Excellence in Electrical Contracting

Billitier Electric
Written by Ryan Cartner

Billitier Electric is an electrical contracting company headquartered in Rochester, New York. For forty-eight years, the company has provided electrical contracting services in New York State. It has built a solid reputation for top-quality service and is recognized throughout the region for it.
~
The company was founded in 1970 by husband and wife duo Ron and Helen Billitier and began as a small company, operating out of their family home. However, the pair worked diligently, and after nearly five decades, the company has grown into one of the largest electrical contractors in the state.

Today, the company employs roughly three hundred people, including licensed electricians, expert project managers and qualified design people, enabling it to work with customers on projects from the very early stages of development. From its locations, it serves a territory that includes the states of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

In recent years, the company has focused a great deal of energy and investment in studying the sustainable lighting initiatives being offered by utility companies and the State of New York. Companies that upgrade lighting, through retrofits or complete replacements, to energy-efficient LED systems are often eligible for incentives through sustainability programs. Working through the planning and the paperwork required to achieve these incentives can be a headache, so Billitier has worked to understand these programs in great detail so that it can help customers upgrade facilities to take advantage of them.

After planning the upgrade to meet the program requirements and doing the installation, the company will also handle all the paperwork and cut through the bureaucratic red-tape for the customer. The result is a modern lighting system, that is designed and installed by qualified experts, a notable reduction on energy costs, and a very valuable rebate at the end without any of the inconvenience associated with applying for it.

Promoting efficient lighting solutions to customers is one way that Billitier is working to be a part of the effort to push sustainability and energy efficiency. The company has worked on several projects that have been certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program and has a LEED-certified design specialist on staff. The company is committed to energy conservation, waste reduction, and environmental sustainability.

Helping customers meet the requirements and deal with the application process for efficient lighting rebates is one example of the ways that Billitier works to eliminate headaches, but making life easy for customers is a key component of what the company does. When it is brought into a project, it is fully invested in its success from the initial planning stages to aftermarket preventative maintenance to keep things operating long into the future.

“We can take a job and design it and build it,” says Matt Pfeffer, Vice President at Billitier Electric, “and then we package everything together with close-out documents so that the owners have valuable details and equipment specifications at the end.” Providing close-out documents enables the customer to review the details of an installation later when working on new renovations or upgrades. Among competing companies, this important aspect of the job is often overlooked. “Some contractors just do the job and leave the owner with no information after the fact,” says Pfeffer.

To best serve customers, Billitier has hired experts in many varied disciplines related to electrical contracting. The company has a level of expertise that is unrivaled in the region, extending far beyond the services offered by a standard electrical contractor. Its skilled professionals work on many specialized installations from security and fire alarm systems to telecommunications, fiber optics, public announcement systems, large-scale backup generators, medium voltage distribution, switchgear and general service and emergency work. Recently, the company has done work on solar energy fields and electric car charging stations.

Staying abreast of changes and advancements in the industry is very important, and Billitier continually learns about new technology as it becomes available. As a result, the company is helping to make New York State a progressive place in terms of environmental sustainability. Its capacity to handle these specialized projects combined with its ability to handle all project phases makes them a single source for customers. The company does everything in-house.

The company is a union contractor, and the union is always working with the company’s employees to keep them trained on the newest technologies. This results in a workforce that is continually improving, and ready to solve any problem a job might present. Billitier also holds its own various training for its employees for safety, vehicles, new technologies, customer service, and more.

One of the key challenges facing Billitier, and many other companies in the United States, is a shortage of young people entering the trades. The company has been fairly successful at mitigating this problem by keeping a varied workload. By offering such a wide range of work across many internal divisions, the company has been able to diversify the skillsets available and build a team of trained tradespeople doing interesting jobs. Staff are invested in the success of the company, and each has a personal sense of pride in the work. There is very little turnover, making for a tight-knit group who know how to work together and provide exceptional service.

Service is the foundation of the company, and it has electricians available throughout its service territory. It has a well-established record for prompt emergency response and has experience dealing with any problem that might arise. Electrical outages can be very expensive, and Billitier understands the cost to a company when computers, phones, air conditioning, heating, manufacturing machinery and other important pieces of equipment stop functioning and so it is dedicated to bringing systems back online as soon as possible.

Support technicians are on-call, ready to work long hours to fix even the most challenging outages. The level of expertise at the company enables it to deal with problems very efficiently and quickly.

The electrical preventative maintenance program offered by Billitier helps customers periodically assess an electrical system to ensure that it is operating properly. This enables customers to be able to catch potential problems before they result in downtime.

The Billitier design team has more than forty years of field experience designing electrical contracting projects. As a result of the knowledge they have acquired, the team often offers consulting services to other design groups.

Offering both design and build services enables Billitier to have direct communication between the teams, reducing the time it takes to move from the design phase of a project to the production floor and lowering the potential for problems related to having two disparate companies working together. The result is an efficient operation saving the customer time and money in the long run.

Through a dedication to quality workmanship in the initial install, periodic EPM assessments, and an on-call team of emergency response people ready to go at a moment’s notice, Billitier excels at keeping customers profitable.

AUTHOR

CURRENT EDITION

Hands-On Learning for Future Success

Read Our Current Issue

PAST EDITIONS

Cladding and Exteriors

February 2024

A Concrete Foundation

December 2023

Elegant and Eco-Friendly

November 2023

From Beautiful Bridges to Breathtaking Buildings

October 2023

More Past Editions

Featured Articles