Home Wize Electric is two people: the owner, Jacob, and a licensed apprentice. They start each day together. “My apprentice rides with me every morning,” Jacob says. The apprentice, he adds, is “here on time just like I am.”
That arrangement is a choice. Jacob says he has held back on growth for a specific reason. “A reason that I haven’t pushed to grow is because you may have to sacrifice quality as you grow when you have people besides the owner of the company showing up to do the work,” he says. He likes knowing that wherever the company goes, the person doing the work is someone he can vouch for.
The work he built the company around is the service call. “The bread and butter of my work is going into people’s homes and fixing things, making the lights work,” he says. Much of it is the everyday fixing of small things that break, and that kind of work didn’t really slow down for him during COVID. People still needed their lights and microwaves.
The company, based in Post Falls and serving northern Idaho, takes on commercial and light industrial jobs too, but most of what it does is residential. Jacob is content to keep it that way. “I’m not necessarily trying to force my way into commercial or industrial,” he says. “We could if we wanted to, but we like the personal relationships that we build from working with everyday people in the community.”
He describes his approach in the field as the opposite of a pitch. “We’re really not a sales-based company,” he says. “We don’t come in with any sales tactics.” He thinks customers can read that within minutes of meeting him. “It’s pretty obvious that we’re just one of them.”
The part of the job he talks about most comes before any wire is pulled: settling what the customer expects. “We have tons of experience in situations where a customer might expect something else versus what they’re actually going to get,” he says, “so we mitigate that up front.” The goal is that when he leaves, the customer has exactly what they thought they were getting when he walked in. One homeowner, who had him run power to an interior closet and add a box and switch in a shop, described Jacob leading them to the attic access door at the end of the job to show and explain the work.
Jacob learned the trade young. His father was an electrician, and Jacob started working alongside him as a little kid. “I was probably journeyman level by the time I was just getting out of high school,” he says, “and it’s pretty much all I’ve ever done my whole life.” He ran an electrical business in another state for about six years before starting over in Idaho.
He frames his own reliability in plain terms. “I have a family to feed and a reputation to uphold,” he says. He says he doesn’t call in sick or miss days, and that doing the work well is what keeps people calling him back.
Staying small is the trade-off he has accepted for that. “It’s nice that I know that everywhere we go we can give them the best level service,” he says.