation. A standardized price book that everyone uses eliminates that. No more "well, the other guy said it would cost less." One price, every time, for every tech on your team.

When you're scaling your shop and bringing on new techs, flat rate is actually easier to train than T&M. A new hire can learn to work from a price book faster than they can learn to accurately estimate a custom T&M quote on a complex job. Your price book becomes an onboarding tool as much as a pricing tool. If you need a framework for systemizing your team and getting consistent output across hires, the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint walks through the exact operational structure I use across my own businesses.

Getting your team to adopt any new system requires testing and accountability. When I work with agencies on their sales processes, I have them test in small batches - send 50 emails with one approach, measure the results, then adjust. One client was struggling with team adoption until we implemented this: every technician tracks their close rate by price tier (Good/Better/Best) weekly, and we review the numbers every Monday. Within three weeks, the technicians who were resistant became the biggest advocates because they could see their average ticket jumping from $340 to $670. When your team sees their own commission checks grow, they'll use the system.

Building Your Price Book: Digital vs. Paper

Plenty of electrical shops started with a printed binder - a physical flat rate pricing book listing all their services and prices. It works. But it has real limitations: it gets outdated when material costs change, techs have to lug it to every job, and there's no integration with your quoting or invoicing tools. Physical price books inevitably become grimy and often contain outdated information. Just putting one together properly takes hundreds of hours.

Digital flat rate software solves most of those problems. Techs can pull up pricing on a tablet, adjust for optional add-ons, show the customer a professional quote on screen, and collect a signature - all before picking up a tool. Better yet, when copper prices spike or you adjust your labor rate, one update in the software pushes new prices to every tech instantly.

The best setups integrate your flat rate pricing directly with your invoicing and job management workflow. When pricing flows automatically into estimates and invoices, your admin time drops dramatically and billing errors disappear. That's where field service software like Housecall Pro or ServiceTitan earns its keep for electrical shops doing real volume. Some platforms also include dynamic pricing automation - rules that automatically update your pricing when material costs and labor rates change, so your price book stays accurate without manual intervention every time copper moves.

If you're not ready to invest in full field service software yet, even a simple spreadsheet-based price book that your team accesses via a shared Google Sheet is vastly better than nothing. The key is one single source of truth that everyone uses. Standardize the document first; upgrade the tooling later.

Tracking Key Metrics After You Switch to Flat Rate

Switching to flat rate isn't a one-time event. It's a system that needs to be monitored and refined over time. These are the numbers you need to track from day one:

• Average ticket size: Your flat rate system should push this number up compared to T&M. If it isn't moving, your Good-Better-Best presentation needs work or your tech training needs work - one of the two.
• Job profit per task type: Break your flat rate jobs down by category (outlets, panels, lighting, EV installs, etc.) and look at margin by category. Some categories will be more profitable than others. That tells you where to route your marketing spend.
• Callback rate: If jobs done at flat rate are generating more callbacks for warranty or follow-up issues, your time estimates may be too tight and techs are rushing. Address it before it becomes a reputation problem.
• Close rate on presented quotes: Flat rate should improve your close rate because customers get a clear number upfront. If your close rate is low, the problem is usually price (too high for your market) or presentation (techs not framing the value properly).
• Price book compliance: Are all your techs actually using the book, or are some still quoting from memory? If compliance is low, you don't have a flat rate system - you have a flat rate suggestion that people ignore.

Review these metrics at minimum every quarter. The price book is a living document and the performance data tells you where to update it.

I'm obsessive about tracking metrics because that's how you know what's actually working. In my consulting work, I have clients track three core numbers: open rates (target: 75%+), response rates (target: 30-40%), and conversion to meetings (target: 15%). For electricians switching to flat rate, your equivalent metrics are: quote acceptance rate, average ticket size, and revenue per technician per day. One client I worked with had a 1.1% bounce rate and 4.98% response rate after we dialed in their tracking - they knew exactly which messages worked. If you're not tracking your flat rate acceptance rate by service type and by technician, you're flying blind and leaving money on the table.

Marketing Your Flat Rate System as a Competitive Advantage

Here's something most electricians miss: your flat rate pricing model is a marketing asset, not just an operational tool. In a market full of contractors who give vague estimates and deliver surprise invoices, "upfront flat rate pricing - you know the price before we start" is a genuine differentiator.

Put it on your website. Put it in your Google Business Profile description. Train your phone staff to lead with it when booking calls: "We quote you a flat rate upfront - no surprises on your final bill." That one line builds trust before you've set foot on site.

Word-of-mouth also spreads faster for flat rate shops. When a customer tells their neighbor "they gave me a flat price before they started and that's exactly what I paid," that's a referral machine. Compare that to: "they billed me for 4 hours and I'm not sure what half of it was for."

If you're running any outbound to land commercial accounts or property managers - where repeat work is the goal - a documented flat rate pricing structure makes you look like a serious, professional operation rather than a solo tech winging it. That's a closer on bigger contracts. I've covered how to structure those outbound conversations in depth in the Discovery Call Framework - the same principles apply whether you're selling electrical services or any other B2B offering.

Beyond word-of-mouth and inbound, consider adding flat rate pricing transparency to your review request flow. After a job closes, ask the customer specifically to mention the upfront pricing if they felt good about it. "No surprise bill" and "told me the price before starting" are phrases that show up in reviews and directly influence how new customers decide between you and a competitor. You can engineer that content into your review strategy.

Marketing your flat rate system is easier than you think. One of my clients in the service industry added a simple P.S. to every email: 'Google [Company Name] and look at their reviews to see our latest work.' That social proof line alone improved their response rates. For electricians, put your flat rate pricing right on your homepage with your most common jobs listed out. I learned from testing thousands of cold emails that transparency builds trust - campaigns with pricing on the website converted 30-40% better than those that made prospects ask. When a homeowner sees 'Outlet installation: $180 flat rate, no surprises' on your site, you've already handled their biggest objection before they even call.

Flat Rate Pricing for Electricians: Common Questions Answered

What if the job turns out to be more complex than expected?

This is the most common objection from electricians who are skeptical about flat rate. The answer is: your flat rate price book should account for this. You build your time estimates based on average or slightly conservative scenarios - not best case. When a job genuinely changes in scope (you open up the wall and find knob-and-tube wiring where there should be modern cable, for example), that's a different job than the one quoted. Most flat rate systems include provisions for presenting a new flat rate quote when the scope materially changes. Your initial quote covered the original scope; the new work gets its own quote. Document it clearly and get customer approval before proceeding.

Do customers push back on flat rate pricing?

Some do, but far fewer than most electricians expect. Customers who push back are almost always reacting to a price that feels high relative to what they expect. That is either a pricing math problem (your rates are actually too high for your market) or a framing problem (the tech didn't explain the value). The data on customer preference consistently shows that most homeowners want to know the total cost before work begins - that's the whole appeal of flat rate from the customer's perspective.

Can I use flat rate pricing for bigger jobs like panel upgrades?

Yes, with the right scope definition. Panel upgrades from 100A to 200A are actually excellent flat rate candidates because the scope is well-defined and experienced electricians have done them hundreds of times. The variables are manageable: you know roughly what it takes, you know the materials, and you can build your pricing to cover the occasional slower job. Full rewires are harder to flat rate because scope varies enormously by house age and condition - those are usually better handled as scoped estimates or T&M with a cap.

What about emergency or after-hours pricing?

Emergency service calls typically run at 1.5 to 2 times standard rates regardless of whether you use flat rate or T&M. If you offer emergency service, build an emergency flat rate modifier into your price book - a simple multiplier applied to your standard prices for after-hours or weekend calls. Make that modifier clear to customers when they book the emergency call, not when they see the invoice.

Common Flat Rate Mistakes to Avoid

• Copying competitor prices without doing your own cost math. Their overhead is not your overhead. Their labor costs are not your labor costs. Build from your own numbers.
• Never updating the price book. Material costs change. Your hourly cost changes as you add staff and overhead. Review and update your flat rates at minimum twice a year.
• Applying flat rate to diagnostic work. Don't quote a flat repair price before you know what you're repairing. Charge a flat diagnostic fee, identify the problem, then quote the fix.
• Setting prices too low to compete. When electricians compete on price rather than value, they get into a race to the bottom - lowering prices to a level that makes profitability impossible. Compete on transparency, speed, and reliability instead.
• No upsell options in the price presentation. Flat rate creates a natural tiered offer. If you're only presenting one option, you're leaving revenue on the table.
• Confusing markup and margin. A 100% markup is a 50% margin. If you're setting markups without understanding what margin they actually produce, you're likely underpriced.
• Letting one tech quote differently from the book. One deviation becomes a precedent. Enforce price book consistency as a non-negotiable standard, not a guideline.

Finding More Electrical Jobs to Apply Your New Pricing To

Getting your flat rate system dialed in is step one. Getting more jobs flowing through it is step two. If you're doing outbound to property managers, real estate investors, or commercial clients - which is where the real volume is - you need a reliable way to build those prospect lists.

For local electrical contractors, this Google Maps scraper is a practical tool for pulling contact data on property management companies, commercial real estate firms, and local businesses in your service area. You can filter by business type, location, and size to build a targeted outreach list fast - no manual searching required.

If you want to reach real estate investors who are buying and renovating properties - a high-value electrical client type - a property search tool can surface property ownership records and help you identify active buyers in your market. Investors doing multiple renovations per year are exactly the kind of repeat client that makes flat rate volume attractive.

You can also use ScraperCity's Angi scraper to find contractors and property owners who are already spending on home services - a warm signal that they hire out trade work. Once you have your list, pair it with a solid cold email sequence to get meetings booked. The Agency Contract Template here is useful for locking in those commercial relationships once you've closed them.

Pricing strategy gets you more money per job. Outbound gets you more jobs. Both levers together is how electrical shops actually scale.

The Bottom Line

Flat rate pricing for electricians isn't a gimmick. It's the pricing model that the most successful electrical service businesses use - from solo operators running tight residential service routes to multi-truck shops doing commercial maintenance contracts. It protects your margins, removes billing disputes, incentivizes your best techs, and makes the sale easier on every single job.

Build your price book from real cost data. Train your team to present it confidently. Add Good-Better-Best options to every applicable call. Market it as a differentiator. Update it at least twice a year. Track your numbers so you know what's working and what needs adjustment. And plug it into a workflow that automates quotes and invoices so your admin burden doesn't scale with your job volume.

The contractors who have done this well aren't smarter than you. They just made the commitment to build the system instead of winging it job by job. That's all this is. Build the system, run the system, improve the system. That's it.

If you want help building the sales and outbound infrastructure on top of your new pricing structure - landing the commercial accounts and property managers who generate real recurring volume - Galadon Gold is where I work through this kind of strategy directly with contractors and business owners.