“I spent the last money I had on tools, on boots, on clothes, on a dream that I wasn’t even sure was going to work out in the end,” Gage Gorman says.
He grew up in Gilroy, about 10 minutes from Morgan Hill, and worked every job he could while he looked for something more. At 18 he went into electrical work. “Starting electrical for me was a huge jump because I had no idea what I was doing, what world I was entering or what was going on,” he says.
Ten years later, at 28, he started Max Level Electric, a licensed contractor serving Santa Clara County and the greater Bay Area. He is the sole owner and runs a crew. The idea was to bring residential, commercial and solar work together, he says, and put “all of the electrical services under one roof.”
The tools come up again when he talks about where the company is headed. His long-term goal, he says, is “to grow a company that my community can work in.” He goes further. “I want to grow a business that can be a pivotal pillar in my community,” he says. “I want to make this company a sense of community pride as much as it is my own.” Part of that plan is putting tools in other people’s hands.
Gorman’s father worked a blue-collar job for a company, and Gorman says he always asked himself why his father never went out on his own. “My father was a great worker, a very respectable guy,” he says. What the son took from him was “how to treat other people and the expectation of a workman or a tradesman when he shows up on someone’s property.”
He also spent a couple of years in the military as a military police officer. “I served my country,” he says. The place he came home to matters to him. “This is my home,” he says. “I really care about this place and I care about the people in it.”
Before the company, most of Gorman’s experience was commercial, including work as an electrician for Tesla and for some larger electrical firms. “Most of our experience is in commercial,” he says, though the company also takes residential clients. On the commercial side that means switchgear and meter upgrades, parking-lot lighting and infrared inspections for hot spots, along with installing and relocating the electrical service for CNC and other manufacturing machines. At homes, the crew handles panel upgrades, EV chargers, battery storage and rewiring for high-demand appliances.
A Los Gatos couple who had their main panel replaced and an EG4 GridBoss battery system installed reported that the company took care of the permits and dealt with the city inspector, and the job passed on its first inspection.
On scheduling, Gorman gets specific. When a client is told the crew will arrive at 9 a.m. Monday, “whether it’s rain or shine, we’ll show up at 9 a.m.,” he says. A job can be rescheduled if it has to be, but the appointment is kept. “There’s always somebody representing Max Level Electric who’s there on site making contact with the client.”
He holds himself to that first. “Our culture is definitely a lead-by-example culture,” he says. “You cannot expect the bulk of your company to follow orders from somebody who’s not following them themselves.”
The future he describes for the company stays close to home. He wants to hire from the area he grew up in, and he has a list ready for what comes after that. “I want to give back to my community with this company in forms of sponsorships, college sponsorships, trade sponsorships, tool giveaways, things like that,” he says.