Winback for Electricians
You did not lose the portfolio on price. You lost it on one Tuesday
The largest single loss in an electrical business
A full rewire is £3,990. An EV charger installation, £1,015. A consumer unit changeover, £710. A new lighting circuit, £581. An EICR, £266.
A letting agent with forty properties is worth roughly £10,640 in certificate work across a five-year cycle, plus remedials, plus callouts, plus every property they take on. It is the closest thing to recurring income an electrician has.
When one of those relationships stops, it does not stop with a conversation. There is no meeting, no complaint, no notice. The instructions simply thin out and then cease, and six months later you notice you have not been to any of their properties since spring.
Ask what happened and the answer is almost always the same. There was a week — often a single day — when they needed somebody at a void, or a tenant had no power, and you could not go or did not ring back. They used somebody else because they had to. That firm did it, did it again, and inherited the portfolio by default.
You were not fired. You were replaced by availability, and the agent has probably not thought about it since.
Why that makes agents unusually winnable back
Switching contractors is a nuisance for a property manager. New paperwork, new insurance checks, new invoicing, retraining the office on who to ring. Nobody does it for fun, and quite a lot of them are mildly dissatisfied with whoever they ended up with.
Which means the lapsed agent is a warmer prospect than a cold one, often considerably warmer. They already know you, they already had you set up, and there is a decent chance the replacement has annoyed them at least once.
What they need is a reason to try again and the confidence that the original problem will not repeat. That is a specific, answerable pitch — not “we would love to work with you again”, but “we have changed how we cover voids and emergencies, here is what that now looks like, would you give us the next one”.
The same logic applies at a smaller scale to your domestic base: the customer whose EICR has expired, the landlord with one flat, the homeowner who had a board changed six years ago and has needed nothing since.
The ratio
Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One rewire at £3,990 covers more than six years.
On winback specifically: recovering one lapsed agent with thirty properties is roughly £7,980 of certificate work over the cycle, before remedials. Against a programme that costs a fraction of that and takes a fortnight to run, it is the least speculative thing on this site.
What we’d actually do
Identify the lapsed accounts from your own records. Every commercial client with nothing in twelve months, ranked by what they used to be worth. Most electricians have three or four of these and have not consciously registered any of them.
Work out what happened, by asking rather than guessing. Property managers are unsentimental and will usually tell you plainly.
Fix the thing first, then go back. If the loss was response time, the winback approach has to lead with what has changed about response time. Going back without that is asking for the same outcome.
A concrete, low-commitment ask. Not the portfolio. One void, one batch of certificates, one property. Agents restart relationships in small pieces.
The domestic sweep alongside it. Expired EICRs and long-silent past customers, contacted with the original certificate attached, which is the detail that makes the message land.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Every lapsed commercial account identified and ranked by value
- An honest answer from each about why the work stopped
- At least one portfolio partially restarted
- Expired certificates swept and a proportion renewed
- A monitoring habit, so the next account going quiet is noticed in weeks rather than seasons
The mistakes we see most
Not noticing. The most expensive failure in this trade. A portfolio can fade over six months without anybody remarking on it.
Going back with nothing changed. If they left because you did not answer, the pitch has to be about answering.
Asking for the whole thing. One job is a much easier yes than forty.
Ignoring the domestic back catalogue. Hundreds of houses, all with ageing installations, all holding a certificate with your name on it.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The lapsed list, ranked, from your own job history — commercial first, domestic behind it.
Weeks 5–8. The conversations, and whatever operational fix the answers demand. This is the part that decides whether the rest works.
Weeks 9–12. The domestic sweep with certificates attached, plus a simple alert so a quiet account surfaces before it becomes a lapsed one.
At ninety days the measure is whether any lapsed commercial client has given you a job. One is a strong quarter and it usually leads to the rest.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Client records show the date of the last job, so an account going quiet is a filter rather than something you eventually notice.
Certificates carry their expiry, which makes the domestic sweep a list of properties genuinely due rather than a mailshot to everybody you have ever met.
And because the original certificate sits against the property, a winback message can carry the actual document — which is why it gets read rather than deleted.
When the reason cannot be fixed
One answer comes back often enough to deserve its own paragraph, and it is the awkward one.
Sometimes an agent stops using you because you were consistently unavailable, and the reason you were unavailable is that you are one person with one van and you were genuinely full. Nothing was mishandled. There is simply more work in a forty-property portfolio than a single electrician can absorb alongside a domestic round.
Going back to that agent with a promise to do better, without anything having actually changed, is worse than not going back at all. It burns the one straightforward conversation you had available and it produces the same failure four months later, which closes the door properly.
So the honest options are fewer and clearer. Take on a second pair of hands, or a reliable subcontractor for the void and emergency work, and go back once that exists. Or go back asking for the certificate work only — the scheduled EICRs, batched, which you can plan around — and explicitly not the reactive callouts. Agents will frequently take that deal, because the scheduled compliance work is the part they most want done properly and least want to chase.
Or accept that this particular relationship needs capacity you have decided not to build, and spend the effort on the accounts you can actually service.
All three are respectable. Only the promise you cannot keep is a mistake.
Questions electricians ask
Will an agent take my call after two years? Usually, yes. They are not embarrassed about it and they change contractors more often than you would think.
What if the replacement is doing fine? Then you are on the list for when they are not, which is worth being on. Ask for one job rather than the portfolio.
Is the domestic side worth sweeping? For expired certificates and old installations, yes. For everyone indiscriminately, much less so.
How often should this run? The commercial check monthly, the domestic sweep once a year.
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