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James Ely remembers being around 12 years old in the early 1970s when he moved in with his stepfather, a residential electrician by trade, in Philadelphia.
“At the time, I had no choice,” Ely said with a laugh, sitting at a mahogany conference table in a temporary office space near Penn Treaty Park. His regular office was under construction and not suitable for visitors.
However, as I grew older, I began to understand the value of such work.
“I started liking it when I was 18,” said Ely, wearing a tweed jacket with a mauve paisley collar. “By the time I was 28, I had started my first business.”
Eley has now been working as an electrician for 40 years in both residential and commercial settings. And he’s still driving the business forward, despite several “rebirths” after weathering an economic downturn and the coronavirus pandemic.
Now in his late 60s, he is focused on preparing his company to improve its chances of winning federal contracts for commercial electrical construction and maintenance.
“I’m still learning the system and how to procure work, but it will apply to all commercial buildings in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware,” he said.
He is a minority-owned, veteran-owned, certified small business with a single-source contracting and affirmative action process, and contracts with government agencies at the federal, state, and often local levels.
Ely was able to move toward that goal with a $5,000 small grant that included business support from the Philadelphia Urban League and Elevate Together.
At Northeast Philadelphia Office Max in September 2023, 20 small businesses in the city were awarded $100,000.
This is the third year in a row that Elevate Together, which is funded by the Office Depot Foundation, has donated to the Urban League and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
The recipients of the grant range from restaurant owners to winemakers. Each business owner was matched with a mentor from the U.S. Small Business Administration to improve their company strategy. In a way, Ely said winning the grant was a source of inspiration.
“I stopped networking for a while, but now I’m going out again and meeting people. That’s how things happen,” he said.
A self-taught commercial electrician, he spent countless hours studying architectural blueprints and driving around construction sites, as racial discrimination in the building industry often closed off traditional trade apprenticeships. He went there to study there.
“If I get an answer that I don’t think is right, I pursue it until I find out it’s actually right,” he said of answers that sometimes mislead the target. “So I built my business from scratch. I didn’t have any money from my family. No one in my family was in business. I didn’t have any debt to begin with. But I didn’t have any money. I had a desire. And I learned this the hard way because there was no one to tell me all about it.”
Over the years, he has stepped away from running his electric business, which has waxed and waned in size. He used to work at a large university in the city, but after he won a bid for an attractive project worth about $300,000, he left the university to work independently again.
“Everyone said I was crazy,” Ely said of her co-workers at the time. “You don’t entrust such good work to one project. And I said, ‘Well, let’s see what happens.'”
After this project about 10 years ago, he became affiliated with a large local electric cooperative, but says it can be a burden because it requires a large up-front payment to be successful. Overall, he said, grit was a key factor in his longevity in the business.
Accessing capital to grow your business is a consistent challenge.
That’s because contractors are awarded projects, are expected to pay all employees, materials, and other costs upfront, and then are reimbursed sometimes after 90 days instead of the standard 30 to 60 days. And if a company doesn’t have enough cash on hand to continue operating for a long period of time, it can go bankrupt.
“I learned and I made mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes,” Ealy said. “But you can learn from your mistakes if you don’t give up.”
Despite his steady run, he is now at an interesting crossroads. He’s ready and willing to keep going, but he doesn’t have anyone who wants to ride with him yet.
“My hope is that I can find a young person who has the same vision as me, but doesn’t know how to get there,” he said.
As a small business owner, he is not sure if there is anyone in his network who is interested in the electrical trade. His children have already gone on to different careers. One of his daughters is a lawyer, his second daughter works for an insurance company, and his third daughter lives several states away in South Carolina.
His son, who actually works in the trade, is a foreman at a major electric power company.
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