Before I moved to the Spokane area, there was a local practice for bidding jobs.  When the project plans had been created they would be sent to the supply houses so that they could do a “take off” of material needed for the project.  Any contractor wanting to make a bid on the project would get the cost list of the material from a supply house and work up their bid for the job.

Depending on how often and how much each contractor purchased from the supply house, their price could differ from one contractor to another.  As a consequence the number of electrical contractors bidding on the larger jobs decreased.  Larger purchasers received a greater deduction on their price list and the smaller purchasers could not be competitive.

Even on small jobs, I would sometimes give a bid to a General Contractor and he would “shop it around” to other electrical contractors.  Then he would come back to me and say, “The job is yours if you will do it for this amount of money.”

Of course this would guarantee that you would get the job, but it would also guarantee that you would lose money.

I have found that your best bet is to have loyal customers that know and like your work, your prices, and your trustworthiness.  You can imagine the difficulty a new business would have getting established in an area.

A government contract is more regulated, so it would be good to get a government contract to help get a business established.

Sometimes a company would lose money steadily until they got a government contract. They would make money and get back on their feet.  Then they would lose money again until they got another government contract.

One of my friends had worked at a supply house and gave one of the electrical contractors a real good material price on a project.  The contractor didn’t come back to get the material for the job and my friend wondered what had happened.

Later, he saw the contractor and asked him about the job.

The contractor responded; “Your price was the best, Bill, but I threw in enough money to get a new pick-up and didn’t get the job.”

I had been working for one particular General Contractor for awhile, when he decided to build his own house.

He had put up the structure, but had delayed pouring the concrete slab for the basement floor.  The weather had not cooperated with his building schedule.

The weather had produced copious amounts of rain and then turned freezing cold.  The basement floor was made of frozen mud.  He waited on the weather for some time, hoping it would warm up, thaw out and dry.  Finally he purchased a used commercial heater, suspended it two feet above the mud and turned it on.  Full blast.

We let it run day and night until the mud was thawed and dried out.

As you know, heat rises.  I was concerned that we might burn the whole house down before the mud was dry.  It was an unusually cold winter, getting down to 20 degrees below zero.  Surprisingly the plan worked!  Sometimes practical people are smarter than engineers.  He was able to pour his basement floor.

The General Contractor didn’t know what to do with his furnace after he finished his drying out season, so he gave it to me.  What would I do with it?

I put it in a protected area and 28 years later I still don’t know what to do with it.

He eventually sold the house and moved to the East Coast.  The house still stands there as good as ever.

Another way of doing something a little bit different involves gluing PVC conduit.  Many times when electricians glue PVC pipe together, they will spread glue on the inside of the coupling and the outside of pipe.

This practice will cause the glue inside the coupling to squeeze back and form a ring inside the coupling.  When the same is done on the other end of the coupling, you now have two rings of hard glue constricting the available conduit fill space.

One of my helpers on one of my jobs was not experienced in PVC conduit gluing.  He used plenty of glue.  It wasn’t until after he went on to another job that I was set to pull wire through the conduit he had run.  I could get my fish tape through, but I could not get the wire to go through the conduit.  The extra glue he had used so constricted the available fill capacity the wires were blocked.

The area where I was working was in a parking lot.  I attached my fish tape to the back bumper of my car and slowly pulled away.  The wire slid through with no difficulty.  When I felt the wires after being pulled through the conduit, they were quite warm to the touch.  I suspect it was the friction of passing through the constricted connectors.

The electrical inspector on that job did not see this happen, so I don’t know what he would have said.  However he had told me before that when I used PVC conduit, I should install steel sweeps at the bottom of a conduit run.  His theory was that the pressure of the fish tape pulling up would cut a PVC sweep.  I argued that it was not in the code.  He said; “It will be!”

I changed them out to steel sweeps to keep him happy, but the requirement never did appear in the code.

Ideal conditions for operating a contracting business would be to always be in the black with a certain amount of operating capitol.  i.e. no need for credit.  That rarely happens.

One use of credit can be exemplified by an experience I had early on in my business venture.  I had installed two manufactured home pedestals for the families of two brothers on the same piece of property.  I did the job in the summer and the families moved in soon after.

That winter it was cold and windy and their furnaces quit; both of them at the same time.  That was an oddity.  When I checked them out, I found that the main breaker on both pedestals had gone bad.  That compounded the oddity.

I went to my supplier to get replacement breakers and they had none on hand.  The lead time to acquire them would be one week.  Well!  A week without power would freeze up both homes.  Then there would be plumbing to fix also.  The supplier did have two new pedestals on hand so I purchased them, on credit.  I also ordered the new breakers.

I took the pedestals to the job site, removed the bad breakers from the existing pedestals and replaced them with the new ones in the new pedestals.  The power was back on.

I took the faulty breakers back to the dealer for credit, and one week later when I picked up the new breakers I put them with the new pedestals.  Now I just had to use the new pedestals on jobs.  That wasn’t going to happen in the winter, but I eventually sold both of them.

I couldn’t have done that without credit.

Borrowing is a different matter.

It can be disastrous.  For instance, one time I was working on a job in downtown Spokane and I needed an extension ladder.  Being new to owning my own business, an extension ladder was not something I had purchased yet.

One of my friends was working nearby so I made a short trip to ask if I could borrow one of his extension ladders.  Success!  At the end of the day, since I wasn’t quite done, I put the ladder on the top of the flat roof of the building, out of sight, and went home.  The next day person or persons unknown had “borrowed” the ladder themselves.  I never saw it again.  Now my business had to buy a ladder; one that I wouldn’t have.

I guess I was a little slow in learning a lesson about “borrowed” ladders.  Later on I left a $300.00 ladder on the job overnight.  It too was “borrowed” by the time I returned.

I wound up buying three ladders and owning one.