What it’s actually like to work at Goodridge Electrical Contractors Ltd, in the words of the people who run it. If you’re thinking about joining us, read this first.
Just because we’ve always done something a particular way doesn’t mean it’s the best way.
Goodridge Electrical Contractors Ltd has its roots in 1984, when my father Trevor founded Goodridge Electronics. The name has changed and we’ve grown considerably, but the values the company was founded on haven’t: honesty, doing things properly, looking after people and taking pride in the work.
Nobody joins us knowing it all, and nobody here never makes a mistake. What matters is attitude: being honest, willing to learn and prepared to take responsibility. We’d rather take on someone who lacks experience but genuinely wants to learn than someone with every qualification going who doesn’t respect the people around them. We can teach skills. We can’t teach that.
Our first apprentice joined us in 2018, went on to be named JTL National Apprentice of the Year, and now runs our electrical department. Others have followed, with regional wins and national finals to their names. Those achievements are theirs. What they say about us is that if you want to develop here, you will be backed.
People here are given a lot of trust and independence. Engineers run their own sites, the office makes its own calls, and managers manage. I’m not in the business every day, and it doesn’t need me to be: projects get run, customers get looked after and decisions get made whether I’m there or not. Having grown the company from a very small operation, that matters to me more than almost anything. A business should be able to run without its owner, and my job is to develop people who take ownership rather than wait to be told.
The other side of that trust is that we expect people to use their initiative, communicate openly, take ownership of their work and support their colleagues. We’re a family-led business, but everyone has a part to play in its future. The company is bigger than any one individual, including me.
In a company this size everyone knows each other, which makes the difficult conversations harder, not easier. We’ve had people not follow the standards expected of them, including on safety, and we have investigated and followed our procedures every time. There is a clear difference between an honest mistake, which we will always help you put right, and knowingly disregarding a safety procedure, which we won’t accept. Looking after people sometimes means making decisions that aren’t popular. We’d rather have that conversation than have someone hurt.
Honesty cuts both ways, so here it is. People who won’t take responsibility, won’t work as part of a team, or won’t keep to the standards tend to struggle at Goodridge Electrical Contractors. Repeating the same mistakes without learning, blaming others, or expecting colleagues to pick up your work does not go unnoticed in a company our size.
That doesn’t make anyone a bad employee. Sometimes what a person wants and what the business needs simply don’t line up, and it’s our responsibility to set clear expectations and give proper support before deciding that someone who is struggling is the problem. But if the paragraph above sounds like hard work to you, we’re probably not the right place.
Stephen Goodridge
Managing Director