Listen Anywhere
Most electricians who go out on their own know how to do the work. The wiring, the inspections, the troubleshooting. That part they’ve got. What nobody prepares them for is everything else: finding customers, building a team, deciding which jobs to take, figuring out what software to use, and staying mentally in the game when the phone stops ringing.
Elber Gamboa, owner of Made Electric in the Greater Toronto area, lived all of it. He’s seven years in now, running a focused residential operation specializing in custom homes and home automation. But in his first six months, he was ready to quit.
He Was Done. Then a Stranger in a Facebook Group Changed Everything.
Elber came to Canada in 2002, got into the electrical trade in 2007, and spent years working for others before getting his master license. He never planned to start his own company. But when the opportunity appeared, he jumped, and within six months, he was calling his old boss to ask if there was a job available.
“I quit mentally in that moment,” he says. He had a wrapped van. Uniforms. The whole setup. He’d started from scratch the way he believed it should be done. And nothing was working.
That week, he posted a goodbye message in a contractors Facebook group he was part of. A guy from Ottawa who ran a multi-trade restoration company texted him back: you can do it, don’t quit. He asked to see photos of the van and the setup. Looked them over. Then told Elber to get on a call the next morning and he’d walk him through the steps.
That conversation turned into three months of mentorship, and the first real system Elber ever had for building his business.
The Cold Outreach Strategy That Actually Worked
The mentor’s advice was simple and specific. Build a list of 100 property management companies. Email them, call them. Expect about 3% to give you work. That’s all you need to get moving.
Elber did it. Three property management companies started sending him service calls regularly. He was running everywhere on his own, but he was busy. He also took two other tips that kept paying off: yard signs on every job site, and going door to door to the two neighbors on each side of any job he completed, pamphlet in hand, telling them who he was and what he’d just done next door.
These aren’t complicated tactics. But they worked because he executed them consistently, and because the product behind the promotion was solid.
Good Work Doesn’t Automatically Build a Business
Elber is direct about this: being a skilled electrician and being a good business owner are completely different things. “One thing is to do good work as an electrician, another thing is to run a business.” He says it himself, and it’s something that comes up constantly with contractors who plateau after a few years.
The business side is its own apprenticeship. Estimating, collections, scheduling, hiring, marketing, customer relationships, cash flow. None of it comes from learning the trade. You have to actively go learn it, usually by making expensive mistakes first.
Elber’s most expensive mistake was in hiring.
The Hiring Problem That Most Trades Businesses Get Wrong
At his peak, Elber had five guys on the team. Then one left, others followed, and he had to let some go. Looking back, he knows why it happened.
He hired electricians. He didn’t hire the right kind of electricians for the work he was doing.
His analogy is sharp: a nurse who works with newborns and a nurse who works with elderly patients both have their credentials, but they need entirely different temperaments for the job. One role requires technical precision and gentleness with someone who can’t communicate. The other requires connection, conversation, patience.
Electrical work is the same. A commercial electrician built for production environments, moving fast through rough-in on a site, is a different person than someone who needs to walk into a homeowner’s house, explain what they’re doing, answer questions, and leave the place exactly as they found it.
“You can’t put a commercial guy into custom homes,” Elber says. The technical skills might transfer. The personality often doesn’t. And on the residential side especially, the person your customer meets is as important as the work they leave behind.
Elber now thinks in terms of personality fit before skills. He wishes he’d learned it sooner.
Why He Has a Perfect 5-Star Google Rating
Made Electric’s Google reviews consistently mention Elber by name. That tells you something. In residential work, the person doing the job is a significant part of the product.
Elber’s framing for customer experience is simple: he thinks about how he’d want someone to show up at his own house. He has a family and kids. He knows what it feels like to let a stranger into your personal space and trust them to treat it with care. So that’s the standard he sets.
It’s not a formal customer service program. It’s a mindset: show up clean, be approachable, answer questions, give honest advice about what they’ll need down the road. Make the customer feel comfortable enough to ask. That combination of technical credibility and genuine approachability is what turns a one-time call into a long-term relationship.
His best clients now don’t even ask for a better price. They know what they’re getting and they trust it.
Saying No to Clients When Work Is Slow
This is the part that sounds easy to agree with and is hard to actually do. Elber has walked away from contractors who mistreated people on site, even when he needed the work. His reasoning: if his crew dreads going to a job, the business pays for it, just in a different way than lost revenue.
He’s found that when he says no to a bad-fit client, he waits a few weeks, and then something from a client he actually wants to work with comes through. It’s not always this clean, and he acknowledges the risk. But the cumulative effect of working with people who share your values is real. The team stays stable. The work is better. The reviews reflect it.
“What do you see for yourself long-term, and for the people around you?” That’s how he describes the discipline behind saying no. It’s not blind idealism. It’s a long-game calculation.
Why Software Isn’t Optional Once You’re Growing
Elber is clear on this: he cannot imagine going back to managing the business manually. Scheduling, invoicing, tracking hours in the field, all of it. Once he had software handling those pieces, the mental overhead dropped significantly.
He describes it as a series of small wins that compound. You get invoicing off your plate, and suddenly your brain has room to think about marketing. You stop tracking hours manually, and you can focus on the customer conversation instead of the paperwork. Tools like Jobtable exist specifically for this, built for contractors who need something that actually fits how trades businesses operate, without the complexity or cost of enterprise software. 👉 Learn more at https://www.jobtable.com
He also pushes back on the “I’m too small to need software” mindset. Implementing systems while you’re growing is significantly easier than retrofitting them once you have employees and active jobs running. The transition is the hard part. Get through it early.
Where the Work Is Going: Why Maintenance Is the Smart Bet
Elber’s economic outlook is grounded in something practical: all the infrastructure that’s been built over the past decade still needs to be maintained. When new construction slows, the maintenance and service side doesn’t follow the same curve.
“AI can come with whatever,” he says, “but there are going to be problems you have to crawl into somewhere and find. And if you haven’t seen it before, you won’t be able to fix it.” Troubleshooting, home service, maintenance work, these aren’t going away. They’re also where residential specialists with the right temperament tend to do very well, because the margins are better and the relationships are stickier.
His bet is on custom homes and home automation, where his crew does the licensed electrical work that automation companies can’t touch, while also getting certified to handle the integration side. Less finger-pointing between trades on complex projects, better margins, and work that builds real expertise over time.
Seven years in, Elber is running a leaner operation than he was a year ago. But he’s running it with more clarity than he ever has. He knows the market he wants, the clients he wants, and the kind of team he needs to build. The question for any contractor reading this is whether they’re doing the same work to understand their own business that clearly, or whether they’re just staying busy and hoping things work out.
Staying busy isn’t the same as growing. And the contractors who figure that out early are the ones worth watching in three years.