Every KSElectrical truck and van carries the same two letters on its side. They are Kurt Swensen’s initials, and he put them there on purpose.
“My initials are KS, and there’s a reason that I put that on the side of all of our trucks and our vans,” he says. The reason, he says, is that “you get that dedicated touch from the owner of the company.”
In practice, that means Swensen stays close to the work. He is not on every job site every day, but he is in and out of them. “I’m there making sure things are up to the standard they need to be with the installations,” he says. The same goes for the first conversation. “Anybody that calls, they get me,” he says. “I don’t send out one of my guys.” The company has no salesmen going out to push extras. The person who comes to look at a project is the person whose initials are on the truck.
He started KSElectrical in 2020, when he reached a point in his career where, as he puts it, “working for myself and specializing in things that I enjoy doing was a good option.” The best part of the years since, he says, has been watching the work come together, even when it takes a different route than planned. “You always think you know how things are going to go, but it never goes exactly that way,” he says. “But it always seems to work out well.”
What he enjoys is residential work. “I enjoy residential,” he says. He likes helping homeowners bring their vision for a project to life. The company takes on all kinds of electrical work, but he names two things as its specialty: service work in people’s homes and wiring high-end custom houses as they go up. The service side is where he gets to do what he likes best, which is working out a homeowner’s problem and coming up with a creative way to solve it.
One homeowner saw that firsthand. After Swensen tracked down the problem in her house, she wrote afterward, he laid out two ways to fix it and told her which one he would choose for his own place.
These days that kind of visit takes the company well beyond a single town. Its website names Adel, Perry, Panora and Indianola among the rural central Iowa communities it serves, and it lists bucket truck work for residential, commercial and agricultural customers. Swensen has several employees and four trucks on the road, so his name now travels with a crew.
He thinks about leading that crew the way a coach thinks about a team. “The culture starts with the coach or with the CEO or the owner, whatever it is,” he says. He believes people respond to that. “Most people want to be part of a winning culture,” he says, and once the owner sets the standard, getting a crew to show up on time, do the job right and treat people fairly comes easily.
He backs the standard with pay. “I pay my employees top of the scale for what electricians earn,” he says. “We pay our apprentices well.” The trucks get the same attention. Each one rolls out, he says, “fully outfitted with material and tools and everything that we need to do the job correctly,” with his initials on the door.