ELECTRICAL CONSTRUCTION SERVICE BUSINESS DIRECTOR

POSITION SUMMARY: P&L responsible electrical power systems service directors position. Service types delivered include emergency repair, perpetual maintenance and small construction services to commercial / institutional / government / and light industrial clients. Focus has been on occupied facilities with services performed on inside wiring and lighting maintenance. Responsibilities include business development, proposal development, contract negotiation the development of client specific custom terms and conditions, work tracking/work order inspection, review and closing, administrative reporting and financial control (billing, ageing, and reporting).  We have a high integrity service oriented business with trained service quality staff, good operational support (dispatch, ops, estimating) successful history and financial solidity that will allow a capable leader to succeed in face of any meaningful opportunity.

Your profile should position you to be the general manager of 3 – 5 million dollar electrical contracting service business and you have the leadership depth to manage a business double that size. This job is titled service director because the fundamental business targets are emergency/demand service, service and maintenance agreements, and small electrical constructions, but in terms of your latitude and responsibilities, you are functioning as a division president.  The success of the operation will depend upon a combination of personality that is part entrepreneur and part operations manager. Responsibilities include business development (that is marketing work and direct sales work), and full P&L responsibilities. There are personnel management responsibilities, hiring/firing and overall formulation and control of budget responsibilities as well.

Your fit begins with a strong history in electrical service. The service business is significantly different than general electrical construction and project management business. It is faster, has many times the numbers of transactions in a given period of time, requires much tighter administrative controls, those controls must be applied daily. Even the service personnel doing the work require broader and more refined skill sets, with personality, communication quality and appearance being critical elements along with advanced trouble shooting and time management skills.

THE BASIC YOU

• You are an electrical service management professional that evolved a career in a self-performing electrical construction business.
• You were an inside wireman somewhere in the past.
• You are a strong technical electrician and troubleshooter.
• You have the capability to identify and size up opportunity for an electrical service business.
• You have the people skills and professional discipline to chase down, propose and close electrical and systems SERVICE business in the Shenandoah Valley, Northern Virginia and DC markets.
• You can present and sell and have the will to do that work.
• You are a good operations professional in a service business capacity and know how to organize, staff, track and bill electrical service work.
• You have contract interpretation and negotiation skills.
• You have the writing skills to develop winning proposals and well formulated agreements.
• You presently know how to read a basic balance sheet and perform basic financial reporting.
• You are a strong computer user.
• You have electrical estimating skills that have been applied to service work.

THE BASIC US

We are a unique, successful, professionally managed, well financed, stable and high integrity mid-sized electrical construction company.  Operating at the 25-30 million-dollar annual sales level now, we are looking to grow and service is going to be a meaningful part of that growth. We have an impressive backlog and we have many annuity clients. Even now we are using the tools of the mega firms in terms of business management, estimating, and reporting. You are a person that wants to have a very direct hand taking a major portion of our business as far as it can go and want policy and operational discretion and financial reward that accompanies personal success.  We have critical mass and history. We have the financial depth. We have carefully planned growth as a thematic company goal. It is now time for us to add necessary systems, departments and key staff members.

All the mega-firms in the greater Virginia/Maryland markets are pitching their size as a dimension that makes for a great career. For a select few combatants that rise to the top in those 1,000 to 3,000 employee firms, life is good at least in terms of the sheer money they earn. In talking to those professionals at industry meetings and events, nobody is talking about happiness or good life work balance…it’s about the money at the giants. What we have to offer is different, and for professionals looking for control, loyalty, integrity, morale and a life-work balance in addition to good compensation, we beat the pants off of the monster constructors.  

We are an EQ company. Reasonable is everywhere: There reason in every dimension of personal and professional conduct on the part of ownership and senior managers. Nice people with good minds, a good sense of judgment, honesty, patience and the ability to listen and many years of success in the electrical construction business sums it up. We have the desire to evolve and improve, not to defend old traditions or habits. We have demonstrated genuine business integrity for many years, we do work that exhibits a high level of craftsmanship and have earned that reputation, and we have been rewarded by client loyalty because of it. Here there is interpersonal integrity, and an environment in which you will be a critical and necessary part of our overall business, and you will really be able to steer the success of a major portion of the business personally.

Our business is a business that has a very open management style. We listen. There are not layers of complex rules, piles of limits or regulations and procedures in place to make every step difficult. There is a very high level of morale, professional informality, and we enjoy knowing one another personally.  Our culture is designed to provide a friendly working environment with the mission of growth and security by being shrewder, better prepared, and smarter than the competition, rather than by burning through and burning out employees or by making unrealistic demands. We support the quality personal / family lives of our employees. We keep our staff, and we share the money with our staff as part of the design of the company.

The business has limited elements of a family business, but family participation is very small and the tiny bunch with similar genome work the longest hours. There are zero free rides for owners. We do not have any extraneous “freeloading" relatives, protected in-laws or buddies on the payroll. The only two titles that are probably out of your reach are president and CEO. Probably.  No other barriers at all.

We are an open book style management company, and we have a bonus program that is defined by net profit. Few private contractors of any size share detailed financial information with management the way we do, and we have established bonus program goals we have lived up to. For you and service, we are willing to listen to your notion of a plan. Service has never evolved as it should to match the dimension and professionalism that exists in our larger project based environment. There is a great deal about your environment we will allow you to mold.

Our business is operated from a positive cash position. We maintain a line of credit far in excess of our needs. Vendors all call on us. Bills are paid net 10th and we take discounts. We retain our clients. We have strong bonding capacity even though bonded work is a smaller percentage of our overall picture. Employees stay with us because we are a better place to be. We have a team that is satisfied with the work they do, the way they are treated, compensated and they are provided with career path and opportunity.

We have put every system in place with capacity to allow this company to sustain growth under control. Our accounting system, for example, is the same system used by the largest constructors in the country, and we chose is because it is effective and can grow with us. We hope to build the service module within that system out fully.

Regarding the service business; you will find all the basics covered. We have power quality study capability, broad testing capabilities (including infra-red, breaker injection, megger, power factor, harmonic study, transient, ground fault, relay test, low Ohm testing, specific equipment test services and ultrasonic testing),  a well defined lighting maintenance program, a solid staff of long term service technicians and a good sized truck fleet. We also deal with systems service to include VDV, fire alarm, UPS systems and electronic security. What we lack is a business development leader, imagination and a good client liaison in addition to a progressive overall business manager.

• You have technical electrical knowledge. You came up through the electrical trades in the self-performing electrical construction/service business. You will be directly calling on, making presentations to and negotiating with technical professionals responsible for complex electrical systems in big facilities. You have to know those systems just short of being a design engineer to be credible. If you do have conceptual design skills or electrical diagnostic and trouble shooting skills that is better yet.
• You have experience pricing the types of electrical services we sell.
• You have to have the courage, professional discipline and personal drive to routinely promote your business. You are willing to sell. Your history includes business development success and relationship building and maintenance.
• You have been a manager and have history that demonstrates your ability to get electrical service work done through the efforts of a team.
• You are a very efficient computer user and can quickly learn and master new systems. We use computer tools and IT and believe in the computer management of information.
• You have to be a hierarchal thinker: We need a person with an extra dash of basic common sense who thinks top down and can identify critical issues very rapidly.
• You have to be a great communicator and have the discipline and skills to write quality letters and compelling professional proposals.
• You have to be strong in live presentation and convey expertise, control and authority.
• You have P&L experience, have formulated an operating budget, and you can read and interpret financial reports.
• You can honestly do what has been outlined in a detailed fashion here.
• You are a US citizen, with a clean driver’s record and will always be able to pass a random drug screen.

THE TASKS AT HAND

Promote, sell, and operate an electrical service business profitably, growing when and where growth is possible.  Getting started this requests that you learn precisely what resources we have available to be taken to the street. It might be reasonable to review past work files looking at job types and success. It will be necessary for you to master the Enterprise Resource Management Systems and you will have to learn about the staff and the respective strength and weaknesses of your new personnel resources. You will respond to past clients, demand service calls and RFPs.  You will begin to catalog target organizations and make sales calls and visits. You will learn our operating costs and estimating systems.

Here you will be dealing with a business and business process that has been in place and fully functional for a long time. Our business is not broken; it has simply never been given the attention and staff leadership depth it deserves.  While we need you to understand exactly what we have and exactly how we run, your mission is to take us beyond those points.

The big mission is a visionary business development mission right along side of the operational management requirements in the service department. Nothing makes things work better or gives an organization more improvement latitude than bringing in good quality business. Nothing could bring you respect, recognition or real control (or bonus dollars) faster than being the consistent source of the business development.

We can service virtually any power and communication system in an occupied facility, commercial application, institution or light industrial facility in the territory, so the issue of where to solicit is not a problematic issue. Understanding how to configure and sell durable long term agreements such that each move you make has annuity value is something you will need to master and focus upon. The maintenance of annuity relationships will require less of your time and will return more revenue than transactional demand and warranty business model that defines most small and medium sized electrical construction service businesses.

Examples of typical sales might be service and maintenance contracts for hospital systems, laboratories or a big university. Another lucrative target has been data centers or the huge local property developers / management companies where you will look to execute a master repair and maintenance contracts. That contract could be for power systems and the contract could be written to include the fire alarm systems and the security systems as well.

There are opportunities to be found on on-line portals, but the old fashion method of looking at where we have been and making personal contact, or calling in where we have not been for years and taking the right person to lunch can make all the difference. Everybody is surveying the Net, not everybody is doing quality leg work. Cold calling is not easy, but successful professionals put aside time and do that heavy lifting.

We need you to be the professional who MAKES things happen more than the one who supports things that are already happening. If you are a professional that makes things happen you will find that every person in our organization gets behind you in an effort to help. You find the quality work and we have the resources on hand to get that work done right now. There is no local electrical construction market that does not hold opportunity for us with the exception of heavy utility work, major OSP work, municipal street lighting and signage, or powerhouse work and even in those venues, if there are special requirements you can connect with and they make financial sense, we will look and listen. If you keep your eye on the endless occupied commercial, institutional, hospitality, healthcare and light industrial facilities in the region, we will all be successful and the business has room to be many multiples of what it is today.

Developing relationships with other leaders in our various business units and supporting their efforts is another easy way to rapidly build this business. If they (our executive staff leadership) learn that you are a sales asset and advocate for them, things will happen. You have to prove that capacity in our democracy. No leader has an obligation to bring you under their business wings; you will have to earn those opportunities.

Once you sell a job, the work must be executed and billed out. This is where leadership, management, operational skills, administrative skills and financial management skills have a bearing on success. We have good operational support in service. Making sure there is accurate reporting, control, timely billings, and that the ageing is where it should be are critical elements in your roster of duties and responsibilities but there is help there. Making certain daily work orders are closed with all the materials that need to be on those repair orders properly allocated, that the vans are serviced, truck and general inventory controlled; all of this is part of the job but you will have shared responsibilities and your operational support is seasoned.

What we have learned is that if the cash is flowing, you will be able to delegate activities easily accomplished by others and build the appropriate staff. You will have to watch and touch everything that happens in your business unit, but we do not want to have our leader get lost in the details of administration to the neglect of capture management or progressive operational management. You are the energy center for this business unit and are you finding opportunities, setting the direction for our growth and keeping the day-to-day operation entirely under control.

SALARY AND BENEFITS:

The base for this position is $95 – 120,000.00.  Bonus will come from business unit profit and a reasonable expectation for a person doing a good job is 25% salary. A great job will bring you more. We will provide a car or equitable allowance and gas card, computer tools, PDA, phone and necessary business expenses. We have a very strong 401K program, which matches 100% of the first 3% salary and stays strong thereafter. We have a premium medical, dental and vision plan. Two weeks is where paid vacation begins. We will help move an exceptional person.

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