Shea Electric – where care and communications collide

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

September 7, 2026

OSHKOSH – For two decades, Founder and COO Dan Shea said Shea Electric & Communications has grown by way of intentional investment in its people – crafting a company culture on the idea of “intolerables.”

“There are certain things I don’t tolerate because it’s either illegal, immoral or unethical,” he said. “Those are my three base points.”

At the beginning of his career, prior to establishing his own company, Dan said he operated on a “three-strike system” for each employer he contracted with to maintain his intolerance toward those types of behaviors.

The East Coast native said a lack of steady work after earning his master electrician’s license led him to take jobs across the country.

“I had a master license in many states, and couldn’t get a job because the East Coast and the West Coast fell into a depression back in the 1989-91 era, so I traveled,” he said. “A lot of people from the East and West Coasts came to the center of the country, and they worked in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, all the way down to Tennessee, etc.”

Eventually, Dan said he and his wife, Patty, found their way to the Dairy State in the early ’90s, where he worked for Wisconsin Rapids-based Consolidated Papers during the company’s “No. 16 paper machine” expansion project.

“I was there for eight and a half months, and that was the longest job I had been on in years,” he said. “After Consolidated Papers, the guys wanted to keep me around. So, I stayed working out of that jurisdiction…, [but Patty and I thought], ‘You know what? We should move to Oshkosh because there’s a lot of work in the Fox Valley.’ So, we decided to move to Oshkosh.”

After working for a Northeast Wisconsin contractor “on and off” for a number of years – “I worked my way up to being their No. 1 guy, which says a lot because [I wasn’t] from the area” – Dan said they eventually reached their third strike as well.

“I was starting a very large project [one year], and when we got done with the large project, strike three came,” he said. “So, I gave one month’s notice, because I was running a lot of work for them, [and] they said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’”

Because he found it difficult to maintain his values as an independent contractor, Dan said his intolerables eventually led him and Patty to open their own shop, Shea Electric, in 2006.

“And the rest is history,” he said.

‘The only constant is change’

Though at the time he wasn’t sure about going into business for himself, Dan said Patty encouraged him to take a leap of faith.

“I left [my former employer] and filled out some applications at different places,” he said. “I got some amazing offers, came home, sat at the table and I said to Patty, ‘Babe, what do I do? These are all really good offers.’ And she said, ‘Dan, you love your guys, and you love your customers. You need to go into business.’”

Dan said he was further encouraged by the local support he received early on, with a number of staff and customers following him to Shea Electric.

“[Several businesses] wrote a letter to the banks for me, and said, ‘Dan Shea is my electrician – I hired X-Y-Z company to get Dan Shea, but Dan Shea was always my guy,’” he said.

Because he never planned to intentionally pursue other companies’ client base, Dan said his banker at the time gave him an “amazing idea” to start building his brand.

“He said to me, ‘What would it look like if you had a party and you [invited local businesses] – they can choose to come to support you, and if they don’t come, you don’t have to call on them,’” he said. “So, we had a party…, invited 300 people and 290 showed up.”

Twenty years later, Dan said Shea Electric has established itself as a “partner” of choice for its customers across and beyond the Fox Valley region.

“I’m not a vendor,” he said. “I can’t stand the word ‘vendor,’ so we call them partners… [because] we act like a partner, we care about their ROI [and] we care about their business.”

Dan said Shea Electric differentiates itself with its commitment to quality, consistency and process innovation.

“This company is extremely intentional with everything we do,” he said. “[We have] standard operating procedures, which are unheard of in construction…, and we redo our processes every three years religiously. We bring people together…, depending on the process, we do a working lunch and we have them spend the time to beat it up to make it better.”

The spirit of continuous improvement throughout Shea Electric, Dan said, is a symptom of how he chose to build it 20 years ago.

“I went into business, and I knew if I bought for $1 and I sold for $1.15 I was making money, but I had no idea how or why,” he said. “I graduated high school, but I couldn’t read a balance sheet, didn’t understand a P&L… so I joined NECA – the National Electrical Contractors Association.”

While attending a NECA conference, Dan said he met Phil Rose, president of Milwaukee-based Roman Electric.

“[He’s] an unbelievably intelligent person [who was] running a very large company at the time,” he said. “After meeting him, I came home, I had Envision Greater Fond du Lac do some research on the company, and once I got it, I read it, memorized it and then I asked for a meeting with Phil Rose.”

In that meeting, Dan said he assured Rose Shea Electric had no intention of moving in on Roman’s territory, and asked if he would consider being a mentor.

“After talking through dinner, he said ‘sure,’” he said. “So, four months go by – I’m meeting with him every month, and we’re talking on the phone every week – and on the fourth month, we met for dinner, and he looked me in the eye and he said, ‘You’re eating faster than I can feed you, and I have my own company to run.’”

So, on Rose’s suggestion, Dan said he joined Vistage – formally known as TEC (The Executive Committee) – “the world’s largest CEO coaching and peer advisory organization,” per vistage.com.

“I didn’t know what I didn’t know [and] I have a natural curiosity,” he said. “So, I joined Vistage, and it was like trying to take a drink from your fire hose. It was amazing. I learned so much so fast, and applied it.”

That immediate and intentional application of the lessons he derived from his peers, Dan said, was a major culture-setting point for Shea Electric.

“Sam Geist wrote a book, ‘Execute… or Be Executed,’ [discussing how] most people go to an event, a seminar, a presentation, read a book and say, ‘Wow, that was amazing,’” he said. “Then, they go back to work, and they get back in the rut… So, one of my sayings – I have lots of sayings – is, ‘the only constant at Shea Electric is change.’”

A unique working experience

Treating “money as a byproduct” of a good working culture, Dan said, has led to the overall success of Shea Electric and the individual prosperity of his employees.

“I had experienced terrible culture and terrible businesses for years,” he said. “The metric was money – ‘How do I make more money?’”

Forgoing that mindset, Dan said he sought to build a company consisting entirely of hard-working, ethical people.

“We look for employees who share a similar cause/purpose/belief for the company as Dan and Patty Shea, and we look for companies that share a similar cause/purpose/belief as Shea Electric,” he said. “It’s not just about the money – it’s about the outcome.”

Dan said these attitudes are what led Shea Electric to adopt company-wide intolerables – as opposed to a list of values or a mission statement – which are polished regularly but rarely change.

“We wrote them together as a group, every single person,” he said. “We revisit them every single year, and they haven’t changed in seven or eight years.”

The first, Dan said, is a lack of integrity, followed by disrespectful behavior of others, a negative attitude, anything less than a strong work ethic and not treating the safety and well-being of other people as the top priority.

“I never wanted people to say, ‘Hey, Dan, I’m doing the best job I can with the guys you hired,’” he said. “The accountability [was] with me because I’m the one hiring and firing.”

To address that single point of accountability, Dan said he and Shea Electric’s long-time project manager/estimator, Chris Hopf, developed a new strategy that helped with hiring.

“We decided that we were going to hire through youth apprenticeship, and so we got heavily involved in school systems,” he said. “So, we have a youth apprenticeship in high school, which feeds into an adult apprenticeship, which feeds into a journeyman, etc.”

Taking each potential apprentice through a multi-step interview process, Dan said they touch base with people across Shea Electric’s org chart before committing to the program.

“You answer a 25-question [survey], and it pops out a 35-page report about your communication style, because the wheels fall off the bus when you stop communicating,” he said. “Chris and Lesa [Jorgensen, our administrative assistant], or my wife, will interview them…, and they’ll give two thumbs up.”

After receiving approval from the first interview, Dan said the candidate is then reviewed by Shea Electric’s management team before inviting them back for a second interview.

“The second interview is with me, our second project manager, Andrew Borgardt, and then we bring two people in at random from the field,” he said. “They could be apprentices. They could be journeymen. They could be foremen – but we bring in two people from the field for the interview.”

Involving his crew in the interview process, Dan said, ensures each new hire is a continuation of the culture his employees have built.

“We had a person named Peter who started to work here [and] none of the four people who interviewed him were on his first job,” he said. “I call every single person at the end of their first week, so on Friday, I called him and said, ‘Hey, how did it go?’ He said, ‘Dan, I have to tell you something: I’ve never experienced this.’”

Dan said by the end of his first week, the new employee reported feeling as though he’d known his coworkers “forever.”

“[My] team trusts one another so much that if my teammates voted for you, then you’re instantly accepted,” he said. “We get at least 14-16 A+ applications a year, and I get to pick from all those people who are A+.”

With a workforce dedicated to the company – just as much as the company is dedicated to them – Dan said the future for Shea Electric is bright.

“I don’t want [to hire] people who want a job – I want [to hire] people who want a career [and] I want to pay it forward,” he said. “They care for their families, [and] they care for one another. When you look to your left and you look to your right, you have to care for these people. They’re here to make a living, but you can have fun doing it.”

Shea Electric’s focus on its employees extends beyond wages and benefits, Dan said, with the company offering classes on financial literacy and goal-setting alongside union-supported health care and pension plans.

“We offer every single person in the company a professional business coach,” he said. “We’re not talking about a mentor [who’s overseeing] the company – we’re talking about a paid, professional business coach to [help] work on them personally and/or professionally, because work affects home and home affects work.”

Dan said supporting employees as whole people – both through life’s challenges and triumphs – results in a safer and more engaged workforce at Shea Electric.

“If somebody is buried in debt, they’re worried about all this other stuff when they’re working,” he said. “They’re not concentrating on the task at hand, and that’s how they get hurt. So, what would it be like if you taught them how to budget?… [That’s] part of our culture, so they’re making better decisions [and] now, instead of being 60% engaged, they’re 85% or 90% engaged.”

This, Dan said, is especially important as demands for electrical and communications technology not only rise, but expand in scope – requiring more from the people tasked with the installation and maintenance of important infrastructure.

“We’re always breaking something to fix it better,” he said. “With new technology comes new processes.”

Developing this culture of intentionality, safety, continuous improvement and community, Dan said, is supporting both Shea Electric today and the company it’s set to become in the future.

“In this company, we don’t have single points of failure,” he said. “I picked my replacement when I started the company 20 years ago, my right-hand man, Chris Hopf…, [because] at Shea Electric we’re always training our replacement. Everybody shares information because no one person is as smart as all of us.”

For more on Shea Electric, visit sheaelectricllc.com.