Owlnotes.com

My official job title is President of an electrical contracting company.

The corporation is more of a sole proprietorship where I line up work, get jobs, bid jobs, manage jobs, and bill them.

Electrical construction projects.

Usually, the biggest challenge is keeping the manpower even with the workload.

I try to look in advance. If I don't see much coming down the road, I start calling people that I have done work for in the past. Most of the time the jobs just come in; people know me and we've worked for them before, so we have ongoing work.

Yes, sometimes you get too much work. If there's too much work, that's a problem, too, because then what happens is that we're not able to complete jobs in a timely manner and keep the customers and the builders happ,y because we're delaying their jobs. Then, the next time they have a job, they might say, "We don't want to use so-and-so because he's not able to service us quickly." If we get overbooked, I know a number of other electrical contractors who are similar to me, and they loan me employees.

It's all through word-of-mouth referrals. We never advertise; I haven't had business cards for ten years. It's just contacts that I've made over the years and people that I've known. I've been in business in Sacramento now since '89, so we've been here for a while. I know a lot of people, and a lot of people know me. We're a small contractor, so we don't get a lot of big jobs, but it's been a very good run.

I pray. Because I'm a trusting sort, I don't do a lot of the stuff I should do to protect myself. I foolishly tell myself that I'm a good judge of character and that I can tell when people are sincere and not. I haven't been burned very much, I really haven't. I think in my whole 22 years of business, I've only lost about $7,000 or $8,000 in uncollected payments.

It depends on how busy I am. If it's been slow and a job comes along where I don't know the person, I usually don't refuse the job. If I want to refuse a job, I will give an estimate that is ridiculously high. I don't ever say, "Hey, I won't do that job for you." That's how I refuse a job I do it with pricing.

I think two things. One, I like seeing completed projects. I like driving by buildings at night and seeing the lights that we've done. I like turning the lights on for the first time at a building. It's really fun when you finally get to turn stuff on and the homeowners get really excited. I also like all of the interaction with my employees and my customers, the talking, the more personal aspect, more than the business end.

I was eighteen years old and I dropped out of college. My wife and I were walking through the EDD office in downtown Oakland, and we saw a posting on the board for apprentice electricians. At the time, a journeyman electrician was making $8.16 an hour, and I said, "Wow! If I could make $8.16 an hour, we'd be set for life." So, I signed up for the apprenticeship, and I did the apprenticeship down there as a four-year program. I worked on the job thirty-six hours a week and did four hours a week in the classroom for four years. I passed the test and became an electrician and then a foreman. I did that for about twelve or thirteen years. In 1985, we moved to San Diego. I couldn't get a job, so I got my contractor's license and I started doing jobs for myself, and then I started hiring employees little by little. When we moved to Sacramento, I started over, hired employees and built up the business.

The state certifies you. I went to contractor's license school, and I went to a school where they tell you the answers you need to know the pass the test.

Now they do. For a long time, there weren't any professional regulations, but now, in California and in many states, electricians need to have certification. Before the regulations were set, there were a lot of guys that took jobs, learned how to do the work and moved into doing it as a career. Now you're supposed to go to school and learn everything in a formal setting.

Probably just to do what you say you're going to do.

No, I'm pretty pleased. I don't have a lot of regrets in that area.

I get up and check e-mail in the morning early. I usually get out of the house at 8:00 a.m., and I drive around to anywhere from two to five different jobs during the day and meet with my employees. Almost every day, I go to the places my employees are working onsite, but some days, I'll only talk to them by telephone. I usually get back to the office at about 1:30 or 2:00 p.m., have some lunch, and maybe go for a bike ride. Then I do some work in the office for a couple of hours. I write correspondence, I draw plans, I do some CAD work on my computer, and do billing for jobs that we've completed. I interface with my CFO, Joanne, who is also my wife, and we'll talk and say, "Hey, this guy's getting kind of behind. We need to get him to pay us," and we figure out how much to bill for different jobs.

I'd say I spend about 60% of my time in the field and 40% in the office.

I go to jobs. Sometimes I'll do small service calls with my tools. That's unusual now. My business has evolved from where I was out in the field doing all of the jobs with my tools to hiring more employees. As things slow down, I do more stuff myself. In the field, I go to the jobs and check on our progress. We look at the plans and review the job my employees are doing. I manage them and oversee what's happening.

Most guys who are in my position do similar work. The goal is obviously to have enough employees that all I have to do is count the money, and to move it to where I'm doing less and less hands-on work. I'm getting older. I'm not a kid; I don't want to be crawling through attics and climbing up ladders. I don't mind doing that sometimes, but I don't want to be doing it all the time anymore. I know a number of contractors with business about the same size as mine, and they do the same kind of thing.

Yes. Sometimes, if I have to, I'll work in the evenings and on the weekends.

The most important characteristic for contractors I work for is that they pay their bills. I like people that are organized enough to give me a good schedule and say, "Hey, we're going to need you in a couple of weeks out here" and have it hold up. So, the good qualities are organization, payment, honesty, integrity. I don't want someone to say, "Oh, yeah, we'll pay you for that" and then turn around and say, "I was never going to pay you for that!" Most of the people that we work with, we've worked with for a long time; I know them, they know me, and we don't have any problems.

I know what to expect, but it's new in that we're constantly changing locations, and the type of work sometimes changes. It's kind of routine, but it's not like going to the same office everyday. I mean, I do have my office here, but I get out and about a lot, and that's one of the things I love about my job, too.

It varies. I mean, for other contracts, we don't talk about that very much. It depends on the size of the business.

My employees make between $20 to $30 an hour, but I give them benefits, too. When someone is starting out, they would start in my business as an electrician, and the starting salary would be probably $15-$20 an hour for a beginner. If I hired a helper who was a nice, good guy who was a hard worker, I'd pay him $14 or $15 an hour and raise him up gradually.

35-40.

Maybe a little less, but I've been doing it for a long time.

It does. Right now, I'm experiencing a little more worry than I typically do, but that's the nature of the beast. That's one of the downsides of construction, and I think almost any business, is that it's feast or famine. Sometimes, you're so buried you don't know how you're going to find the top; other times, you're saying, "What am I going to do next week to make money?" Also, something that's really important is to save your money when you're making it.

That's an interesting question. I don't really plan on retiring. I could probably retire at sixty. I could retire right now, but that would probably mean a pretty significant cut in my lifestyle. My goal is to be able to keep my fingers in the business with diminishing frequency. Hopefully, one of my sons will want to continue take over the business, and I can pull out gradually. If not, when I get too old and tired, I'll just pull the plug, although I feel a big responsibility to my employees. That's one thing that keeps me from wanting to retire. When I think about it realistically, they can get jobs other places, but they like working for me and I like them.

Not very much. I can organize my time pretty much however I want.

Vacations are limited. I feel like I'm so intimately and intricately involved in how the business runs days to day that I find it's hard for me to get away for a long period of time. I can usually get away for a week. I haven't taken a two-week vacation since 1985.

Probably a couple of weeks a year, and we take long weekends. We'll go up to Mendocino and take a Friday and a Monday off, or a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, something like that, but a week is about it sometimes.

I can't think of anything I like the most. I like visiting people and talking to people a lot.

Well, not in my workday, but in my work life, the hardest thing is personnel matters and letting guys go. I really, really hate that. Having to terminate an employee is the worst thing for me. It's usually for lack of work, but I don't like worrying about whether we have enough work to keep everyone going, but fortunately that doesn't happen very often.

Staying focused. What we're finding out is no matter how big the company you're working for, there's no real stability in any job anywhere. I mean, if you're working for a huge company, there's a pretty big chance they'll be in business next year, but they can also lay off workers, too. I think there's both security and insecurity in being self-employed, and I do control it to a degree.

There are codes, electrical codes and safety codes that are a lot more strict and stringent.

Yeah, I'm not a guy that likes to go back and do a lot of continuing education, so my knowledge is pretty much rooted in the mid-'70s, but I learn new things through osmosis and through the jobs themselves. My guys learn about new trends and share the information with me so that I keep up to date. The focus now is on energy conservation, lighting rules and regulations.

Well, it hasn't affected my career that much. I think a lot of electricians see this energy conservation stuff as a real opportunity, they see it as a challenge, and I think it's an opportunity to make a lot of money and say, "Hey, this is what's required now and it costs more." I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do that without spending a lot of money, instead of just saying, "It costs more."

Mostly lighting design.

I think that there's a lot more computer interfacing and a lot more automation, both commercially and residentially, in lighting systems. In residential buildings, there's a lot more fluorescent lighting and concern with energy conservation.

Yeah, I know they will.

It's more hands-on. There a lot of schools that train for organizations. A lot of the training organizations have sprung up as a result of certification requirements. I think there was training available before, but now that the certification process is required, a lot of schools are offering other kinds of training as well.

I think I understand business a lot better now. I was an electrician before I started an electrical business, and I know a couple of guys who were businessmen who just started their own electrical companies, and they were able to build their organizations much more efficiently. If I knew then what I know now, I would probably have started off a little larger and had more managers to that I didn't have to do so much of the business end, where I could just make the executive decisions.

The most important is that they come to the job every day on time. The next important thing is that they know what they're doing, and that they do it consistently, and then that they can do it rapidly.

A lot of places, actually. Prior to certification, a lot of electricians are eligible for on-the-job training through apprenticeships. There are private businesses that run apprenticeship programs. Each employee, each apprentice, has to get his own job while he goes to school and he'll take two to four weeks out of his apprenticeship for school and he'll go to school for about eight hours a day.

"Only work for people who want to pay you." The truth of it is, if somebody doesn't want to pay, they won't.

It's smartest to do it right the first time. You don't get to do it right later.