“I’m the one dealing with the customer. I hear what the customer wants. I’m the one who installs it, so I know exactly. There’s no middleman or anything like that.”
That is how Thomas Flaherty describes his company, and he means it literally. Thomas Flaherty Electric, based in Hanover on the South Shore, has one electrician, and he is also the person who picks up the phone. No office hands the job to a crew, so nothing gets lost along the way.
“It’s just me,” Flaherty says. Because he deals with every customer one-on-one, he believes he can stand behind the result. The man who heard the request is the man doing the wiring.
He came to the trade by way of the military. After high school he spent five years in the Marine Corps, where he worked on F-18 jets. When he got out, he began an apprenticeship with the Local 103 electrical union. Once he had his electrical license, he went out on his own, in 2026.
The Marines shaped how he works as much as what he knows. Asked where his reliability comes from, he points to two places. “The military kind of instilled it in me, and I always grew up working in construction,” he says. The practice itself is plain. “Just answering the phone and showing up when you say you’re going to.”
The company bills itself as veteran owned and operated. Flaherty says most of his work is residential, though he also takes commercial jobs for offices and small shops. The work runs from panel upgrades and EV charger installs to smoke alarms, lighting and troubleshooting a tripped breaker.
Working alone changes small things about how a job goes. One customer who hired him to put in a new electrical panel and an EV charger described getting a video call at work so Flaherty could show the progress firsthand. With no foreman in between, the update came from the person with his hands in the panel.
The company advertises 24-hour emergency service. In a one-man shop, that means the person who answers a late call is the same person who drives out to take care of it.
Flaherty has already settled on who should run the company after him. “I definitely want to hand it down to my son,” he says.