Corey here. Sparky by trade, and founder of Collective Sparkies Discount Group.
I want to talk about money you've already earned and lost without ever seeing it go. Not the job that went bad. The ones that went fine.
The 30-day blindfold
Here's the part that catches everyone, and it's why this cost stays invisible.
You quote a job in March. You buy the gear across April.
The statement lands at the end of May with a month's worth of purchasing on it. Hundreds of lines across a dozen jobs.
By then the work is done. The customer has paid.
The price you quoted was locked in a month or two ago. Often longer.
So when a price moves on you mid-job, it doesn't come out of your customer's pocket.
It comes out of profit you'd already earned, on work that's already finished, and there's no way to go back and recover it.
And you're never going to find it.
Your time as an owner is worth well north of $150 an hour. Nobody's auditing 400 invoice lines after dinner against a quote from four weeks back.
What doesn't get checked, drifts. Quietly, every month, on every line.
How most of us end up here
Almost every trade business starts the same way. Sole trader, ABN, a ute and every hat on at once. Tools all day, quoting at night, invoicing on a Sunday.
One objective sits above the rest: more work. So you chase it.
And everything you learn about running a business comes from that world. Leads, funnels, closing rates, how to get the phone ringing. Fair enough, sales keep the lights on.
But there's a second lever nobody talks about, because it doesn't make a good social media reel. What you pay for the gear you're already buying.
And it doesn't require any of the usual. No extra marketing, no extra tech, no extra van, no extra debtors.
What it costs is time, and constant negotiation. At your hourly rate, across the number of lines and increases involved, that's the catch. It's why almost nobody does it.
It also moves your profit way more than you think.
Materials run anywhere from 15% to 35% of revenue depending on your trade and the work you do. Whatever your number, 5% off your material bill lifts your profit for the year by somewhere between 10% and 15%.
Put a number on it. A business buying $50,000 of gear a month spends $600,000 a year. Trim 5% and that's $30,000 kept, without winning an extra job.
Every trade feels this. Sparkies just cop it worse.
Plumbers, builders, painters, security. Every one of us buys materials we never audit.
But the electrical side carries more product lines than most. Cable, switchgear, lighting, bakelite, power points, data. Thousands of part numbers across hundreds of brands.
That does two things, and both cost money.
It splits your spend. Spread across that many lines, nothing you buy looks big to anyone.
Your total spend doesn't earn you better pricing on every item. Depth on the lines you buy week in, week out does.
And it makes increases impossible to police. Nobody can watch thousands of part numbers.
So an increase doesn't arrive as a letter you can push back on. It arrives as 2% on a line here, 4% on a line there, across hundreds of items.
None is big enough to notice on its own. That's exactly why they work.
And a manufacturer's increase doesn't always land on your price file at the number that landed on the wholesaler. A few points get added along the way.
Worth knowing when the letter says 6% and your invoice says more.
Every month we go through members' existing spend history. We find increases on the exact same products they bought the month before, averaging 14%.
Look at what a few per cent does to your profit. It works the same way coming off you.
What that's actually worth
Go back to that $30,000. Now earn it the other way.
At a 10% net margin you'd need $300,000 of extra work to put that money in your pocket. Plus the staff, the materials, the admin and the wait to get paid.
A saved dollar is the only dollar in your business that arrives with nothing attached to it.
The line I hear most
"I just pass it on, mate. Doesn't matter."
I said it myself for years. But that's the tradie talking, not the business owner.
Except it doesn't. Even when the customer wears the increase, you've given away profit you could have kept.
Same price to them, cheaper buy for you. That difference is yours.
It also only holds until you're against someone who buys better. Then you're either the expensive quote or the cheap one working for nothing.
There's a difference between a business run by a tradie and a business owner who happens to be one. The second knows what they buy, what they pay, and why.
You can't defend what you can't see
Most owners know their total with each supplier and nothing underneath it. So they can't say which prices are worth defending.
It starts at the quote. If you're still marking up paper plans, your quantities are a guess, and so is every order behind them.
A digital takeoff tool like Groundplan gives you accurate counts by item.
Once you can see a job needs 340 of one fitting instead of "a fair few", you know what volume you're carrying into a pricing conversation.
Accurate quantities protect your margin when you quote. Accurate pricing protects it when you buy.
Where to start
- Pull 12 months of invoices and sort by dollars per item.
Usually 80–90% of your spend comes from just 10–20% of your lines. That short list is the only part worth your time. - Compare this month's price on those items to the same month last year.
That's your real increase, not the one in the letter. - Where a price has moved, find the notification that explains it.
Increases land from different suppliers at different times, and you'll rarely see them all in one place.
Your supplier or job management software won't hand you that first list. It's an export and a spreadsheet.
None of it's complicated. It's just slow, and it's first to fall off the list when the phone rings. That's why it never gets done.
It's time to get your supplier pricing sorted
Most owners reckon they've got good pricing. Fair enough. But how do you actually know?
For most of us the benchmark is a mate at the pub, or a quick look online across a few items. You come out alright on cable and that's that.
It's a spot check, not a benchmark.
The question isn't whether you beat another sparky on a few items. It's whether your pricing is right on the lines that move the profit needle on your spend. Your list, not his.
And even if it is, you're still one account, getting one account's pricing.
That's where we come in. We find the lines that actually move the needle on your spend, get the pricing on them where it should be, and lock it in through our national supplier agreements.
Then we watch it. When a ridiculous increase turns up, we step in and get it put back.
That last part is the insurance. Good pricing nobody watches doesn't stay good pricing for long.
One member buying $100,000 to $150,000 of materials a month came out $90,000 better off across the year.
If you want someone looking after this side of your business the way your accountant looks after your tax and BAS, that's what we do.
Either way, go and look. Until you control what you're paying for materials, you're pushing sh#t uphill. More sales, more staff, more hours, same margin waiting at the end of it.
That money is already leaving your business. Start watching it and it stops.
It's the easiest margin you'll ever pick up.
Groundplan readers get 10% off Big Dog membership at CSD Group. Book a call with me and I'll show you where your pricing is leaking, by how much, and where it should sit on the gear you already buy.
Author Bio
Corey Connolly is a licensed electrician who spent 10 years running his own contracting business before founding CSD Group. CSD Group helps sparkies secure better pricing on the gear they actually buy and maintains that pricing through national supplier agreements and monthly monitoring. Members also get kickbacks on their spend, which are worth much more than a BBQ breakfast and a stubby cooler.
Visit: Collective Sparkies
