Ask Alan Shipman what he wants Setter Electric to be known for and he says commercial work. Ask him which jobs are harder and he points to houses.
Residential work, he says, is more intricate. The finished job usually has to look nicer. The budget is usually tighter. And a house project calls for more care than a commercial one.
Setter Electric Company is a Tulsa electrical contractor built around service and repair. It works for homeowners and businesses in the city and the towns around it. The jobs run from flickering lights and tripping breakers to full rewiring. The company keeps someone available for emergencies around the clock and puts a one-year warranty on its workmanship and materials. Shipman says the crew holds its schedule tight. One of the first men he brought on still works there. “We’ve been together ever since,” he says.
The pandemic years tested that crew in a particular way. The calls kept coming. The parts did not. “You couldn’t take material or help for granted,” Shipman says. “You had to really seek it out.” Lead times on material, he says, “were tenfold,” and a job could stall halfway through. “You’d start a job and you’d wait six weeks to go back and finish it when you got a part,” he says. By his account, the delays are what made those stretches so busy, because one job kept running into the next.
The house work he describes shows up in one homeowner’s account of the company’s visits to her 1960s home. Her list was long. The crew added outlets and replaced switches. They took out the pull-chain fixtures in her closets and put in wall switches. They tracked down fan switches that would work with the remotes she already owned. New wiring had to reach a spot she described as hard to get to, and they ran it anyway. An outdoor outlet that had been dead for years came back to life. She noted that the house was clean and in order every time they left.
That is the job Shipman has in mind when he compares a house with a commercial building.
“You’ve gotta do a more quality install on a residential job with a tighter budget, which makes it probably more challenging than commercial work,” he says.