The Electric Roundtable, an organization of privately owned, union electrical and communications contracting firms located throughout the United States, recently voted in B&D Industries, Inc., Albuquerque, N.M., as its tenth member company. A family-owned business, B&D Industries, Inc., has been located in Albuquerque for 57 years. Its electrical specialties include consultation, life-cycle planning, procurement, construction testing and start-up, instruction, and maintenance of electrical components and systems. The firm also performs voice and data communications work.
The firm’s high standards for safety, quality assurance, performance, and productivity earned it the position on the Electric Roundtable, according to Troy Beall, president and CEO of B&D Industries, Inc. The vetting process took over a year. “The first thing they do is look at your financials to make sure you’re stable, but then they throw those away,” explains Beall, meaning that the main priority of the Electric Roundtable isn’t the bottom line. Good business practices, such as customer relations, play a larger role. “Financials aren’t the main concern,” he continues. “They want to make sure you have the customer relationships, quality, and safety that meet their standards.”
The rigorous approval process reached all levels of the company’s staff. “They interviewed our people down to the foreman level — not just our executive managers — to make sure we have the right culture,” says Beall. “They value that our management helps all our workers from the superintendent up. That’s leadership, and that’s something the roundtable values. We’re honored to be a part of it, and we will work hard to do a good job for them.”
Founded in 1991 by a group of electrical contractors for the purposes of sharing best practices and business leads, the Electric Roundtable meets throughout the year to exchange information in every facet of electrical construction, design, maintenance, engineering, and internal operations. “We’re going to be a better company because of this,” says Beall. “These other large electrical firms are going to share their industry best practices with us, and we’re going to share with them. We do things that they may not have done before. So that’s the whole point. We’re not competing against each other, we’re working together.”
All members must be active participants at the national and local levels in the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA). Annual sales for member companies range from approximately $40 million to more than $220 million. To lessen competition further, each member company is drawn from a specific location in the United States, with none overlapping. “With us, they have almost every state covered now,” says Beall. “They had a hole in West Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. They no longer have that hole.”
An official member since October, B&D Industries, Inc. is already working on several projects with other member companies, such as Fenton, Mo.-based Sachs Electric, Indianapolis-based ERMCO, and Alterman, San Antonio. Already, B&D Industries, Inc. has learned a valuable lesson. “We thought our safety program was unparalleled,” says Beall. “But as soon as we got in the roundtable, we found out we could actually get better.” The firm learned a new locking and tagging out process on a nuclear enrichment facility site from a roundtable member company. “ERMCO sent one of their main managers, a VP, down to work on that site. “They helped us with a different set of ideas and made us better.”
