Jared Theis remembers sitting up one night, thinking about his warranty. When he started Rise Above Electric, he offered two years on his work, double the one year most electricians give, as an incentive for customers to take a chance on what he calls “a new guy on the block.” That night he thought back over the warranty calls he had actually handled. All of them had come while he worked for other companies, and none of them had been his own work.
“I’ve yet to have to fulfill a warranty,” he says. So he dropped the end date.
The guarantee now covers his workmanship for as long as the customer owns or leases the property. “I’m confident enough in my work to say, as long as you own that property or lease that property, if I’ve done the work on it, I offer a lifetime warranty on my workmanship,” he says. He doesn’t present it as something a customer will likely need. To him it is a claim about the work itself, and his record backs it: “The fact that I haven’t yet speaks good.”
That confidence comes from a career that started long before the business did. Theis says he has spent 25 years in the electrical trade, much of it with some of the largest contractors in Colorado, several of them nationwide, and some of it with small shops. He has worked at Denver International Airport and, by his count, at nearly every military installation in the state. His website lists him as a licensed electrician. At the last big company he worked for, he was the head service tech, the one sent out after someone else had already tried and couldn’t find the fault.
He went out on his own almost by accident. Jobs started coming to him when he wasn’t looking for them, and he left the big company to see how long it would last. He figured it would be a year or so before he was back at a larger firm. The work kept coming, and after about two years he got his business license and made it official.
Troubleshooting is still what he likes best. Everyone is glad at both ends of a service call, he says: glad to see him arrive because he’s there to fix the problem, and glad to see him go because he fixed it. He considers his speed part of the job, at diagnosis and at installs, so a business owner or a family isn’t stuck with “a guy that’s in front of your customers or you’re trying to get dinner cooked and he’s still in there looking for a problem.”
Sometimes the fastest fix involves no visit at all. When a homeowner calls to say the kitchen outlets quit, he asks whether they have checked the GFCIs and the breakers, and he walks them through it. He would rather they not pay a truck fee for something they can handle themselves. “Ideally they’re going to remember me when they have a real problem,” he says.
Scheduling follows the same logic. Theis often works as a one-man crew, and he points out that when one of five crew members runs late nobody notices, but when you’re the only one coming, they do. So instead of the half-day window a cable company gives, he gives an hour. “I’ll say sometime between 9 and 10 in the morning,” he says, “and I’ll usually be there right on time, right at the beginning of that.” The extra slack is there so a surprise early in the day doesn’t make him miss the time he promised.
His territory runs from Fort Collins south to Colorado Springs and up into the mountains as far as Conifer, and farther if a customer will cover the drive. A partner handles the office and sometimes comes out on jobs.
Away from service calls, the work he enjoys most is commercial, especially running conduit. “There’s an art to it as well as the math,” he says. He likes it best when the conduit stays exposed and every run comes out in perfect lines. “It has to look nice, and it’s going to be to code, it’s going to be safe,” he says.
None of that work has brought him a warranty call yet. He doesn’t expect the streak to last forever. “I’m sure I’m going to have a warranty call sometime,” he says. “I mean, it’s inevitable. I’m sure it’ll happen.”
Theis is a Colorado native, and his 25 years in the trade have taken him from Denver International Airport to nearly every military installation in the state. For now, the lifetime guarantee rests on a record with no warranty calls on his own work.