When Ross Woodford was a first-year apprentice electrician, he worked for a man with a firm rule about hiring. The boss would not take on a new employee unless he had that person’s payroll for an entire year in the bank, kept separate from the money that ran the business.
Ross has never forgotten what the rule meant. “That was just his way of saying, I will not take you on if I can’t take care of you,” he says.
The lesson landed on ground his parents had already prepared. Ross grew up in Northwest Iowa, where his father farmed and his mother owned a bar. His father bred a heavy work ethic into him, and his mother had a relentless drive to always be doing something. She harped on being reliable, and both parents repeated the same rule: “Five minutes early is on time, on time is late.” Both of them ran their own businesses, and Ross says working for himself has always been in his blood.
Once he was in the trade, others added to what his parents started. “I think I had a lot of people that shaped me as well professionally over the years,” he says.
What those years taught him most was how he wanted to lead. He describes a graphic he once saw of two kinds of leaders. In one picture, a man sits behind a desk cracking a whip over 10 men who drag him along. In the other, he is out front, pulling with them. “You can’t be the leader behind the desk,” Ross says.
Leading from the front means being straight with the crew about a bad day ahead. “Hey guys, I don’t love this,” he says he’ll tell them. “This is going to suck, but this is part of it sometimes.” It means owning his own mistakes, too. “If anything slips through the cracks, it falls on me, and I always own that,” he says. Being honest about it, he has found, usually earns a lot of grace.
But working for other contractors, Ross kept getting steered toward data centers, where the best money was. The work never interested him. “You go through the turnstiles every day,” he says. “You almost feel more like cattle at a feed yard than you do an employee.” He saw that was where the industry was going if he kept working for other people.
What he wanted instead was what his parents had. “The most ultimate freedom that exists is the freedom to do what you want with your time, where you’re not asking someone else for permission to do what you want with your time,” he says.
So he and his wife, Paula, made a decision. “We decided that it was time to go out on our own and try to make it on our own,” he says. Woodford Power and Light Co. launched in Ankeny in the first week of September 2025.
The company Ross leads looks like the lessons he carried into it. It is an IBEW Local 347 signatory contractor, and its crews are union electricians. Licensed electricians are on site at all times. “I will never send apprentices to do work by themselves,” Ross says. An owner or an owner’s representative keeps a hand in every project, he says, even when they aren’t the ones doing the work, and customers can always reach them.
Most of the work is commercial, mainly remodels and tenant improvements. The job Ross calls the company’s crown jewel was the remodel of an entire Best Buy, a 35,000-square-foot store. The crew reused the existing power and started over on nearly everything else, including a whole new sales floor. The general contractor told him why the company got that job: he had shown up for the pre-bid and stayed responsive through the whole bidding process. “We won because we were responsive and we showed up and we continued to show up,” he says.
Winning that work matters to Ross because of who it pays. Five other families depend on the company. Ross had worked alongside all three of the company’s journeymen before, and they came with him once the company got going. “If you take care of your people, they’re going to take care of you,” he says, and he says his employees keep proving him right.
He never has to worry about the work getting done. What he worries about is keeping enough of it coming. Making sure his people have work, he says, is “one of the only things that really keeps me up at night.”
Paula has been in it from that first decision. She backed his vision from the start and put her own name on it: Paula owns Woodford Power and Light outright. She runs the administrative side of the business while Ross runs the field, and the company’s own site credits her with making sure each customer feels heard and respected. Ross says her role is just as important as his.
For now, Ross takes the company’s future one day at a time. “I’m just focused on one day at a time and what do I have to do to keep my current employees employed,” he says.
A year of payroll in the bank for every person they hire, the rule his first boss lived by, is still out of reach for a company this new. Ross keeps it in front of him all the same. “That’s a goal I’d like to work towards,” he says.