Baker Electric

LeRoy Baker was an electrical engineer in Missoula, Montana, who wanted warmer weather and whose wife had family in Escondido. The Bakers moved to Southern California in 1937, and the following year LeRoy bought a small shop called Dietrich Electric for $4,000 and renamed it Escondido Electric; the Baker name went up in 1950. Eighty-eight years and four generations later, the firm still runs from Escondido, still has a Baker in the president’s chair, and builds electrical and renewable-energy infrastructure — utility-scale solar, battery storage, transportation, controls — across California.

The firm provides large-scale electrical construction, renewable-energy installation, and ongoing electrical service for the education, government, commercial, and infrastructure sectors, with capabilities grouped across construction, controls, systems technology, transportation, tenant improvement, utility-scale solar, and battery energy storage. Project portfolios run from school-district-wide electrical builds to multi-million-dollar public-works contracts. Residential work sits with an affiliated company, NB Baker Electric — formed in 2007 and now trading as Baker Home Energy — which has installed solar for more than 20,000 households across San Diego, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties and has since widened into batteries, HVAC, roofing, and vehicle charging. Engineering, project management, and field operations are coordinated from the Escondido headquarters the firm moved into in 2006.

For most of the firm’s life the distinguishing fact was family continuity: LeRoy handed the business to his son Neville in 1947, Neville to his son Kent in 1982 — Kent having come up through the trade as a Baker apprentice in 1960, after the Army — and Kent to his son Ted in 2000. In 2020 the family transferred ownership to the workforce. Baker Electric is now wholly owned by its employees through an employee stock ownership plan, and the Bakers hold their posts by office rather than by title deed: Ted as president and CEO, Kent as chairman of the board. In ENR’s 2022 Top 600 Specialty Contractors, Baker ranked 34th nationally among electrical contractors.

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