CE Pro June 2022 - 63

Step 11: Do You Need to Be an Electrician
to Succeed in Lighting?
The biggest question regarding lighting fixtures is whether a
low-voltage integrator needs to hire an electrical contractor to
be part of his team, or simply partner with local electricians? The
answer is up for debate.
According to DMF's Mike Libman, " You do not need to
have electrical license to do this. You can buy the fixtures and
still have electrician do the panel and the labor. You spec the
product and buy the product. "
Andrew Davis, CEO at Gramophone, disagrees somewhat. He
sees the move into lighting as an ideal situation for dealers to
expand into electrical contracting.
" The best advice I can give is find a local electrician that you
work well with. Maybe someone who has a smaller operation
that may be great at what they do, but not like the business side
of it in terms of paperwork, marketing, showroom, and see if
you can get your arms around that individual and bring them in
house. We all know a good electrician who's not a good business
person, right? We've all run into those trades, where they're like,
they're amazing carpenters, and they can't run a business to save
their lives. "
" I completely agree with what Andrew was saying, " says Richard
Millson of Millson Home Technologies. " The best way to do
this right off the bat is to take it in stages. Just don't go out and
start hiring electricians. You could just form your own division
and all that sort of thing. There's a fair amount to it. By taking in
steps, you can learn as you go. "
Millson works closely with a local electrician but recognizes
that someday he might become part of the company
officially.
At GHT, the company has started its own electrical division
for one of its locations, but not in the city of St. Louis.
" St. Louis is a pretty union-heavy town so we've decided to
hold off on that for now because it definitely complicates things;
but in Atlanta, the company has hired a master electrician. It's
made a huge impact because it makes it so much easier to
sell control, fixtures, electrical and services in a package. It's
easier on project managers; it's easier to manage everything
across the board if you have that extra level of control, "
remarks Eric Joy of GHT. " Yes, we've made the investment in
hiring personnel and to get the electrical license. That's a big
step, it took us a while to decide to do that but it has made a
lot of sense and definitely is worth doing for us. "
Drew Ballsman of HD Media Systems suggests that even
though many integrators are adding electrical divisions, taking
away the labor from the electrician can cause channel conflict.
He thinks the integrators should focus on the quality lighting design,
supplying the product, and being consultative to the other
trades, while letting the electrician do the installation so he can
continue to capture the labor as his primary revenue source.
Jonathan Wesco of Allegro believes you can be successful
in lighting without hiring an electrician, but he worries a
cepro.com
bit about the long-term situation of integrators working so
closely with electricians.
" One of our concerns is we're literally working side by side
on these projects and the electricians, which are ultimately
our competitors, are observing our process and what we're
doing. That's a little concerning to me as a business owner.
We'll have to work through that over the course of time. I
see, eventually, probably having some electrical division but
it would probably be very different than what a traditional
electrical contractor would be, " he notes.
Lee Travis, owner of Wipliance with offices in Bellevue,
Wash., and Scottsdale, Ariz., has been doing electrical work for
15 years in Seattle, but only work that comes associated with
the low-voltage space. In other words, Wipliance electricians
are not out there making service calls on electrical panels for
new customers.
" With our electrical business in Seattle, we're really geared toward
the boutique projects. What we mean by that is we do a lot
of really cool lighting and a lot of really high margins. That's what
we're interested in, " he says frankly. " Everything else, we're trying
to send to other electricians ... to the builder's electricians. "
Wipliance's Scottsdale location does not do line-voltage work
because Travis is trying to work closely with electrical contractors
as partners there. The large projects there can have up to
300 openings (switches, fixtures, etc.), which can mean big labor
revenue for the electricians.
" Electricians think about labor openings, it's what they
do. They think about that before the product. They're making
25%, let's say, on the fixtures that they pick up from the
supply house. They might make $2,500 in profit for $10,000
fixtures, but we're going to come in and do $100,000 in
fixtures. So, if their break-even point is $25,000 on that,
we might give them up to 10%, and they can just be handsoff.
We're going to take all this design headache off their
hands and we're going to spec and provide all the fixtures,
and we're going to drive up all the electrician's labor costs
because of all the additional openings that we're going to
have, " explains Travis.
Robert Haecker, president and founder of TRIPhase Technology
in Zionsville, Ind., does not have in-house electricians.
" Our approach is more having alliances with a number of
electricians throughout the city. We will do the design, and make
it easy for them to do their jobs, providing payment schedules,
project management to support throughout, " he says. " What
we've found is that if you have these alliances they will bring you
business. We had one instance last year where the homeowner
went to the electrician and said, 'I want those keypads engraved
to tell me what lights to control.' Well, the electrician didn't
do automated lighting. He brought the customer to us and
about three weeks later that client spent more than $1
million with us. "
June 2022 CE Pro | 63
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CE Pro June 2022

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