Buying an electrical contractor in Treasure Coast

• 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 Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties on the Atlantic coast and Okeechobee and Highlands counties inland: Stuart, Palm City, Port St. Lucie, Fort Pierce, Vero Beach, Sebastian, Okeechobee, Sebring and Avon Park. Port St. Lucie is the largest city and has grown quickly as a suburb within reach of Palm Beach County to the south.

The coast draws retirees and winter residents, and health care, construction, real estate, boating and sport fishing are big parts of the economy. The coast lies in the Indian River citrus district, named for the lagoon. Inland, Okeechobee and Highlands are cattle, dairy and citrus country around Lake Okeechobee and along the ridge near Sebring, with many retirees of their own. Home service companies, the building trades, marine businesses and medical practices find steady customers here.

The coast is seasonal, with winter residents filling restaurants, golf courses and service schedules, and summer is quieter. Hurricane Nicole came ashore near Vero Beach in November 2022, and the region has a long history of storms, so check insurance, flood zones and how a business came through recent ones.

Water quality in the St. Lucie River and the Indian River Lagoon is a recurring problem, and in a bad year it can hurt fishing, boating and tourism businesses. Inland, distances are longer and the labor pool thinner. A company in Sebring or Okeechobee may be one of very few of its kind nearby, which can mean loyal customers and little competition, but also few people to hire. Most new homes on the coast are going up in and around Port St. Lucie.