Business View Civil and Municipal | June 2022

49 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6 VA Electrical Contractors LLC is a company that was started from a group of people that were all working together at a company that was closing its doors. The company was statewide in Texas and there were some awesome employees at that company. Four of the people that were working there had worked together for over fifteen years and had developed a great friendship and trust. With the adversity and stress of having to look for a new job, they got together and discussed the possibility of starting their own business. The idea was that this company had the one asset that is the hardest to find: Good People. With that idea we began discussing the opportunity with others and the responses were overwhelmingly positive. Even the local suppliers, distributors and retailers were giving us positive feedback. So, with an idea, a group of likeminded, hard-working people, we started the business in August of 2013. The business opened with 2 employees, and we hit the pavement and began talking to all of our potential customers. Our future Vice President, George Green, was able to sell a $4 million plus job to get us started, along with a few smaller projects. A funny side note to that is that we didn’t have a payroll system, HR Department or any clue of how to get this done. We started interviewing payroll companies and they would inevitably ask: “How many employees do you have?” our response would be 2 but we will have 100 or more by November of 2013. They would smile and say something like “Bless your heart”, (A Texas way of saying “You’re full of bologna”). We finally did have one company take us seriously and we ended up with over 100 employees before the end of November of 2013. The representative called me the day we hit 100 and said he never believed we would get there but he was amazed to see it happen. The reason we were able to go from 2 to over 100 employees so quickly is specifically because of the quality of people we had in our company and at our homes. When we were looking at this undertaking, we asked what would make us equal to or potentially better than some of those other great companies out there. It came down to Quality. We decided we would focus on quality in a number of areas. First, we would give our customers the best quality we could. Second, we would focus on the quality of the employees we focused on. Finally, we wanted to focus on the quality of the support at home we could give our employees. A lot has happened since those opening months. A lot of great opportunities, a lot of great customers, a lot of incredible buildings have been built, a lot education through experience. VA Electric still to this day tries to maintain a “Small Business” feel so that every employee knows they are part of the whole team. We have been blessed to grow to over 500 employees, we have moved from only South-Central Texas to doing work across the country. ...... For more information, please visit our website www.vaelectric.net