The shop
Highline Electrical Services runs twelve techs across two crews in the Boise metro.
Residential service and small commercial — restaurant fit-outs, dental offices, a couple of pharmacy buildouts a year. Jared Boateng owns and runs the shop. He bought it from the previous owner in 2022, when it had four techs.
Tripling headcount in three years means a lot of hiring. Two techs came from the local IBEW, three from a competitor that closed, the rest from a mix of trade-school grads and journeymen looking for steadier work. Twelve people, twelve ways of doing the same load calc
The problem wasn't accuracy. It was variance.
For the four years before Highline grew, this didn't matter. Jared did most of the calcs himself. Past eight techs, it stopped scaling. Calcs piled up on his desk for review. New hires waited a week to learn the shop's house style. Estimates went out late.
"I was the bottleneck. Twelve techs and one set of eyeballs is bad math."
The switch
Highline rolled out Breakerbox's Load Calculator across the team in January. The training was an afternoon. Jared walked through three jobs with the techs, ran the calcs side-by-side with the tool's calcs, and showed where the demand factors lived inside the app.
By the second week, every tech was running their own calcs. Same job, same number, regardless of which truck. Jared stopped reviewing every calc and started reviewing every fifth one as a spot check.
| Workflow | Before | With Load Calculator |
|---|---|---|
| New-hire onboarding | 1 week shadowing on calcs | 1 afternoon |
| Calc variance across techs | 5–10% spread | Zero, by definition |
| Owner review queue | Every calc | Spot checks |
About six hours a week back across the team, by Jared's accounting. Most of it shows up as faster estimate turnaround. Some of it is Jared spending less time at his desk and more time on the bigger jobs.
Where they are now
Highline is hiring two more techs by Q3. Jared runs them through Breakerbox the first week. By week two they're calc-ing their own jobs with the same number Jared would have come up with himself.
The standardization matters in another spot too. When a customer pushes back on a panel-upgrade recommendation, Jared can pull up the calc, point to the specific load that tipped the math over, and walk them through it. The conversation isn't "trust me." It's "here's the math." Most customers don't push back twice.
The shop's growing. The calc workflow finally isn't.