7 pages of very encouraging reading here, and a lot of good advice for new start ups. As so many have said, to make a go of it you need to be a businessman first and an electrician second. Things I've learned in the past 3 years:
Saving money is as good as making money, and sometimes a lot easier.
Knock your suppliers down and always have a backup locally.
Stock up on things when they're cheap or there are silly offers.
Budget wisely as there will be times when nothing's coming in ( I just had a 3 week holiday with no income and have 3 weeks training over the next month, allow for this in your hourly rate)
My rate works out between £25 and £75 / hour depending on what work we're doing (not all electrical). You can't really compare one job to another if the customer's different - some have higher or lower expectations or different priorities and at the end of the day you have to work out how to get the most out of them while still leaving them happy with the job and wanting to call you back next time. That's where the skill is, the actual work you're doing doesn't really come into it - it's the customer service.
It's nice to see people encouraging others to charge a decent rate as some of the figures knocking about are ridiculous. Out of an average working week of 60 hours (sometimes including weekends) I'll get paid for 30 hours of it with all the other crap I have to do to keep the business running. Take off training, tools, van, diesel, servicing, van insurance, tax, public liability insurance, membership to various ******** organisations, clothing, advertising, phone bill, bank charges ....................... and you'd be lucky to break even with some of the figures being mentioned on this forum.
Enough of a ramble anyway, one final point I want to make to anyone who hasn't looked into it is the VAT flat rate scheme. If most of your customers are VAT registered then you could be making another 7.5% each year for the hassle of filling in a very simple form every 3 months. Wish I'd done it sooner. For those doing public stuff it wouldn't be worth it as they couldn't claim it back but for everyone else it might as well be in our pockets!