Baker Electric

Leroy Baker started Baker Electric in 1938 in San Diego, rewiring household appliances and the small home-energy systems of pre-war Southern California out of what was then a single-electrician operation. Eighty-eight years and four generations later, Baker Electric is still owned and run by the Baker family — Kent Baker, who joined as an apprentice in 1960 and took over as president in 1982; his son Ted Baker, who took over in 2000 and remains in the role — and is now one of the largest privately held electrical contractors and solar-energy providers in California, headquartered in Escondido and operating across the Southern California metropolitan corridor.

The firm provides full-service electrical construction, renewable-energy installation, and ongoing electrical-service work for the education, government, commercial, residential, and infrastructure sectors. Project portfolios run from school-district-wide electrical builds to multi-million-dollar government installations to the residential solar arrays that NB Baker Electric — the firm’s residential-solar arm, formed in 2007 — has installed for more than twenty thousand households across San Diego, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties. Engineering, project management, and field operations are coordinated from the Escondido headquarters into which the firm moved in 2006.

What distinguishes Baker Electric in its sector is the combination of family continuity and technological breadth. Most American electrical contractors of comparable scale have either been absorbed into national construction conglomerates or have remained narrowly specialised in one segment of the trade; Baker has stayed family-owned through four generations and has, across that time, expanded from electrical contracting into solar installation, battery storage, electric-vehicle charging infrastructure, and the related renewable-energy categories without losing the operational discipline that built the firm.

The practice has worked with Baker Electric at the Escondido headquarters on Lean process implementation across operations.