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By Kim Gooden for the Tribune

When Heath Reindal took Pam Koenen’s Basic Electricity class in his junior year of high school, he never imagined the wheels it had set in motion for his future.

That class had piqued his interest in electricity, so for the next two summers he worked for Kenny Anderson, an electrician in the Alden area.

When the time came to make post-secondary plans, Reindal knew he wanted to go to a trade school.

“I figured since I already had some experience with electricity, and they offered that program in Albert Lea, that’s what I was going to do,” he said.

When he finished his two-year course to be an electrician, Reindal was an apprentice electrician. That meant he could do electrical work under the supervision of a journeyman or master electrician.

So he went to work full-time with E & I Specialists, wiring ethanol plants across Iowa, and continued to work with Anderson on weekends.

He enjoyed what he was doing and had never given any thought to owning his own business, but one day Anderson’s wife, Dorothy, told him that Kenny wanted to retire and asked if he’d be interested in taking over.

“It took a lot of thought,” Reindal said. “I was working on the road at ethanol plants all over Iowa and newly married. I knew that working on the road wasn’t going to last forever.”

But he also knew that he would be giving up a steady paycheck every week by owning his own business, something he’d never done before.

“It was a tough decision but we knew it was a very good opportunity,” Reindal said.

And just like that, after only working in the field for five years, Reindal found himself the owner of his own electrical business — Reindal Electric — in January 2008.

Anderson agreed to work with him for three years and it was just the two of them for the first two years. Anderson was the master electrician in the business until Reindal completed his journeyman electrician’s license, and then his master electrician’s license a year later. In 2010 they took on another electrician, and Anderson started phasing out.

Then, in 2019, Reindal acquired Dennis Klocek’s electrical business.

“He approached me about buying his business,” Reindal said. “He had been doing it for 25 years and wanted to continuing doing the work but be able to go home at the end of the day without the responsibilities of ownership.”

It proved to be a win-win for Reindal’s business.

Klocek continues to work with Reindal on a part-time basis, along with full-time employees Aaron Chicos, Braden Routh, Kris Manges and Derek Miller.

While taking over two established electrical businesses has been a good move, it hasn’t always been easy.

“Owning your own business takes a lot of time — a lot more than most people would think — if you want to be successful anyway,” Reindal said. “But I’m glad we did it.”

While his wife, Diana, has helped with the bookwork end of the business all along, it has made a big difference since she joined the business full-time in 2023.

“It took a load off me,” he said.

However, having her leave her full-time job with benefits meant the loss of a second steady paycheck.

“It was a challenge, but fortunately, it hasn’t been an issue,” Reindal said.

There have been other challenges along the way.

“When I bought Kenny out, I moved all the supplies from his garage to the garage at our house. We had one van and some racks in the garage,” Reindal recalled.

That lasted two years.

“Then we moved the supplies to a bigger building in a residential part of Alden, which worked out well because we later moved to the neighborhood where the building was,” he said.

“And the stuff I got from Dennis’s building was mostly out at my dad’s until we got our new building in 2022.”

The new building is a 60-by-80-foot shop with a 16-by-30-foot office and breakroom located on the main road through Alden.

Now all the materials and the office are under one roof and this has made a big difference, since the office was formerly in the basement of Reindal’s home.

All of the employees meet at the shop at 7 a.m. every morning to load the supplies they will need into their vehicles before setting out to take care of whatever jobs are on the docket for that day.

“We prioritize most of our work and try to take care of the most important things first,” Reindal said. “And then we work on checking off the other jobs that are on the list.”

Coordinating everything — from having the necessary materials to scheduling someone to do the job — is one of the biggest challenges Reindal deals with.

“Sometimes things fall through due to weather or other things and we have to have a Plan B or Plan C,” he said.

“For a couple years the biggest challenge was getting the materials when we needed them to finish jobs,” he said. “It’s better now, but that’s why we keep as much inventory as we do.”

The territory they cover is about a 45-mile radius from Alden, including all of Freeborn County.

“Most of our work is agricultural — grain drying facilities, livestock buildings and equipment storage — but not just for farmers,” Reindal said. “We do a lot for coops and implement dealers too. Even most of the houses we wire are on farms. But we do houses for other people, too.

“We do some commercial work, but not a lot.”

While he knows he has to take care of things like ordering parts, answering phone calls and going through invoices, he would prefer to be out working on a job.

“I try to spend a day in the office, but I can’t ever get through even part of the day before someone calls,” he said. “And that’s OK. It just means I’ll be in the office on Saturday or Sunday to catch up. But that doesn’t bother me.”

That customer service is one of the things that accounts for the ongoing growth of his business, but Reindal is quick to give credit to his employees.

And having happy, satisfied and appreciative customers is one of the biggest rewards of running his own business, he said.

Now that he has a shop with plenty of storage and a crew of very capable employees, has he given any thought to future expansion?

“I’m not opposed to growing a little bit more, but we are at the point where I can’t hardly take on any more and still go out and do what I’m doing,” Reindal said. “And I don’t ever want to stop being out in the field.

“Right now we are in a pretty comfortable spot and we have a good grip on everything. It would take a lot of thought to expand more than this.”