Buying an electrical contractor in Southwest Florida

• Customers spread across several builders and contractors. If one customer is a third of the work, its next slowdown is yours.
• Service and maintenance work that repeats: facility contracts, generator maintenance plans, property managers who call for every tenant change.
• Careful estimating on bid work, and job costs that show which projects made money and why.
• A foreman or operations manager who runs the field without the owner.
• Trained electricians who stay, and apprentices coming up behind them.
• A licensed qualifier who stays, or a believable replacement.
• Few old unpaid customer bills, and a habit of filing lien notices on time.
• Stocked, tracked service vans, so a technician can finish most calls in one trip.

• Backlog: signed work not yet done, its expected margin, and how much is with one customer.
• Job-by-job results on the last two or three years of bid work. A few bad jobs can erase a good year.
• Retainage owed to the company, and how long it usually takes to collect.
• Unpaid customer invoices by age. Construction customers can pay slowly.
• Liens, payment disputes and any lawsuits over defective work.
• Electricians' pay and overtime, and whether the best foremen will stay.
• Bonding capacity (how much a surety will guarantee) if the company bids public or larger commercial jobs, and whether the surety will stay with a new owner.
• Past insurance claims, especially for fires or injuries.
• For generator installs, who hooks up the gas line. That's work for a plumbing, mechanical or gas licensee, not an electrical contractor.

• Whose license does the company work under, and would they stay after the sale?
• How much of your work is service, commercial and new construction?
• How much signed work do you have lined up, and who are the biggest customers in it?
• How do you price bid jobs, and how often do costs run over your estimate?
• Do you have maintenance contracts or generator service plans, and how many renew each year?
• Who runs the crews when you're not there?
• Has a job ever gone badly wrong? What happened, and what changed afterward?

This region covers Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Sarasota and Manatee counties on the Gulf coast and Hendry, Glades and DeSoto inland: Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Naples, Bonita Springs, Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, Sarasota, Venice, Bradenton, LaBelle, Clewiston, Moore Haven and Arcadia. The coastal economy runs on people who choose to live or spend the winter here: retirees, seasonal residents, and the construction, real estate, health care, financial and home services that follow them. Tourism, golf and boating add to it.

Inland, the economy is agricultural: sugarcane around Clewiston, citrus, cattle and vegetables, with Immokalee in Collier County a center for farm work. The building trades, pool, landscaping and pest control companies, property managers, medical and dental practices, and marine businesses tend to do well along the coast.

This is one of Florida's most seasonal markets. From roughly January through April, restaurants, shops and service companies run at full speed. Summers are slower, so look at monthly revenue, not only the yearly total. The coast has taken two major hurricanes in recent years: Ian came ashore at Cayo Costa in Lee County in September 2022, and Milton at Siesta Key in Sarasota County in October 2024. Rebuilding brought a wave of work for contractors that won't last forever, so ask how much recent revenue came from storm repairs. Insurance costs and flood zones weigh on every property.

Housing costs near the coast make hiring hard, especially around Naples. New communities east of Interstate 75 in Lee, Collier, Charlotte and Manatee keep service companies busy.