“Hey, if you’re doing this, you might want to think about doing that.” Kennan Koenig says some version of that sentence at the jobs he walks before he puts a number on them.
Koenig is a master electrician. He has run Koenig Electric LLC in New Braunfels since December 2020, when his master and contractor licenses were in order. Quotes are free. Some jobs are simple enough to price over the phone. For a lot of others, he drives out, meets the customer and asks what they want out of the project. Then he tells them what he sees. “We’re the professionals,” he says, so if something has been overlooked, he raises it, or asks whether they have considered another approach. He calls it educating the customer rather than selling to them.
All that talking is aimed at the end of the job. “It’s the same price I quoted at the beginning is what we charge at the end,” Koenig says, “unless they completely change the scope of work, which usually doesn’t happen because we discuss potential variables like that at the time of the quote.”
He knows how it can go otherwise. A customer gets halfway through a project and wishes they had thought of something, or wants to add something. Koenig would rather hear that before anyone picks up a tool. When a suggestion lands, he says, customers usually make the change on the spot or ask for a price on it too. “We usually figure all that out up front,” he says.
The instinct came from outside the trade. His father was a restaurateur, and Koenig worked in restaurants as a teenager. “We’re a trade company, but we’re in customer service,” he says. “People are relying on us to come solve their problems.” He thinks the restaurant years gave him an edge. “I understand that customer service side of it better, I think, than a lot of people that only ever did the trades,” he says. Those electricians, as he sees it, think about the tradecraft and stop there.
It shows in the scheduling. The company tries to give customers two-hour arrival windows, and Koenig says crews almost always land inside them, though he allows that circumstances sometimes run them a little late. When a customer calls, he says, he is the one who answers. The work is residential and commercial, and he has no preference between the two. It reaches from New Braunfels out to San Marcos, Seguin and San Antonio.
Koenig has four employees. The company’s team page names Jackson Sanchez as its lead installer, along with a wireman, a lead helper and an apprentice.
Sanchez turns up in the customers’ accounts. A commercial client who had forgotten to buy a fixture for part of a job wrote afterward that he braced for an eye roll when he admitted it. Instead, Sanchez helped him go get one and steered him to the right fixture for the space.
Koenig says he leads by example and by picking people carefully. He explains right away how the company does things and how he wants them done, then holds people to it. Anyone who won’t meet that standard is let go, and he finds somebody new to train.
Most of the people he hires come in with little experience, and he trains them toward their licenses. That is on purpose. “They don’t have a lot of the bad habits from other companies,” he says, “because I get them without a lot of experience and train them.”
He has the company’s future in mind when he does it. He wants to grow the business and eventually hand it down, or sell it, to one of the men he trained. The plan, he says, is “training up one of my guys to take over the company one day and leave it to him to run it.”