Safe you Finance

David Payne knows well the history of his family’s electrical contracting business. He has seen the business change many times since its start in the 1950s in Flint, Mich., as a company that primarily worked servicing auto plants. He saw his father make aggressive moves to diversify the industrial projects it worked on, which included moving the company to St. Louis.

So it isn’t without precedent that Payne has stepped up and made changes of his own since taking the helm in the mid-1990s.

In 2000, he led the company in buying commercial electrical contractor Crest Electric. That move proved key in stabilizing the company’s workload and earned it larger projects as well, including work at the Lumi