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Electrical X-Factor is all about the fast-paced, ever-changing world of the electrical trade as seen by a seasoned electrician who’s been in the business for over 40 years. David Moss, CEO and founder of Patriot Electric in Victoria, BC, doesn’t hold back. He comes from the school of hard knocks… and class is in session.
EP Production Team (00:19.21)
After 40 years in the trade, you learn a few things. You can make a living 8 to 5, but you can make a life from 5 to midnight.
The electrical industry is on the cutting edge. High risk, high reward. It's a necessary one, but potentially fatal, always changing, and poised to enter the future leading the charge. You can be a part of the industry for a long time and still need to redefine what it is you do. What does it take to last in the industry? It's a trade that might seem at odds with itself, filled with old-school grappling of staying current. If they don't rise with the wave, they go under.
What's a legacy? It's something you leave behind. It's long lasting and positive, you hope. It's something you build, something to be remembered by. It's how people think of you and talk about you when you're not around. It comes from the things you do and how you do them. I kind of had to refer back to what my initial understanding of what a legacy was and that's typically something that's very, very important. It's not something he thinks about often, but electrician, CEO.
and founder of Patriot Electric, David Moss, has had time to work on his legacy. He's only been doing this for 40 years. So maybe some people's legacy is going to be a book they wrote or a car they built or a home they built. that's
a symbolic piece of legacy. From a business point of view, it's like I mentioned, it's more of the ability to persevere, change, take risks, stay on point with your quality and determination for always doing what's right. A job has to be pretty special for someone to stick it out for such a long time. Let's rewind. What makes someone want to go into the industry in the first place?
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looking at being an electrician or considering my next phase in my life was when I was around 20. The beauty of that was I was coming out of a family-run business of photo finishing. We were the second lab in Victoria. Long story short, I didn't see myself quote-unquote spending the rest of my days in the dark working with chemicals. So in photo finishing I said no there's no way I'm more of an outdoorsy kind of guy. I said all right shift gears what am going to have my options? Well dad's a mechanical contractor, twin brother's a general contractor, framer.
Well, we don't got no damn electricians in the family. So then I said to myself, okay, do I want to be a plumber like my dad? And you know what happens? Shit flows downhill, paydays and Friday. And or do I want to sling around a foreign plywood that weighs about 90 pounds a sheet like my brother in...
knee-high mud and then stepping on electric cords that don't have proper grounds and getting shocked and shit and so on. Just because you might not get rained on, don't think it's all sunshine and roses. I was working 16 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week when I first started in my 20s and in my early 30s. And I'd be driving sometimes all the way till midnight and then be back at home, go to bed, get up at 6 30, go to work. That's just what we did. You can make a living eight to five, but you can make a life from five to midnight.
If you expect to be able to live like you want to live, you weren't going to accomplish that in a nine to five job. There was nobody that I saw working nine to five, living the way I wanted to live. I guess you could say the school of hard knocks, which is basically putting you through the struggle because if there's no struggle, there's no reward. And so that's when I started to get in the trade and say, all right, I'm doing my thing. I'm becoming an entrepreneur. I'm in control of my future, but I'm not financially where I want to be. David's a big believer in knowing exactly what you want.
Maybe not when or how to get it, right out of the gate. But you need to make it to the track. For David, it all started with a picture on a fridge. I have a lake home on my refrigerator with a dog in the dock and some kids. And that stayed on my fridge since I was 20 years old, all the way until I was 44 years old. That same picture. Took it off and threw it away twice. I didn't actually throw it in the garbage, I just...
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give it this one here. In frustration and disappointment. Almost gave up. But didn't. David's been in the industry for a while now. He's seen it change. He's seen the people change. For the health of the industry, it has to. It needs to keep up in the world. It needs new blood. But there's just a tiny issue with that. What I found over the industry over the last 20...
I guess 23 years that I've been in it, is that young people are changing. So they're not work ready. That's Mark Chappell, senior project manager at Patriot Electric. A tale as old as time. The military has slang for its recruits fresh out of basic training. F-N-G. F-ing new guy. Everybody has to start somewhere. But it's a real concern in an industry like electrical, where one wrong move
can be your last. For one thing, it's the difference in mindset. When they hit the industry, they're not ready to work. They don't know what's expected of them. They don't understand that this is the job you have to do to get to the job you actually want. So they all get into the industry thinking that, I'm to be somewhat important. So you got to pay your dues, then you get there. So there's an expectation that is completely unfounded in today's youth. They watch all these guys play video games on YouTube and think that, hey, I can make money playing video games. No, you can't.
You got to have a personality. You got to have the right game. You got to be the right time. There's a lot of things that these guys did that you're not just going to magically know how to do. So they don't think you to pay their dues, which is probably my biggest problem with today's youth in the industry, unrealistic expectations. What do you do if the next generation doesn't seem prepared? How do you hand over the keys to the kingdom? How do you entrust all that you've built, all the work you put into it over decades to newcomers? Yeah.
The biggest thing that I think that they need to understand is they need to have patience. They need to be able to think outside of the box, approach things from a different angle. And it's not necessarily about always knowing the answer, it's about knowing how to find the answer. You don't have to know everything, you just have to be able to find out how to figure it out. So in my career, there's been plenty of times where I've walked into something where there's no instruction manual for it. There's nothing you can find for it, but you manufacturer's a phone call away. It's knowing that you can do that and feeling comfortable doing that, picking up the phone and making that call.
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that's going to make you stand out from the rest. even then, picking up the phone at all can be terrifying for younger people today. We're so ingrained in, you know, texting, you know, just calling and talking to people. It's hard for people sometimes, right? Just talking to people now. That's Paul Goetz, engineer and training project coordinator at Patriot Electric. I think we still got some place. We got some things to work on there, definitely. Confidence in just, you know, getting stuff done and, you know, being able to talk to people. I think it's just.
people getting out there, right? Because for me, it's, you know, we're very behind the screen nowadays. Paul is newer to the industry than David and Mark, but David wouldn't have taken him on if he didn't think he could handle himself. These guys like Paul, very few guys like Paul, that'll actually go ahead and jump in both feet and learn it and not be scared of it, even though it's not part of their profession or whatever. He just did what was asked of him and respectfully for the overall benefit of the team and the company, he's doing that. As these types of people,
And there's other people like that in the trade that are willing to go outside the box to learn and to do. And by that, they're going to become the experts and the leaders in what they're doing because they were able to say, no, I don't know how to do that. Or that's not part of my this or that's not this. No, no. But the positive attitude. Yeah, I'll figure that out. Or no, I don't know, but I'll figure it out. Or no, I don't know right now, but I'll get back to you. You could probably say that any of your cohorts or anybody around the same discipline you're in.
If they can attribute to those kinds of skills and attitudes, they're going to be able to excel.
So having those soft skills that are missing from today's youth is what really you need to get into this industry, feel.
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Well, how you develop those soft skills, right? Like Marcus mentioned, he says, they're not ready. They're not ready to work. Well, how do we get them ready to work? I think that all has to start in high school. When I was going to high school, they had the trades programs in the school where you could, you know, do some mechanics work, wood shop, like all those sorts of things. I feel like the other classes that are mandatory to take, you know, your sciences, your maths, all your social studies, English, those should also be incorporated in those real world soft skills. That's the only way we're really going to get these youth ready for this, right? So I thought they get to university.
it's almost too late. Now you're trying to learn all these skills while you're trying to learn how to work, that's just an immense amount of additional pressure that you could not have if you would have learned those skills at an earlier age. And obviously parents can help with that to some degree, but by and large, work, your mom and dad aren't there to help you. So what better place to learn that than in school when your mom and dad aren't there to help you? Probably their biggest challenge is their own insecurities, not necessarily feeling like they can do the job.
And a large part of that is because you're working with people that are very good at what they do and you never really had that experience unless you were in sports or something like that where you excelled at where you knew, hey, I can learn this. They don't have that confidence that they can do this. They can learn this unless they've actually done that in their personal lives or athletics. It's really difficult for them to do that and they don't have the problem solving abilities. So that's also hindering them in the industry because if you walk into a situation and
your mom and dad have solved all your problems for you all your life, you have no problem solving skills. So that's another thing that's really hurt the young kids coming in industry. So the ones that I find are that excel as at a young age in the industry, I'm sure Dave can personally attest to this, are the farm boys, farm girls, because they've had to solve their own problems their whole lives. Nobody's come to rescue them. I would love to have a company full of farm kids.
Great, great kids, hard workers, they problem solve, they think outside of the box, because they've always had to. If they could teach that to all the other kids, that'd be great. We have a very healthy industry. But at the same time, the next generation of electricians are facing other kinds of challenges. They're overcoming different barriers. There's still going to be the school that hard knocks. Their barriers might be different barriers than my barriers were. For almost anybody going through coming up from ground zero is going to be financial. That's going to be the number one.
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they're coming to work into a bigger city or into where the colleges are, they're sometimes seeing themselves bunk with a house with 10 to 12 people. Now think about this. So they rent a house, there's one bed in the house, there's 10 to 12 other young individuals there. Think about the distractions in there and with the workload and the focus that it takes to become a tradesperson and become a star at it. Whereas when I talk to these young kids now that are coming through that are renting rooms in houses with all the distractions. Well, first of all, they're getting
pulled away from their focus and their study time. They're getting distractions. They're trying to feed themselves. They're trying to, you know, get to work, get home, stay committed. It's like they're just getting bombarded with all that. So they can get knocked off the rails real quick. Well, a lot of them are dropping out. I sit on the Apprenticeship Advising Council Board for Camosco College. I'm the longest standing member there right now. I've been on that since 2001.
And so each year or at least every six months, we're going to be doing every six months, getting together with all the stakeholders in the industry. And we talk about how the, what's, what's impacting the industry, what's happening and so on and so forth. But the, the common thing is about the apprentices coming up is that there, there's a real struggle with them coming down from the interior to find a combination to stay here while they're going to college. And if they do, how can they afford that? And if they do get a job.
you know, where they're to stay, that's the number one thing. That's their first thing, their most concern is where am going to stay, where am going to live? And then from there they have to worry about, you know, paying rent, paying groceries, getting tuned from work. It's a big task. It knocks 20 to 40 % of the kids right out of the market after the second or third year. They just can't do it. They just can't do it. You'd think that being raised on technology would make the next generation of electricians adept at doing this sort of work. You'd be...
Well, it's changing for the good and the bad, obviously. On the negative side, I've definitely seen a reduction in productivity. The next generation that's coming up doesn't have the same work ethic that I grew up with or that David has grown up with. There's a lot more time-wasting activities, people on their phones. And so in some ways, technology has been a hindrance to the industry, I feel. But obviously in other ways, it's been a benefit. You know, can quickly and easily Google something you don't know how to do or something you don't know how to fix. You can quickly and easily watch YouTube videos for tutorials on how to actually...
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install something, so there's a lot of great benefits to technology. And that would be the greatest adder to the sites. I feel is technology. You can go on to any job site and you can document everything via video. That can all be put onto a 3d modeling. So there's a lot of amazing innovations on the job sites that are brought by tech. There's nothing more important than when you, you walk away from a textbook or an environment where it's controlled and you walk into an uncontrolled environment without a textbook. And now you're relying on the environment that you're in and you.
need to execute the solution physically to make it right. And then the bonus of that is the praise you're going to get back, whether it be the homeowner or the superintendent, that's when you start to gain your confidence and your ability to grow and learn and then pass that on as experience to another EIT, another co-op or another apprentice electrician. So this gap that we have, I think the first thing that's going to involve is training. The training comes in mostly from the private sector. The education is going to be coming from mainly either the colleges that are going to be
influenced in changing their course loads. So that's what we're as stakeholders when we come in to talk to the colleges at least every six months to a year, we're always talking about, okay well we're seeing these shifts in the industry on technology. This is what our customers are asking for, this is what we're providing, this is what we're going after and your apprentices aren't doing anything to do with that. But that is such a big shift that takes so long to turn that generally speaking by the time that that's implemented you're two and three years down the road maybe even more.
That's a losing proposition for the students entering the trade. But there's a fix. One that David has already tapped into. So the alternative to that is we either need to train ourselves. In-house training is absolutely the best. When you're trying to build a dynasty, you hit the market for free agents or you grow your own electricians. We can't always get the best, but the best that we can get, we want them and we'll pay them accordingly.
And then if they're not the best, want to train them to be the best and to bring them up from where they are. There's a huge cost involved with that training, obviously, that companies like Patriot or like GE have to bear. We understand that that's a real thing that we're going to have to do if we want to have quality employees going forward. Dave's, he's always been someone who's very much supported the colleges and the industries here. So he's taken a basically a lead on that as far as the city of Victoria goes from what I understand. And more people need to do that.
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You need to get more involvement from all these different firms in the industry to get these guys work ready. Guys, gals, sorry. They just got to get them up to snuff. And there's no other way to do that other than teach them. Because they're not getting that from a young age. They're not getting that in school. It's when they get to the workforce. it's, now it's incumbent upon us to teach them how to do that. that is the best way to do it. If we grow our own team, we train the way our culture is. We train our mannerisms. We train them with our quality assurances. The senior electricians...
are going to be seasoned in our culture, in our ways. And generally speaking, more of the troubleshooting and experience side of things. The new generation coming in are probably going to be Google savvy on a lot of shit. And they're going to be also savvy on what the code says, but how to put that together when they arrive there. That's why you need to have, and it's required by, by code. The journeymen have two to three apprentices at most supervision on the site.
Matter of fact, in some cases it's one to one, but rarely is it one journeyman to three apprentices. Generally it's one to two. So that's where you have that on-site personalized supervision and training because they need it. Electricians need to look out for one another. When things go wrong in a trade like this, you don't often get to make the same mistake twice. Let's make one thing clear. You don't mess around with electricity. I can't say enough good things about electrical industry, construction in general. There's obviously, know,
There's horror stories, you hear them all the time, you see them all the time, but by and large, my life's been good. There's some dangerous things as a part of our industry. Like every time you drive past power lines and you see a hard hat glued to the bottom of those power lines, a line's been life was lost. So there are horror stories in the industry. I'm just lucky that I've never been a part of them, right? I've heard about them, I've talked to people who have been a part of them or seen people that have had, you know, horrific accidents, but I've been very fortunate to always be very safe and have a crew people around me that have, you know,
done their utmost to make sure that I went home every night. So I've been very fortunate that way, but there is horror stories out there, 100%. When I was a first brand new apprentice electrician, I was working with a senior journeyman who took me to meet two retired injured electricians, both high voltage accidents, but both still alive. One of them had his legs blown off. He was in a wheelchair and he was still alive. That was horrific.
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introduction to him. The other gentleman I met who another high voltage accident had his skin melted off, break down both arms and he was wearing plastic shields. those were enough to talk about horror. There's no room for mistakes in the electrical trade. They're deadly. There's deadly. You're going to be dead. You'll be dead. I mean if you come out of an electrical accident alive, there's an angel watching over you and it wasn't your time but generally you don't get that chance.
So it was a real wake-up call for that's why it's so rigorous and testing and education and the amount of safety requirements are for a real good reason. And our flashes are like I said before, they're the surface of the sun temperature. So there's no coming back from that. I always heard all the time, everybody will try to do their electrical but nobody will do their own plumbing. Nobody wants to clean up a water mask but they don't mind taking a chance at electrocuting themselves.
You're picking the wrong one, man. You can clean up water. You can't unburn your skin. Or you can't non-unburn your house down. yeah, there's definitely a lot of people try to do it themselves. And then they typically, when they get in trouble, they call an actual electrician to come and take care of it.
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Big part of being an electrician is being hands-on. Having someone watching over your shoulder, making sure you don't kill yourself is a pretty big deal. But it's more than that. Having a mentor is essential. David's been through it, and he knows the value of having one, if not becoming one himself. They're not just numbers. They're people. want to try it again. You guys have heard me say this all through the whole conversation here. Have them identify what they want and help them get it.
You know, because see, that's what someone did for me. I didn't sacrifice my dreams and settle for something. I was always surrounded by people that encouraged me to stretch and reach higher, equip yourself. I was always taught, you know what, you need to find the people that are living the way you want to live, taking the vacations you want to take and doing the things you want to do. And then you want to find how to become their apprentice and or be mentored by them. That's where the mentorship comes in. And see, that's where you're to hear Dave Moss talking about
That's what we have to offer this new generation, this generation coming behind us that's maybe struggling trying to figure out how are ever going to do this, how are we ever going to have any more. Well, you better find a freaking mentor. If you don't have one straight up, good luck. And I sincerely mean that, good luck. But I couldn't do it without one. I needed someone to turn to to call in the night or in the evenings or when I'm sitting there freaking out on what decision should I make.
and knew that I could contact someone that had a personal interest in me. And it wasn't just a paid conversation, it was a friendship conversation that could actually sincerely guide me and open a door. And then you talk about loyalty, that's when you develop loyalties that are lifelong, cherished memories. You can pass those same things right onto the next generation. My advice to young kids that would be looking into the trades right now, pick one where you feel like you can excel with your skill set that you currently have.
Don't necessarily overreach so you you can't get past a grade eight education. Don't go into electrical, right? It's not the trade for you. There's drywall, there's painting, there's scaffolders, there's lots of other trades that you can do. You can still work with your hands. You can still be engaged in a job site that you could do with your limited education. So work with your strengths. Get into a field where you can actually utilize your strengths. So if you're a big strong farm kid, good chance that you can be an electrician, good chance you can be a plumber, you can be a pipe fitter, you can be steam fitter.
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gas fitter, lots of heavy lifting stuff that those kids could be, they could really excel at. If you're a more academically minded person, electrical is a great trade for you because there's a lot of electrical math theory that you really need in order to actually be successful in this industry. So utilize your strengths and don't be afraid to ask questions, don't be afraid of failure. That's one of the biggest things that I would love for kids to understand is life is failure. It's all about failure.
You fail every single day. It's how you learn and move on that's going to dictate your future. So kids nowadays are so afraid of making mistakes and screwing up that they just don't try. So I think being comfortable with failure and understanding that it is a part of life would be a huge benefit to the kids coming up as well.
In many ways, the electrical industry is the wild frontier when it comes to technology, in that it's characterized by innovation. With that comes new dangers. The old ways may not exist anymore, and experienced electricians need to find new ways to survive. David may speak about legacy, and it's still to be determined, but he's not ready to cash out just yet. Well, when are you going to retire? Never. Not for a long time. I'm still on fire.
The industry is exploding. If I wasn't part of this right now, like the industry is going like this and if you're retiring, I want to be going with that rise. And I have a responsibility at this point to pass on what I've learned so that these other guys have a good opportunity to ride this next wave. Like I've ridden a couple of waves and I've ridden them down too. Now there's a new wave happening right now. David's in the right place at the right time.
He and his team at Patriot Electric are more than ready for whatever the future has to offer. There's so many new technologies coming out, they're going to create more of an influx of work than has ever been possible before. So think the industry is going in the right direction. I'm excited to see where it's headed in the future. Changes all the time, know, now solar is coming out and know, EVs and all these new things, it never ends. Well, it's fantastic for us in our position. Bad instances, you know, it just never ends. It's always something new every single day.
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As far as technology goes, that's probably one of the fastest advancing technology trades that there is. There's always going to be something to learn in that industry. I am someone who's very passionate about learning and furthering my own education. So that's really the reason I chose electrical is I knew that I would always be able to learn for my entirety of my career, essentially. Like I'm only one person. I can only do so much. I can only read so much. The industry is changing so rapidly that I definitely depend on, you know, people.
like David, our journeymen that are in our field, our other office staff, Polly, Ashley, they do their own research on things. Mark is talking about Paul Goetz and Ashley Brown, another member of Patriot Electric, who we'll hear from next episode when we dig into solar energy. It's like a pool of knowledge, right? Collective intelligence, if you want to call it that. I think that's what I need myself to be successful in this industry because I can't do it all myself. I'm sure Dave could personally attest he's been doing it for
40 years. You know, it's a collective thing. You need a bunch of people to be successful in this industry. With all the changes that are coming all the time, nobody can keep up. Nobody has a chance of keeping up. You need that collective mind in order to do that. I love how it's changing. Don't get me wrong. I love seeing where it's going. I feel like it's a very healthy industry. I want to be able to bless the next generation coming behind me with the same opportunity, but give them a freaking chance to stand on my shoulders and take it from there.
That's what I think is going to be a good gift going out. Because I think that's going to pay heavy dividends in the long run. Now we're back to legacy. What it is that David wants to leave behind? He's a road builder. He knows how hard it was coming up. I fought every bloody way. I've bent steering wheels. I've been so mad and frustrated and cried myself to sleep fricking numerous times. Is it easy? No way. If you ask me down one of the questions there, what would you like to be remembered for?
and what would you like to leave behind? That's eventually where I think I'd like to go. Because I'd like to give those who really, really are fighting for what they want and really, really digging in and doing whatever it takes like I did. I want to be able to see what it would take to put a scholarship together or some kind of a bursary together that can feed that individual either a one time or maybe on an annual basis for those falling in behind there. So there needs to be something that the province is going to put together to support these kids.
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coming in and helping them out with some kind of a financial aid. That needs to happen because I think that's the first and foremost hurdle to these young people coming in. The province is going to have to step up. I think my legacy in comparison would be a lot more fluid and a lot more spread out over time. And it wouldn't be one particular thing. It'll be a number of different things. It might be the continuing education that I've taught numerous electricians and apprentices along my journey.
to hopefully carry on that same culture and determination, professionalism, admiration by the inspectors. This is how David does business. That's part of the legacy too. Because a company's actions and reputation reflects back on its founder. What have you remembered for? Well, I think having a company that's, like this is it right now. It's basically my mission statement.
and that is that we want to have the highest of integrity. In other words, you tell them the truth. There's no lying. So there's no room for that. I'm standing on your word. If we're going to do it, we're going to do it and we're going to come through. And if there's any change in something, we're going to try and do the best we can to resolve it because there's always going to be those times where there's going to be misunderstandings and miscommunications and so on. But having the utmost of integrity, honesty, ethics.
interest in our staff to support their vision and dream. I always ask people that, where do you see yourself in a year, two years, five years? I constantly ask my new recruits that because if they can't answer it that tells me a lot about where they're at. They're lacking vision, they're lacking focus and so they're so concerned about their day-to-day that they haven't had a chance to look further down the road. So I want to help paint that picture for them. Give them the reason to understand that this is reason to get up in the morning, go through the struggle,
so that you know there's gonna be a prize at the end of that. So don't give up halfway through. So I gotta try and, for those that don't have that vision, I gotta try and instill that into them. I think that's gonna give them legs to keep going. And so those are the kind of the attributes I wanna be remembered for. I've probably reinvented myself a dozen times in the trade. Like that's not just me personally, but my whole company's scope of what we do. So the ability to adapt.
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to go through hard times and not be afraid of taking risks. Those are parts of the legacy of a patriot and a Dave Moss. Not just one thing, but the ability to do those things. That's the legacy that you need to understand that you went through those things.
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Surviving in this industry is about knowledge and experience, or learning and taking your lumps. It's about the flow of things and resilience. Bending, but not breaking. You've got to have support, those who helped you, and those you help in turn. It's a cycle, and it's always in motion. This industry's not for those who stay static. Be grounded, but unafraid to swing out of your shoes when it counts.
And you need to be able to see over the horizon. The electrical trade isn't the same as it was 40 years ago when David Moss was starting out, but it's always had an air of change. Electricity was a big deal when Edison flipped the switch and lit up Manhattan for the first time in 1882. That was then. Even now, it feels like standing on the precipice of the next big thing, harnessing the power of the sun.
and building bigger and batter batteries. But if electric technology is an arms race and the market is an unregulated no-man's land, we're also inventing new and creative ways to put ourselves in danger. What happens when a technology we're just starting to understand utterly and catastrophically fails? David Moss has some idea. He might just have some solutions in mind too. Join him
and his guests from around the industry on Electrical X Factor.