“If you ever get in a pinch, they call dad,” Dan Griffin says.
He means his sons, Cody and Danny, who do the electrical work for Codan Electric in Tolland. Griffin runs the office. His wife keeps the books. “It’s just me and my wife and the boys do the work,” he says. The company name is Cody and Dan run together.
Griffin does not oversell his own part in it. “They’re pretty well versed,” he says. “They don’t need me anymore. They’re on their own. They’re smarter than I am.”
He came to the trade the slow way. In 1984 he started as an apprentice at an electrical shop in Tolland, where the owner, Dennis, hired him and, as Griffin puts it, “gave me a chance.” He earned his license in 1990 and went on to work as a union electrician. From 1995 to 2001 he worked for a company in Windsor that he still calls a great one to work for. In 2001 he started his own business.
His specialty came out of those years. “Commercial is where we start,” he says. “I’m a commercial electrician.” His kind of work meant bending pipe, running feeders and wiring variable-frequency drives for motors. The company’s site lists plant control panels and PLC wiring next to the house calls, and its portfolio runs from a phase converter and a septic pump chamber to a splash pad and a custom basement putting green.
Griffin says his sons learned the trade by growing up around it. “We’re really good at troubleshooting because my kids grew up around me,” he says. They took in what he knows about tracing a fault, and he says they were selective about the rest. “They learned from me, but they pick and choose the best qualities I had, and the bad ones that we all have, they discarded.”
One habit they kept is a rule about arriving. Griffin says the crew has to be out the door at a set time and at the job when expected. “They have to call before they show,” he says. Nobody turns up at a customer’s door unannounced.
The pandemic years tested that. Griffin calls them the busiest stretch the company has had. “The kids, the guys really worked hard,” he says. “They worked their butts off, and I was even working back then.” He has since moved off the job sites and into the office.
One customer, a retired firefighter renting a house where the company was called out for an emergency, judged the crew by its truck. In his review he described lines rolled perfectly and equipment kept clean, and he noted that inside the house the crew left not even a boot print.
Griffin’s goal is to hand the business to his sons.