“Hey, I do the best work.” “No, I do the best work.”
That is how Patrick Robinson describes the electricians he worked beside for 17 years at Jacobs Electric, a big residential company that does new construction. When he started there, he says, it was “just a group of us and the owner,” and the crew helped build the company up from that size. Everyone wanted his own work to be the best on the job. “It was kind of a competition,” Robinson says, “so it was a healthy competition.”
He now co-owns P & R Electric in Tucson with Richard Peru. The company gives 2017 as the year the two founded it, and Robinson says each partner has been doing electrical work for more than 30 years. Three electricians work for him, two with 25 years or more in the trade and one with eight-plus.
Robinson credits the crew’s habits to a shared past. “My two main electricians are guys that I worked with at Jacobs Electric, and so we all have those same standards,” he says. “It’s nice because when I send them jobs, I get compliments all the time.”
He spent many of his Jacobs years as a service technician, and the job made him learn how to deal with customers. One lesson came early. “The first guy to really train me taught me accountability on my jobs,” he says, “and that was a huge first step.”
P & R does mostly residential remodeling, along with commercial work, and Robinson does not rank one above the other. “We do it all,” he says. “So we don’t like to pick and choose.” When COVID sent people home to work, he says, he got busier, with conversions to offices as people went remote.
Customers have described what that standard looks like on a job. One recalled Robinson and one of his men trenching and running new conduit for a pool light and pump, and said the run went in low and perfectly straight.
The crew works across greater Tucson and out to Marana, Green Valley, Vail and Oro Valley. Robinson says showing up is the other thing people notice. “That’s the other thing I hear all the time,” he says. “Oh my gosh, I’ve called four people and you’re the first one to respond.”
He is not after a much larger company. “I’m not looking to get too big,” he says, only to “grow a little bit and maintain.” What he wants is for the business to keep going without him, run by the kind of electrician he came up alongside. His plan is “to make it to where one of my guys can take over and manage it when I’m ready to step down.”