How an Electrical Contractor Uses Data to Say No to the Wrong Jobs (Able Electric, NS)

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0:42Welcome back to the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Excited to have our first electrical subcontractor on the show. Able Electric — couldn't think of a better company to start that off with. So we have President Mike Castellani and Adam Castellani. Thanks a lot for being here, guys — our first, we have many subcontractors on the show, but our first electrical contractor. So I couldn't think of a better company to start that off with, so thanks for coming, thanks for being here. Dan, it's our pleasure. We really consider this

1:13an honor. We've watched your work, watched this podcast grow, and we're thrilled to be here today. Thanks, Mike. And so — just to clarify for our listeners — it's a father and son here. Start with you, Mike, and maybe just tell us a little bit about your background and obviously taking over as president in 2016 of Able, and just sort of what led up to that and how it's been for just the last six years. We could — it's hard to sum that up

1:40in a few minutes, but just give us some context. Well, you know, it's a great question. People ask me how I got in this business. I'm not an electrician per se. I have a corporate background. I've been involved in commodity sales, capital sales, service-based sales.

2:02My last corporate job was 12 years and we got a tremendous amount of training there. So the opportunity came up in early 2016. I was at another location under a contract and I learned about Able Electric — great brand name, great presence, great history — 1973, right? 1973. So it's coming up to 50 years next year. So the opportunity presented itself, the owner was leaving the business, so we put it together, we bought Able Electric. There were some great people there. It was just a bit

2:43of a tired company and just needed a fresh start. Six years later we've grown appreciably. One of my mantras has been continued growth, but it has to be sustainable. A lot of people can take on the big project, buy new trucks, look glamorous right out of the gate. We take a very patient approach and have grown and brought on some skill sets. Is that an approach that you've learned over the years, like in prior experiences? I find that — I made this

3:17mistake myself — I've previously been a contractor, but a lot of times it's like people are talking about how many men do you have working for you, how big are the projects, you mentioned just having the nice trucks, the glamorous look — but playing chess instead of checkers, and being really — having a lot of finesse about the projects you go after. And that's a difficult thing because it's constant decisions, sometimes years before you even act on them. Yes. You know, that's a really good point. You use the term there

3:45chess versus checkers. I think that's something we use in the business as we grow it. We're not going to chase every bit of business that's out there. We go after what we're good at and, you know, we have a wide range of skill sets, and it's what we're good at that we will excel at. There are different ways we go to market. But to get back to the original priorities, the plan for growth has to be incremental. You can't swing for

4:19the fences. You want to build a roof on your house, but if you don't have a good foundation that house is going to fall down. So we used the skill sets that we had in there, added to them, and the big thing for us is we brought a lot of visibility into the business. It's a process-driven, metrics-based approach, so we get away from the gut decisions and it's a factual, math-based decision of how we pursue business, how we want to add

4:53infrastructure into our company — adding additional resources, be it manpower or software. You brought up another point. I spoke with someone earlier this week about how many people you have — well, we've got X number of employees, but I don't need any more. I would rather have things right, pre-built, optimize other resources, because time is so valuable. We're in a commodity-based market. Some of our things — I want to be able to drive value as efficiently as possible because timelines are so stretched now. Supply chain issues,

5:36waiting on other trades, manpower. You don't need as many people if you do your business smart — that's my opinion, that's how we go to market. Yeah, and I mean, even to add to that, we kind of look at that in the office setting as well. There's a labour shortage out there in the construction sector, but that also exists in terms of finding the right people on the administrative side, project management. There's — I don't want to say a lack of skill set out there, but there's

6:09definitely a shortage. So how can we maximize what we have in-house right now in terms of efficiencies? A lot of it is really coming down to embracing technology so that we're able to manage more work, but still be able to — the way we have. Yeah, we were talking to Dalhousie University in their continuing education program last week about some of the courses they offer that have accreditation for Gold Seal and stuff like that, and a big topic was the labour shortage.

6:40Depending — I'm not sure exactly what it's like within the electrical trade — but a lot of the trades, prior to the pandemic, just saw a big drop through the last couple of years in people entering apprenticeship programs. So that gap is going to be lasting, it's going to affect us a bit. But what are you talking about — like in-house training, ways that you can sort of bridge that gap within the company structure to keep people educated? Kind of exactly. I mean,

7:08we kind of have to separate that into two things, which would be our office staff and then the field staff that we have. Really, the field staff — that is something that we as an industry have to lean into to promote the trades. There are a lot of great-paying jobs out there, and I'll admit myself that I was probably a little naive in terms of what opportunities were out there for the trades before I joined the sector. So

7:41that's something that — it's a group effort where we all have to try to bring people in, and it's not one company going out and recruiting people to join. And then the office staff — that really comes down to hiring the right people that are willing to embrace an environment where everything we do, we ask how can we do it more efficiently. It's continuous improvement and the willingness to embrace change. So having the right people to do that allows us to implement

8:11efficiencies for sure. I think it's interesting that you brought up maybe being a bit naive at a younger age about what it meant to be in the trades or what it could offer, or maybe the level of salary. And that's one of the things we're hoping our media platform can bridge the gap on, just in ongoing conversations like this — we're just providing a platform. We have great guests and expertise in the industry, but just to

8:39shed light on what it's actually like to enter into the workforce. What does it mean to be a journeyman electrician, or an architect, or in carpentry on some of these commercial, institutional jobs? And it is a great career. Sometimes people, if they're growing up in a family full of lawyers, think they'd like to be out working with their hands, and they feel that it's less in terms of status — I might not be articulating that correctly,

9:07but just to have a little bit more of an emphasis on: no, this is a good path, this is a respectful way to make a living, this is an honourable way to make a living. Does that make sense? There can definitely be a stigma out there. Yeah, there are lots of stigmas out there. But I think you touched on it — education. Going back to high school, when I was in high school in

9:30the '80s — university, university, university, don't go to vocational school. And we've heard that for years and years, and it is still like that. But we're a unionized company, and I'm not here to debate union versus non-union, but our electricians make very good money. There's tons of work out there, and electricity is not going away with the greening of the economy. Methods might be changing, like everything else, but that's not going away. The tools you use may change, but the principles of electricity — Ohm's law —

10:11is still going to be around for a generation. Someone asked me last week, like, is all this new technology — are we going to lose out on positions, is it going to mean fewer jobs? And it's like, no, I don't think so. Technology is always going to advance, but you're always going to need the right people doing the job. That's never going to change. Right. And one of the things — Adam and I had this discussion not long ago — there are different types of learners.

10:34You know, the ones that go to university — auditory, visual — and then the trades, which are tactile: right brain, left brain, exactly. And there's a stigma — oh, they went to vocational school, they're not as sharp as that other guy. But we have a lot of very, very smart people in the industry, with very good business acumen, very good technical skills, great leadership skills. And it doesn't matter if you're a law firm, a doctor's practice, accounting, whatever it may be — you still need those skills. At the end of the day,

11:15all businesses succeed on making a profit. And if you don't have those people in your business, you're not going to make profit. It's a people-driven business, like everything else. If it was easy, everybody would do it. That's right. Yeah. I think especially as a business owner, when you have those hires and you have people in those positions facilitating your company's revenue and money, and monitoring other people and dollars and material — whenever they're doing their job well, especially if you've

11:48experienced people who haven't — man, they're so appreciated. They are. And for our company, and I know for successful companies, we call them dashboards. We're very dashboard-driven. I can come in after being out of the business for two days for whatever reason, and I can open up the dashboards — health and safety, we have a dashboard, service revenue dashboard — everything is on a dashboard. We can see it. And that's what bridges the gap between the field and the office, the information flowing back

12:24and forth. Good communication skills, leadership — okay, you don't have to have it. It's inherent to any business success. One of our pillars as a business is good people. And I think most companies that succeed have really good people. Yeah. I know one of Able's taglines — correct me if I'm wrong — is "doing business differently." What does that mean? They mentioned it's a people-driven business, bridging the gap between what's called white collar and blue collar, the office and the site, both just

13:00as important as each other, the lean methodologies and so on. But Adam, can you speak a little bit about just being in operations, and sort of give us a little bit of context about your employees on the office side — estimators, logistics manager? A big thing is lead times and all the extensive specs and materials that you guys need to order on some of these jobs. Just take us through a little bit about the company

13:28as a whole. Right, so I mean, Mike kind of mentioned it earlier — it's process-driven, metrics-based, and customer-centred. For me, it really comes down to the process. We try to make it as visible as possible, identify our key team players in every process, put them into swim lanes, and then going further to that, we'll start tracking our cycle times — whether it be shop drawings, how long it takes to build out a service invoice, how long it takes to price up a change order

14:05and get our approvals. So by tracking that — it's not something we have to go above and beyond; it's built into our process — we can identify where our gaps are. Then we'll get together with our team players and do what we call a process improvement meeting, get everyone's opinion on it, and then we're able to measure our improvement. But we always need to get that baseline first: start off with it, identify our problems. So how does that make us do

14:34business differently? Well, ultimately we want to be known as the best executors out there when it comes to a project. We want to minimize the bandwidth that it takes to actually manage us and deliver value to the customer and the end user. It's something that they should be factoring into choosing Able as a partner. We talk about the race to the bottom — low price versus low cost. One of the things is, if you have a trade that is not engaging stakeholders, they can

15:06throw off the entire project. It leads to chaos — you're only as good as your weakest link. And that really goes back to whether it's the general contractor or the end user — it's something they should be factoring into their overall cost of the project and the delivery timeline. For us, it's one of those things: you want to be known as the best executor. We always talk about being known as best in class. We want

15:37people to come to us knowing that. From a health and safety perspective, we've won awards for that. We embrace dashboard digital technology, ensuring your distribution lists are all up to date, and when it comes to the processes, a lot of the time we'll work with customers who might not necessarily have a robust process for a key part of the project — and ultimately it defaults to ours. Whether it's change order logs, submittal logs, we have those things in place. So if it doesn't exist on the

16:13project, or with a customer, we're able to bring that to the table. And we like to think that by providing that information in a transparent manner, the GCs don't really have to worry about us, in a sense. And you mentioned the race to the bottom earlier — and it's one thing with the mental energy and the organization required to set up all your systems and your metrics and your processes, and then monitor them and hold the data accountable and hold people

16:45accountable. But I think it's interesting — even for some of our guests that are listening, whether they're part of a general contracting firm or even outside the industry — just the mental energy it takes to decide what to bid on and what not to bid on. Being able to catch those decisions early, where you're going to say no, no, no, no, and save hundreds of hours of unnecessary — not wasted, but maybe wasted — time. Stay away from all this. We've got some preferred relationships here,

17:14ongoing work, we're going to focus. Just talk a little bit about what it's like to manage those higher-level decisions that trickle down. Well, you've really highlighted it very well. After a number of years compiling our data based on our revenue streams — we have different revenue streams coming into the business, be it service-based, projects, size, scope — but Adam alluded to it earlier: it's not a dollar value, it's a function of the process that is so important. Because then we know the swim lanes, the

17:48bandwidth, the project manager — and as well as the projects we've executed, we know where we do well. We know — no offence to any contractors out there — but we know some contractors run their business better than others. That is mission critical. If we see customer GC-X, GC-Y, GC-Z, we'll refer back to our metrics. Okay, it's this specific type of project: a fit-up, service, mechanical upgrade, and these are the bidders and these are the contractors and subs they use. Okay, we're not going to be successful in

18:32there. We will get the job done, but is it going to take too much bandwidth from us to manage? Yeah. Are the chances of success greatly diminished? Yes. So we're very fortunate now — compound that with the sheer volume of work that's out there right now to bid on. And bid-based business is tough because a lot of the time it's a race to the bottom. Two parts to that: we do a lot of value-based purchasing. Doesn't mean our wholesaler comes in with the best price, but if they can

19:09support that large order, we're going to reward them the business. Sure, we're spending a couple of percentage points higher — yes, it could be a couple of thousand dollars more or less — but if it's less bandwidth for us to manage, it's going to reach site smoother, and we're going to use them. And then our customers — one of our more successful projects this year, we're working with what we consider a best-in-class contractor. There's no drama, it's noise-free. We've got people on there, but they have

19:47processes, we have processes — exactly, they're synergized. I haven't had a single — I don't want to say conflict on the job yet — but in terms of noise that comes back to the office, a fire to put out, it's been almost a year now. And the job just — because all the stakeholders are actively engaged, they were all selected through a value-based process. So everybody's aware of the team players that are there, and it's just been a dream, honestly. Chills when you say

20:21that — just because I know, you guys have experienced it, and other people that might be listening — but if you haven't been in the construction industry and haven't been part of a large project that didn't go well, just to have something go so smooth that it's almost too good to be true. It's such a good feeling too — when that team comes together and just starts playing as a team, and

20:41everybody's kind of humbled themselves and settled into their roles and accepted it — it's just like, here we go. Yeah. Well, it was a leap of faith on probably the customer's part to bring us in for that particular job, but we had some traction with some of the stakeholders involved. And stakeholder engagement and partnership is mission critical to success. Adam will probably talk better about it, but we — the generational gap we see right now, you can use the

21:15labels — Gen X, whatever — yeah, and that's what they are, yes, but they're labels. There are a lot of good people, and yes, some of the younger people in the business are not as experienced, yeah. But boy, are they ever sharp and eager, and want to learn. And when you're hiring and employing them — as, for example, a project manager or coordinator — it's a leap of faith. But if you can teach them a process, have them understand what's going on

21:45and the impact of what they're doing — it is a risk too, right? But you're going to see the eagerness, you're going to see the confidence. They don't quite quit, they're not quite there yet, but it's always going to be a risk. Like, I think this person can do it, but I'm going to have to take a risk and see. Well, is he coachable? Is he coachable? Right? Can you provide him the tools to make him successful? Will you mentor him? Employee engagement is so, so valuable. I

22:12take a lot of pride in the fact that I go into our office and even out to the field — the camaraderie, the laughing in the office, poking at each other's mistakes — because everyone makes mistakes daily. We make wrong decisions; it's okay to make mistakes, you've got to learn from them. I call it acts of commission and acts of omission. An act of commission is: I've had this problem, I tried this, and based on this, this, and this, it

22:47didn't work. I say at least you tried, and you learned. It's the acts of omission — anybody could have solved it, somebody should have, nobody did — that drives me bananas. Because that's different. The multiple touches to go back and fix that — that's what costs. Or that perception you have from the customer that you didn't care. So a highly engaged workforce is so important. There are two terms I use a lot. The first is construction ethics — there's an oxymoron — and NSCC teaches a course on it.

23:25Hopefully it's used. I've seen a lot of shady stuff over the years. And the other one is construction empathy. How many GCs have empathy for their project manager working for a corporation that doesn't understand what they're asking for, or how what they're asking for impacts others? We've got to get away from that. No one wants to — my father was in construction back in the '70s and '80s, and I can remember as a young fellow going out to the sites, and

24:00there was a lot of that authoritative stuff. He was the boss. We need a certain level of it for sure, but it's got to be collaborative. And that's another thing I think the younger generation will bring more of, because of the transparency via dashboards. SafetyDocs is a system we use very successfully for health and safety, and you're sharing the data — it's very transparent. So that communication and understanding of other people's stakeholder involvement and responsibility is so, so important. Did

24:35you want to add something to that, Adam? I mean, we kind of talked about it — stakeholder unawareness is something that can seriously impact a project's cost and a whole program in general. Whether it's the end users, the public, government-based, or a private customer, if they don't have an awareness of all the stakeholders involved in a job, it's ultimately going to cost more, it's going to drive up costs. And there's also schedule and delivery time impacts.

25:12There might be a mandate that comes out, and with that being said, all the decisions are seen through such a narrow lens that they're unable to take a macro approach to certain things. So you have to be aware of all the stakeholders involved to realize what is the impact of this decision, whether it's small or large. That way you can keep the whole project moving, continue to execute. And if they're not aware, that is something that costs everybody money and time

25:47on the job. Making decisions without an understanding of the impact to the overall project, and not even understanding how many stakeholders are involved — is it one degree of separation you want to look at, or two degrees? I've done that analysis before for some jobs, and you start going — just on our branch of the stakeholder tree, who we can impact on the customer side and then who we impact on our supplier side or subcontractor side — and going just two

26:18degrees of separation, you start getting into hundreds of people, and that's just on the electrical contractor branch. So if you have a dozen sub-trades on the job, that gets multiplied. And it's not just two degrees of separation — it goes down to three, four. With a supply chain that's impacted right now the way it is, you're only as strong as your weakest link. Let's just say there are a couple thousand stakeholders involved in a job, top to bottom. Well, if you

26:49have a couple percent of them that aren't engaged or are unaware, and there's not a process in place to manage those stakeholders that may not be delivering on their promises or expectations, then the whole thing can fall apart pretty quickly. And that is more likely to be the result of the low-price-versus-low-cost mindset. You want to choose partners that bring value to the project. Mike alluded to that — we practice what we preach; we will do that

27:25analysis when we are choosing our partners for a project. Yeah. Some of the topics and items we've been talking about — such great points. It makes me think of — we had Lindsay Construction on the show a couple of months back. It was Cory and Devin. One of the things we kind of touched on was: as a leader in the company on the office side, whether you're president, CEO — similar to the

27:55situation with both of you here — you just think of all the variables, all this vision, all the data to take into so many decisions. Sometimes we talked about the blue collar and the white collar side, the bridge between the site and the office, and sometimes it's a matter of just not understanding what that person really does. I know you're a seasoned veteran, but could you speak to that? Like, you don't have the luxury to go and

28:27point and say look what I did the last six months. Sometimes it's not tangible, not physical — not the way a lot of the site guys present it, right. You're thinking years ahead, there are so many layers, so many depths. A lot of people don't necessarily understand that, and that's okay — people are different. But the guys on site, it's: get it done. It's a different thing. But if we could have a little

28:54better understanding, it might — I don't know. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And the reason why I was smiling is you talked about me being the leader of the organization. And the other leaders you mentioned — yeah, it's difficult to be out there. As people, we often default back to what we're comfortable with. Adam and the other operations folks want me out of the weeds. Okay, why is this job a little sideways, or boy, we did good

29:29there — what are we going to learn there? I want that information. So getting that message out and understanding people is very important. And you talk about what the guys do — we put a lot of things on LinkedIn, our project successes and all that. That's great for the customers, helps our brand awareness. But the real key part of that is the testimonials. And it's also the guys that participated in that project — yes. It's their

30:04notch on their belt. "Yeah, I was part of that project, I'm being recognized." Tough market, tough economy for workers, finding the proper workforce. So having a highly engaged workforce is so important. Yeah, and with evaluating projects — your project was great. I often say, well, that's great, you did a work of art behind that drywall and all those conduits are in straight, and it's a work of art. And you did it four times over because you can, and that's what it is for

30:37them — it is an art form. And they do take the same kind of pride in it. They do. It's an expression of themselves exactly. I've walked into some electrical rooms and it's mind-boggling what they've done with four-inch conduit and feeders and all kinds of everything in a room for these large institutional and commercial jobs. Yeah, whatever the customers have experienced — it does take years of experience, and we need to appreciate that. And where I'm going with that is, one of the challenges I had — I'm an

31:11outsider into this business. The electrical contracting side did lower-voltage work for a number of years. People look at me differently — I don't have the notches on my belt. We're still here six years later and the company continues to grow. So that's one thing. But the metrics — the guys we talked about a little, they worked on that job. If you put up how they performed on the job, you want to see the engagement change, the body language change of the

31:46employees. In a previous life — for electricians it was technicians — I worked at a company for several years in the '90s. You want to see employee engagement. People come out of their chairs when they see their performance up against their co-workers', how this particular job did versus that one. It's very important to articulate that message back to them — what went wrong and what went right. And you've got to take out the best practices and the struggles too.

32:23And if that struggle is common across your business, you need to address it. I don't want to make it a task to constantly be communicating affirmation — what went wrong, constantly going back and forth doing that. We're not the best at it, I'll tell you right now, we're not the best at it. But you do try, and if a guy wants to know how he's doing, we will definitely show him. Yeah. Okay. It's hard to bring everyone in — it's very expensive. You know, as a business

32:53owner, I see companies do town halls. In my head, I'm calculating how many people are in that room, for how long, and what the cost is. What is the ROI on that? Yeah, and is it worth it? And it absolutely is worth it. Yeah, okay. It's tough to do, tough to make the commitment. But it goes back to that — having an engaged workforce. You're only as good as your employees, and how to get that message out there and have people want to work and deliver value. I know you have something to add, Adam,

33:25but just before you do — it just came to me. It's really interesting how you explained all that, and I think a big part of what we've realized in just having this — call it a mutual platform, an ongoing conversation with everybody weighing in from different perspectives — it's been really humbling and amazing. Because there are so many different backgrounds, so many different levels of expertise, and different roles in the industry coming together to make these buildings happen. But you

33:54mentioned earlier: not only is construction a huge part of the backbone of the economy in Atlantic Canada and in many places, but maybe here more than some places, it seems to have this cultural factor. It's part of the aura. People are constantly driving by and saying — whether it was 20 years ago or today — "I worked on that job, I laid all the facade on that exterior, that whole building there. I remember doing this. I remember this story." You know, this

34:22people do take a lot of pride in, and if you can capture and understand that as a business owner — like a coach understanding his players — if you can reach them on that level of passion, they'll respond. For sure. And it's one of those things — you drive around the city and, oh yeah, so-and-so is doing that job, this is the GC, this is the developer. You kind of know all of that, who's doing what. And it's

34:47funny what you remember. There was a project we were talking about yesterday, and I mentioned, oh, this GC did that 12 years ago. And then I'm thinking to myself: how do you know that? Because you've only been in the industry for four years. But there's just that much awareness out there for what other people have done — and for what we've done as well. So making sure we recognize that. Really, when it comes down to putting

35:18that out there — the guys on site, the girls on site — they deserve that recognition. Because a lot of the time it comes from the top down: the owner says, "oh, check out my new facility," and then the general contractor takes their cut, like, "okay, we helped put this together," and then the same with the electrical trade, "oh, look at Able Electric's new project that they've recently completed." But really, that recognition needs to go down to the guys and girls on site that have

35:48built that from the ground up. Exactly. And that's something we need to do a better job of. We've really tried to bring that forward in our company in terms of recognizing those individuals. And you've enabled them — you've given them the opportunity to be there as part of that job and help build it. Yeah, exactly. The opportunity's there, but they need to capitalize on it, or the next person is coming. Because we won't stay in business — you just don't have

36:18time. Two weeks longer on the schedule with a four-man crew and your margin's gone. Well, yeah, and that's it. And that's where we actively manage a lot of our business. We've talked about how we manage our business differently. We've got a lot of materials and suppliers that feed us. There are four principles we walk on — I'm going to share a trade secret now. Tools, material, skill set, and scope. We make sure our people have the right

36:46tools. You've seen this, Dan — people trying to do a job and they need the right tools. Trying to install studs with a Canadian Tire drill where the battery's dead. So we go best in class wherever we can. We want our guys to be productive and confident, and aware of health and safety risks. Yeah, that's a big thing. And I'll just jump in before you move on to tools — we encourage our team to come forward with solutions, whether it's something they've seen on site that another contractor is using. We need

37:17them to come forward and bring it to us. We want to evaluate every single solution that's out there to see what our ROI is. With a labour shortage that's not really going to resolve within the next few years, what are the efficiencies we can pick up? Is there a health and safety consideration? So it is paramount to us — bring us your recommendations. And that goes right down to our first-year apprentices.

37:50Right. Retention, keeping our apprentices, training them the way we want things done. But I was talking about tools, materials, skill set, and scope. If we don't have those in place, the jobs will go sideways. I don't care about the metrics, who you have on the job — whatever. Well, who you have on the job is the skill set, but they also need to understand the scope, use the tools, and make sure the materials are there. We have multiple suppliers coming in,

38:22different manufacturers. On one large project we're taking on, there are going to be — I think — nine different packages of materials coming from wholesalers. This could be Source Atlantic, it could be Rexel, it could be others. Yeah, it could be all of them. Once again, we'll look at value-based purchasing to consolidate that for that particular opportunity. Where I was going with that is, we have to manage our stakeholders, manage our suppliers, communicate with them what we expect, what they

38:59deliver. If there's a change on their end, just communicate with us. Don't hide it, don't try to make it sound better than it is. Just give me the truth. I learned long ago: don't lie to people, because you're not smart enough to be a liar. Even if you've been given the salesman's answer before — we joke: are you giving me the salesman's math today, contract math, or real math? Yeah, it's like

39:24three different speeds. You can say whatever you want, but eventually the truth comes out. That's right, and the truth is going to bite you, you know where. So that's one of the things we do — manage the stakeholders, communicate, communicate. Some of our guys, you look at their laptop and it's a tool for them; other guys, that would be a paperweight. But it's their skill set. Boy, they know how to lay things out, they have great skill sets, and they understand what needs to

39:53be done and know how to train an apprentice to maximize their resources. Because just because you're a journeyman doesn't mean you're a good teacher for apprentices. Yeah, exactly. That's actually a rare thing to find — somebody who's extremely skilled and experienced who also has the intangible skills to coach and teach. And when you do find those people, they're great to have in your company. Well, you know, you can see your ROI for five years — it might not be easy to measure. That's why we want to

40:20keep those people around. And Adam was alluding to the tools, which reminded me of something. We want to use these tools, and we're not trying to minimize our workforce — because the more work we have on, the more employees we need. Yeah, we could take on more work because we have the bandwidth, because we're scalable. But just find the right people. We also want to increase the longevity of our workforce. If you're using a lousy drill or an impact gun, or you don't know how to use it properly, carpal tunnel, for example, will

40:51develop — bad shoulder, bad elbow. The trades is hard work. I look at our electricians: the first ones in on a new build, they'll be down in the trenches putting in some duct bank or whatever. That's right, in the civil stage, right through to the end — and we're the last ones in, putting the lights in the ceiling. Exactly, exactly. And as my whole back can attest to. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's a whole other discussion — we'll need an extra

41:21hour. We'll have to go for two hours. Just for the Rhine stuff inside, right. But it's the longevity and the better health for our employees. If they see we're using the best tools — guaranteed uptime with our fleet program for our tools — it's very important they understand and see that. And some of our older guys say, "yeah, thanks for doing that," because they climb ladders all day long. Those work boots are on concrete floors. It can be a hard job on your body.

41:57I don't want to give away any secrets, but believe it or not, we're actually implementing a new tool today. Something we were approached with — a solution by one of our wholesalers. And we've actually encouraged everybody: leave your job site and go watch this. It's a demo, more or less — so you might be able to implement that on your job site. As opposed to just talking about this tool, they can go there and actually see one of their co-workers using it, and

42:29that's something that's actually happening this morning. Wow. Good segue. Well, it was an important initiative for us. We've debated this, and I actually had an older fellow tell me this the other day: the only way you're going to get it adopted, particularly with your older crew, is — you can tell them this is what needs to be done. But you're going to run into headwinds. In the trades, generally, they're visual learners — they don't read instructions, they look at plans. Yeah, and we forget that. The

43:02salesman comes in or the consultant comes in, blah blah blah — in one ear, out the other. Put it on paper for them, show them how it is. I think — in one change order in particular — there were two months of emails back and forth. Finally everyone met in the office, put it down on paper: five minutes, problem was solved. Yeah, you get the wall and ceiling, drywall, and electrical all talking to each other. "This wall's a little too narrow, and this is why. Shim it out

43:29two inches." All we had to do was all three of us diagram it — five meetings — and then after that they had an hour to themselves and talked about who was going to win the Super Bowl. Yeah. Bengals! Well, it's not the Patriots. Cool Joe — we like Cool Joe. Yeah, Joe Burrow, he's the man. But so we forget that these guys are tactile users. And I joke with our electrical wholesalers — I may

44:04be a harder sell for some of them, but I want the people that will get traction with us. And I think you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, Dan — the people that bring us value. I get a lot of "me too's": "oh, I'll do that for you, where do you need the price to be?" No, no. But those who understand what you need — when they understand, they give me a business plan. I understand the business plan, I agree, I have

44:32this much business with you. I don't need a dollar off — I want a percentage of your spend. That was an interesting thing I learned not long ago. It's a different way to look at it. I'm still learning. Understand my business and we'll show you what we can do. That's right. And that's what I think we do really well at Able — we have our processes, and whether it's a large multi-million dollar project, a small office fit-up, or a service call, we have the process and we will bring

45:03you value, and we can measure how we're doing. I'll just use an example — I'm not going to go through the whole example because it's a little embarrassing. A guy introduced me a while back and said, "Oh yeah, you're the guy that measures all the suppliers, aren't you?" He measures all the suppliers. "Well, I guess that's my claim to fame." And with me: "Yeah, don't try math on that guy." He was actually a

45:35fellow electrical contractor friend of mine. But you're controlling your business. Yeah, well, yeah. He was a friend of mine too. But anyways, so we can articulate to the customer: "Mr. Wholesaler, you took three weeks to turn those shop drawings around — we expected you to commit to four or five days. So you've impacted the schedule for two weeks. It went to the consultant, then sat in the GC's mailbox, and that was another three weeks." And they're screaming at us. "Oh, here it is, right here." So now you've impacted the schedule six

46:14weeks. Your critical path has just been destroyed. So what we're doing — we talked about the logs and so on — Adam really developed the system on that. And that's one of the benefits we have: we have Adam because he came into the business fresh, not tainted. "This is what we need." Adam went to work on it and learned the business as he went along. But to get back to that — we manage a lot of our stakeholders, manage our partners,

46:51is it added cost to us? Yeah. People ask, "why do you have that particular overhead?" Well, I can articulate the story and the value of it. And I've heard from more than one person that "you're the only people that do that specific thing." So it's different. It catches people's attention. Well, yeah, but not everyone buys into it. Right. But it's working. It is. And as we evolve into different profiles of business, different

47:21verticals we want to play in — because we're smarter about what we do now than we were five years ago. For sure. And there are more opportunities out there. As I say, our funnel versus our active bid log — what's in the funnel, even with the recession looming, is still pretty impressive. Right, yeah. And that's not just for us — that's for many people. That's a good general comment to hear on the show, because it means that there's

47:51other people in the same situation. Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about your thoughts on the current market — private, public — maybe some jobs that you have currently or you've done recently that you're extremely proud of? Thinking of like the Under Armour store at Dartmouth Crossing, the Gahan on the Nova Centre campus — I mean, there are lots of bigger ones than that: institutional, retail. And then maybe a little bit about the Cape Breton office. We're really excited about the Cape Breton

48:21operation. Of course, with anything new, with any expansion, you're going to have some growing pains. Just the new market, the culture, all kinds of things. Yeah, culture is something we never really touched on. When we hire, it has to be a cultural fit. And when we moved to Cape Breton, it was a cultural fit with potential employees and existing ones — so that made it easier. Like any company, we had growing pains, headwinds, competition. Can I ask when you opened an office? Is it five years ago? No, it was two

48:54years ago. Okay. It was May of 2021. Yeah, probably. Okay, yeah, yeah — it's been like 18 months, yeah? A year and a half. Just before we move into the projects, though, I do want to — he says that we manage our stakeholders on both sides, but we want to present ourselves as actually being less management-intensive to our customers. Right, yeah, that's a better way to articulate it. And with that being said, that's how we do our procurement. It's:

49:31okay, this supplier overall is going to deliver value, but it's going to cost us less management time to use them to deliver the same solution — or a solution with more value. And that's how we want to present ourselves to our customers. It's something we're willing to take on on our end, but ultimately that's one of those things where we want to practice what we preach. Yeah, it's providing the tools,

50:04it's a value-add that we take out and help promote — promote our customers, promote what we do. At the end of the day, we want to be best in class. There are lots of subcontractors, whether plumbing, electrical, or whatever. We just do business the way we think is right. It may not be for everybody. We're not a mystery — we've got great people at the end of the day, very high skill sets, and we just operate on certain fundamentals and principles.

50:37And that's been my background, and that's got to help. I'm not familiar with how competitive it is in Atlantic Canada as far as electrical contractors go. I was going to assume it's the same as most scopes, which is just a big, chaotic race — but so part of what you're doing is differentiating yourself from the pack. You talk about the race to the bottom and all that — just

51:07enabling yourself to grow and have a steady path. Regardless of the competition, we have to do what works for us. Yeah. Okay. This is my training, my experience, working with the other longer-term employees that we've had at Able. We try — it doesn't always work. If you try to make ribs and make pizza, it didn't work, but they're still going strong. Right. We're going to try some things; if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But you have to accept that you haven't sacrificed your

51:43base while you're trying this. The bread and butter. Try some things as you go — will that become the peanut butter and jam? Maybe, maybe not. You don't know if the jam goes with the peanut butter till you try it. Right. So just — I don't think it's any big state secret — there were a lot of naysayers when I got in the business and started doing things my way, doing things different. Don't say it's my way — it's just

52:13the way we had to do it. Looking at it from a union perspective and how a union company can compete at non-union rates and so on — well, it's just how we did it. That's a difficult thing. Yeah, it still is. And it always will be. We could have another hour of discussion on union versus non-union, and rates and things like that. Yeah, yeah. So — yeah, let's talk about some projects. Is there anything that jumps out as far as something

52:44you're really proud of? I mean, you mentioned a handful of jobs there. Without getting into specifics, it's funny — because the job ends up looking great, it may have been challenging, but was it financially worth it? Was there enough margin in there to make it worthwhile? So even though they end up looking great, we put our recognition out there for some of the guys. Maybe that type of work is what we're moving away from. Maybe we're moving towards the type of work

53:16that we put on there that went better — minimal noise coming back from the field and the office staff, low bandwidth to manage, and there may have been margin there. So that's kind of how I look at projects on our end: what do we want to take from that in terms of how we're going to shape our business? And Mike alluded to it — well, that's going to go into our

53:42database and we'll be able to pull those metrics out the next time we have to make that kind of decision. Yeah, able to compare — whether it's a backlog decision or, sure, different customers. We talked about different GCs all looking at their business a little bit differently. And as you said — no offence to everybody — they all manage things a little bit differently, and we align better with some customers. So let's just say there's a lot to bid on right now.

54:14You can't bid on everything — as much as we want to. Yes, you can. Yeah, we try to, but if you have to make a decision — and that's critical — let's just say it's two construction management jobs that you have to pick and choose between and you have an invite to both. Well, we're able to go back and say, you know, this is the one that aligns with us; they understand our partnership more than the other players. Sure. And being

54:45able to make that decision from an analytical perspective — you know, that's huge for us. We take a lot of pride in what we do in terms of our company and how we're viewed in the marketplace. That's one of those things for us. At the end of the day, being profitable is paramount. But we really do take a lot of pride in what we've built, what our team has built, how

55:18good our team is. Ultimately, making sure we get that recognition. So having this opportunity to come in here — you said you could do this all day — it's really one of those things where, yeah, you're getting your tire pumped for sure. And yeah, like I said, we really appreciate that opportunity. Anything you guys want to mention before we wrap up? You were talking about our projects — yeah, I'm going to give you a funny story. I don't know if it's a funny story —

55:46more like a story of a loss masquerading as success. You mentioned earlier a couple of our jobs — Under Armour. Okay, great retail setup — we did the Under Armour job over in Dartmouth Crossing. People will say to me, "oh, that's great," or the Nova Centre — the Gahan, or whatever — "oh wow, that's a great restaurant, yeah, we did that, oh yeah, that's nice" — blah blah blah. No context on how the project went. No, no context, glamorous right? In the back of your mind, like, yeah, we lost money on

56:14both. Neither here nor there — we're still here, so we are going to take our lumps on jobs. That's the way it happens. Oh yeah, and everyone does, right? Just avoid it as much as you can. But we mentioned our projects — we've got some hospital work, some large institutional work, university campuses. The Saint Mary's University Hub is a big project for us right now. Yeah, that's okay. It's glazed — overlooks — oh, and we're

56:46also doing Nine Locks Brewery with Lindsay Construction. You're doing Nine Locks? Yeah! Well, that must be exciting — everybody knows about that. Yeah, it's a brewery. Are you getting paid with beer? Yeah — do you get free beer? After the afternoon, we get the first batch. Yeah, yeah. That's right. No, for sure. I know you mentioned lots of projects there, and you guys seem to be all over the place, and it seems like things are going

57:17really well. We're trying to build a recession-proof company too. There are going to be ups and downs, but we want to be able to respond to where our demands are. Before we wrap up, I know you guys are Italian — I gotta ask, who's the better cook? I want to start a fight here. I'm not a good cook — I'm not either. I live well — that's right, and my mother. Yeah, so I'm well looked after. Are you guys going to get up to some of

57:46the World Junior games over the holidays? It's right in town here. Yeah, yeah, I think I'm heading to a handful of them. Nice. Yeah, it's exciting. I'm fortunate — this year it's a bit different. My daughter's brother-in-law is actually coming here to ref. No way! So he's refereeing. He's a great fellow — he's, I think, Adam's age. So we'll see him, and it's a good event. When something like that happens, the city's going to be buzzing. It is, and it brings it closer to home

58:16when you're involved with it. No, it's a great event for the city. Maybe the parking will improve — I don't know, it's pretty bad down here. I remember going to the World Juniors in 2003 when I would have been eight or nine years old, and yeah, definitely looking forward to it. That was an unbelievable experience back then. Yeah, for sure. It's great. I just want to say Merry Christmas to our listeners. This is going to be airing over the holidays, and once again, Adam

58:46and Mike, thank you so much for coming on and being with us today. Awesome to hear all about yourselves and about Able Electric. Dan, thank you so much for inviting us in. We really appreciate it. We've been watching your podcast, watching you and your team grow. You're doing a great service to the industry — keep up the great work. Thanks a lot, Mike, we really appreciate that. Thank you so much, and I'll second

59:16what Mike said. Like we say, the recognition that you're putting out there in the industry — the visibility — it's definitely something that is needed and very much appreciated. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mike. All right, thank you. Cheers! Cheers, guys! This episode is brought to you by Cook Insurance, your trusted insurance broker in Atlantic Canada for 50 years. Insurance is complex, and the Cook team focuses on delivering comprehensive solutions for your construction needs, including builders risk, wrap-up liability, performance bonds, and project-specific construction. A Navacord partner since

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