By Jack DeGange

Brian Cole is a soft-spoken man with a graying mustache who enjoys the outdoors and raising a family in a small Vermont town. He doesn’t strike you as a risk taker. His wife, Wendy, might tell you otherwise.

Just ask her to recall the night when Brian came home and announced he was leaving his job as an electrician-carpenter to start his own business. That was nearly 25 years ago. Their oldest son, Adam, was barely a year old (he now works with his father) and the Coles were expecting Nathaniel, the second of their four children.

“Wendy had every reason to be nervous,”said Cole. “But, I wanted to be my own boss and I knew I could do it.”

And he has, building Cole Electric, based in East Thetford, Vt., from a one-man operation—“I would do anything in those days”—into a company with more than 40 employees that ranks as one of the region’s largest electrical contracting firms.

Growing up in Utica, N.Y., Cole began to learn about business from his father, an electrician. “By the time I was 12 years old, I was going to jobs, helping to clean the truck and haul tools,” he recalled. “You don’t realize what you learn from that kind of experience.”

Cole’s future in electrical contracting didn’t happen overnight. He enrolled at the State University of New York College of Forestry at Syracuse University and graduated with a degree in zoology and botany. He became an assistant to a doctor at the University of Rochester, doing kidney research. But, after several years in a laboratory, the research grant ended. Plus, recalled Cole, “I wanted to be outdoors.”

Opportunity knocked after he and Wendy visited friends in Woodstock, Vt. They liked the area and Brian took a job with Rusty Hyde and Bruce Williamson at Domus, Inc., the residential design-build contractor in Etna, N.H.

“I think I was Bruce’s first hire,” said Cole. “I was doing general carpentry and learning to wire. I read the code book twice, took the state test, and got my license."

When Cole left Domus to launch his own business, it was as a builder-electrician. “We took anything that came along,” he said. In time, the business evolved to “all electrical” and from residential work to larger projects.

“I remember bidding my first big job,” said Cole. “It was for the Community Health Center at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital. I went back to Utica and reviewed the plans with my father. We didn’t get the bid but I knew I wanted to push the business and make it bigger.”

Soon after, Cole was successful with projects at the Norwich Elementary School and at Lyndon State College during the 1980s. At the same time, he was building a relationship with Trumbull-Nelson as a subcontractor.

If there is a turning point in the growth of Cole Electric it was the day Ron Bauer (now T-N’s executive vice president) asked Brian if he wanted to bid a major project at the Lebanon Airport industrial park.

“Our strength is in our workers, especially our project managers and foremen,” he said. “Our goal is to install quality electrical work and we do it while treating people with respect—the owners, contractors and our workers.”

It was to be part of the outfitting team for the facility now occupied by Stryker Biotech. “Except for us, all of the bidders were from outside the area,” said Cole. “We had to go to Philadelphia for interviews and to present the bid.”

The project involved working in clean rooms and with sophisticated technology. “There was a lot of risk but I knew we could do the job,” added Cole.

“We were successful and it put us into a whole other league.”

That job has led to numerous commercial and institutional projects with Trumbull-Nelson and other contractors over the past 15 years. But it hasn’t happened at the expense of retaining the perspective of living in and working from a small town operating base. Wendy was a member of the local board of selectpersons and Brian spent a dozen years on the Thetford Academy board of trustees, including the period when the school went through a $2.5 million renovation process.

“I learned a great deal about budgeting, negotiating contracts and bidding as a trustee at the Academy,” said Cole. He helped to raise funds and organize the job and then served as clerk of the works as well as electrical contractor. Lest anyone suggest he had a conflict of interest, he and Wendy also made a five-figure donation to the building campaign.

“Being part of small town life is important to us,” said Cole, who also found time to coach his sons’ Little League baseball teams for nine years.

Cole Electric has grown over the past decade but Brian Cole hasn’t lost sight of the fundamentals for success in business. “Our strength is in our workers, especially our project managers and foremen,” he said. “Our goal is to install quality electrical work and we do it while treating people with respect—the owners, contractors and our workers.

“We’ve also learned to focus on pre-job planning. Before we begin a job, we’ll have the project foreman spend as many as 100 hours reviewing every detail. It’s important to build on information and manage the process. I began to learn about this business with my father and I’ve come to realize that you never stop learning. If you think you know everything, you’re in trouble.”

Brian Cole set out more than 20 years ago to build his own business and Cole Electric has become the Upper Valley’s largest electrical contractor, now working on projects throughout Vermont and New Hampshire. He’s turned over site work to three project managers because his job these days is to “manage our business better and keep learning.”