Cleveland Electric

MAKING THE CONNECTION 1925-2025 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

MAKING THE CONNECTION

MAKING THE CONNECTION

100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

Copyright 2024 Cleveland Electric All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Cleveland Electric.

Cleveland Electric 3715 Northside Parkway NW Bldg. 100-800 Atlanta, GA 30327 404-696-4550 www.clevelandelectric.com Editors Ken Harbour James Cleveland Jr. Vann Cleveland Project Coordinator Ashley Schling BOOK DEVELOPMENT Author Amy Meadows Editor Rob Levin Photography Lisa Means Cover and Book Design Rick Korab Index Alexandra Nickerson Project Management Stacy Moser Image Management and Production Renée Peyton

Covington, Georgia www.bookhouse.net Manufactured in South Korea

Cleveland Electric Company employee Tony Gilleland completes a quality-control inspection.

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD XI PROLOGUE

MAN AND MACHINE XIII

CHAPTER ONE

STATE OF REPAIR

The Founding of the Cleveland Electric Company 1

CHAPTER TWO

INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH

Cleveland Electric Company Cements Itself in the Industrial Arena 25

CHAPTER THREE

A COMMERCIAL BREAK

Adding Industry Verticals 51

CHAPTER FOUR

THE OPPORTUNITY TO LEAD

The People of Cleveland Electric Company 83

EPILOGUE

THE FAMILY PLAN This timeline gracing a wall of Cleveland Electric’s lobby shares the company’s important achievements from 1925 to the present day.

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INDEX 99

In Cleveland’s fabrication shop, the company can more efficiently assemble large components for a job that are then transported and installed on-site later. (L to R) Jacob Slay, Bryce Carter, Jonathon Darrow, Kamren Adams, Michael McConico, Simon Bright, Victoria Shelton, Cliff Bettis, Christian Correa, and Cody Morris.

A Cleveland electrician completes cable terminations in an electrical panel.

FOREWORD

As we celebrate one hundred years of being in

ny. But I do know that he laid a foundation com-

business, we first and foremost recognize the gift

prised of good family principles and demonstrated

of family and business that was given to us by God.

by example a pathway to success which ran right

God continues to bless our family and our business

through its employees to the customer.

just as He did from the very beginning. The Cleve-

Mary Kay Ash, founder of the highly successful

land family is a Christian family firmly acknowledg-

Mary Kay Cosmetics, once said, “People are defi-

ing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and we are

nitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make

forever grateful for the blessings He has bestowed

any difference whether the product is cars or cos-

upon us and our business.

metics. A company is only as good as the people

Most people have had the opportunity to experi-

it keeps.” Our company has been built by so many

ence family. Most people also have had the op-

wonderful employees.

portunity to experience business. But few people

This book celebrates the employees of Cleveland

get to experience the combination of family and

Electric Company. We could not have done it with-

business together. At Cleveland Electric Company,

out you. On behalf of the entire Cleveland family,

for the past one hundred years we have been able

Thank You!

to combine family and business together for thousands of people to experience in a very positive way and enriching way.

And it is not just five generations of the direct Cleveland family, because we have always considered each and every employee of the company to be an extended family member. I have no idea if Ras H. Cleveland was able to see a century in front of him when he started Cleveland Electric Compa-

Ken Harbour Chief Executive Officer

XIII

Vann Cleveland, pictured here in 1960, knew from an early age that Cleveland Electric would be an important part of his life. Vann’s dad was Louie “Buster” W. Cleveland Jr., and his grandfather Ras was the company’s founder.

PROLOGUE

MAN AND MACHINE Vann Cleveland fondly recalls his first memories of the business that has been an integral part of his family since 1925. The first great-grandchild of Ras H. Cleveland, founder of Cleveland Electric Company, Vann always enjoyed visiting the company’s headquarters at 557 Marietta Street in Atlanta. His father, Louie W. Cleveland Jr., known as Buster, often would take his six-year-old son to the office on weekends to spend time with Ras, who was in his eighties.

Together, the pair would enjoy Coke and peanuts in the break room and even take a ride on the overhead crane. Yet, it was in those moments when they would walk around the motor repair shop floor that Vann truly got to know to his great-grandfather.

“He would be out in the shop looking at the equipment. He was a mechanic, and that’s where Ras H. Cleveland his heart was,” explains Vann, who joined the family business in 1983 and now serves as vice president of business development. “He had a great business sense, but that was not what he liked. He liked the equipment, being out in the trenches with his sleeves rolled up. That’s where he was in his element.”

Today, the small electric motor repair company founded by that mechanic-at-heart is

recognized as one of the most prolific, innovative, and successful specialty contractors in the country. In fact, over the course of a century, Cleveland Electric Company has grown and evolved to offer a comprehensive array of electrical and mechanical construction services to customers across a host of industrial and commercial market sectors. Boasting more than one thousand employees and over $350 million in annual revenues, Cleveland Electric Company prides itself on partnering with customers to develop pioneering solutions that promise to take every project to unprecedented levels.

The company has been able to accomplish all of this while maintaining the family creed that has always been at its core.

As the Cleveland family mission statement notes, “Our family has been richly blessed with resources and opportunities. Our family business is an extension of our family and its values.”

Those values include hard work, honesty, and service to others in business and daily life.

This is the exceptional story of how one man’s vision was transformed into a thriving organization that has been able to meet the demands of an ever-changing construction market while offering the highest possible level of quality and integrity for one hundred years.

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In 1965, a Cleveland employee, known as an armature winder, checks for broken electric motor parts where coils might have been damaged so he can repair or completely replace them, a process called rewinding.

CHAPTER ONE

MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

STATE OF REPAIR

The Founding of Cleveland Electric Company Ras Hitson Cleveland knew that he was ready to hand over the reins of Cleveland Electric Company Inc. in the late 1950s. He had recently survived a heart attack, and he decided that it was time for his sons, Louie W. Cleveland and James R. Cleveland, to take over the organization that he founded as the Cleveland-Browning Electric & Elevator Company in 1925.

He knew that Louie was steadfast, conservative-minded, dedicated, and extremely knowledgeable about his father’s core business. And he admired James as an innovative risk-taker who loved a challenge and wanted to see how he could expand his father’s legacy in new directions. Together, the two brothers were prepared to take control of the burgeoning company that he launched as a forty-year-old who had found his passion for electrical work as a teenager a quarter-century earlier during the earliest days of the industry. n “I don’t think I ever really made a decision about going into the business,” James said in 1991. “It was just natural because it was what I always wanted to do. You know, like a kid who wants to do what his father does—that’s the way it was for me. It was the same for my brother, Louie. We had a close relationship with our father, and we wanted to do what he did.”

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MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

According to Louie, who also spoke of his father’s company in 1991, “I’ve been with the company since I got out of school, so I’ve been through every phase of it. It was sort of understood that whenever you finished with your schooling—however much you were going to take—that you’d go to work in this business. I came to work for my dad and did whatever needed to be done to help hold the thing together.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy. When Ras Cleveland started his own motor repair shop, he had no idea that the country would fall into the Great Depression four years later. He already had very little capital to invest in his business, as well as no credit, and the nation’s financial devastation only made it harder for him to pay for parts and equipment, let alone make payroll. Just to stay afloat, he often had one group of employees work for three days one week and two days the next, while doing the same with a second group—working them two days and then three just to make sure that everyone could put bread on the table. In many cases, his employees had to wait for weeks on end to receive their hourly wages. And at times, he even had to borrow money from those same individuals just to pay for motor parts that were shipped cash on delivery. Fortunately, as James R. Cleveland Sr. noted, “In those days, your word was as good as you could have. That’s the way

“In those days, your word was as good as you could have. That’s the way business was done then. Employees trusted Ras, and key workers stayed with him for many, many years.”

— James R. Cleveland Sr. 2

business was done then. Employees trusted him, and many key employees stayed with him for many, many years.”

That level of struggle was all Ras ever knew.

Holding only a fourth-grade education, he had to leave school as a child after the death of his mother so he could work and help his father and two brothers make ends meet. He picked up odd jobs throughout Atlanta, his hometown, and found

Workers repaired and rewound motors of all sizes in Cleveland Electric’s early days.

CHAPTER ONE STATE OF REPAIR: THE FOUNDING OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

his way into the electrical field as a teenager. He worked at companies like Watton Manufacturing Company, South Electric Company, Carter & Gillespie, Georgia Power Company, and Drum Electric, spending a few years at each stop. Through his various jobs, a spark was lit as he rose up through the fledgling industry and learned every skill he could about repairing direct current, or DC, motors. After marrying his love, Emma Bradley, and

starting a family, he made his way to Bryant Electric Company, which had a machine shop and did electrical work. As son Jimmy Sr. once noted, “He definitely ran Bryant Electric Company. He was the person that everyone came to or called to go get them out of their miseries. So, I would think he had a following of people around Atlanta that he knew, and that helped when he went out to start a business of his own.”

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MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

Seizing an Opportunity In the early 1920s, Ras worked for Browning Electrical Motor Repair Company. He was ready to strike out on his own and build a business, and a unique opportunity presented itself when his employer offered to sell the com-

pany to him. He leapt at the chance and took on a partner: S. H. Browning. Together, they officially formed Cleveland-Browning Electric & Elevator Company in 1925. Initially, the company strictly was a repair shop, handling the type of work that Ras had done for so many years. The business was headquartered in a

This Wright-Way electric chain hoist is used by a Cleveland Electric employee to lift a large piece of machinery in 1972.

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two-story building made of terra-cotta tiles at 557 Marietta Street. The building and the land it sat upon were owned by Ras, who rented space in the building next to the CR Spark Plug Company, even though he had plans for the eventual growth of his own company. When Louie joined the business in 1930, he recalled the jobs that helped keep the company, which had twelve employees at the time, running— even through difficult times.

“When I went to work, I was unskilled at repairing motors,” he once said about the early days of Cleveland Electric Company. “I just learned by experience, working with other, older people—like an apprenticeship. I would do whatever needed to be done on a particular motor. I learned all the phases of it; I learned to go out and do a little troubleshooting, to take a motor off and bring it into the shop. I got to learn how to be a machinist, wind coils, rewind a motor.

Electronics were nonexistent then. We worked on such things as ceiling fans; it was before air conditioning. Everybody had a desk fan—every office had a fan on every desk. We would send a truck and pick up two hundred fans at Western Electric Company, bring them in, and repair them so they’d be ready for summer.”

That was the crux of the business: repairing and rewinding motors of all sizes and horsepower.

From those small fan motors to massive on-site motors that ran manufacturing and transportation equipment, Ras was able to use his expertise to figure out how to fix any and every one of them.

According to son Jimmy Sr., “Dad was a very hands-on person—very hands-on. He would go out with his men on occasion, on difficult jobs, and they would do the job together. He had a following of people around town who would call continued on page 8

A FAMILY AFFAIR In the early 1990s, the Cleveland family got together and decided to draft a family mission statement. The reason was simple, according to Chris Cleveland, who was put in charge of the effort, which was spearheaded by Carol Harbour, the daughter of James R. Cleveland Sr. He wrote, “By looking at our family, we realized that we had enjoyed some success and had been greatly blessed for close to five generations. What we wanted to do was to put down on paper the reasons for this success, outlining the building blocks that had gotten the Cleveland family to the point where it is today. After much discussion, we concluded that many of the values and characteristics of our family had trickled down from the foundation of our family, Ras and Emma Cleveland. Furthermore, their children had continued to ingrain these values and characteristics in each successive generation, which led our family to its current state.” n Upon the completion of the family mission statement, Chris offered advice to any and every family member who read it. “I leave you all with a challenge. Do not let this statement become an antiquated wall ornament or a piece of paper in the back of a desk drawer. Outlining the keys to our family’s success is just the beginning. I challenge you to continue to live these values, passing them on to new family members, never allowing the legacy of Ras and Emma Cleveland to stop growing.”

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Cleveland Electric employee Fred Dudash performs a quality-control inspection.

MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

James Cleveland Sr. (left) and Louie Cleveland Sr. at the 1971 groundbreaking of the new Cleveland Electric Company Motor Shop on MLK Jr. Blvd.

continued from page 5

him to do work. At that time, electricity was fairly new, and nobody knew much about it. But he’d been in electricity since he was fifteen years old.

[And] my father worked eighteen to twenty hours a day all of his life.”

As motor repair was a skill that very few people had, hardly any businesses offered 8

the service, which is essential for motors that have a natural lifespan.

As Ken Harbour—Ras’s great-grandson and CEO of Cleveland Electric Company since January 2024—who began in the mechanical group and worked in the company alongside his father, George Harbour, explains, “When [motors] get to the end of that lifespan, they have to be ‘rewound.’

There are motors of such a size that we could physically remove them, take them to the shop, rewind them, recoat the exterior, and then bring them back to the end user. Other motors are so large that they cannot be removed, so we would have to go to the facility and actually do that same process on the motor in place.” The ability to do this kind of work gave the business a genuine edge in the industry, especially since Ras was so dedicated to getting the job done right.

“All [my father] had going for him was his knowledge of electrical apparatus, and that’s what the business started on,” Louie recalled, noting how Ras leaned into what he did best.

“One of the reasons we were successful was my dad’s reputation for fixing things. When he got a

CHAPTER ONE STATE OF REPAIR: THE FOUNDING OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

job in the shop, he just turned heaven and Earth over until he got it back into operation because that just shut somebody else’s operation down.

He was really tough on that. I worked all night— many, many a night—to get something ready. But he had a reputation for knowing how to get [a motor] done and get it back. We still strive to do that because when industry loses a large motor, it slows them down.”

Within a few years of joining the business, Louie, who left his studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology to join his father’s company, became one of Ras’s most dependable motor repair experts, and he ultimately specialized in the coil and winding aspect of the motor repair process. He even designed special coil-winding

equipment that was used to wind armature coils for the Pullman Company, which manufactured rail cars in Atlanta, not far from Cleveland Electric Company’s headquarters. What’s more, Louie created an array of forms for recording data for coil-winding testing procedures, which allowed the company to develop new techniques along the way. That masterful level of specialization allowed the business to carve out an impressive niche in what became a booming electric industry over the next several decades.

A COMMUNITY MEMBER FIRST According to James R. Cleveland Sr., his father, Ras Cleveland, worked every day of his life and never had a hobby.

However, he did have a passion for being a contributing member of society and the community in which he lived.

He was a trustee of Scottish Rite Hospital in Atlanta, as well as a Mason and an active member of the Yaarab Shriners, where he served on the director’s staff. The Shriners even named a large class of candidates in his honor in January of 1960. Not only did these activities allow him—and ultimately his entire family—to give back to the community, but they also helped him develop relationships that would benefit Cleveland Electric Company for many years.

A nurse and her patients enjoy the sunshine outside the Scottish Rite Hospital for Crippled Children circa 1915, reading Valentine’s Day cards they’d received that day. Ras Cleveland was a trustee of this hospital.

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MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

Rewinding armature on a DC motor circa 1973.

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CHAPTER ONE STATE OF REPAIR: THE FOUNDING OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

A New Direction Atlanta proved to be an excellent location for the Cleveland-Browning Electric & Elevator Company, which became the Cleveland-Browning Electric Company when elevator work began to dissipate over time. Ras, his business partner, and their team began focusing on other industries that the local market could offer, such as the newspaper industry, which allowed the company to repair the motors and equipment that helped produce The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution newspapers. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ras, who eventually bought out S. H. Browning’s interest in the company and renamed it Cleveland Electric Company Inc., turned his attention to the paper and textile mills that surrounded Atlanta. His son Jimmy Sr. became a route salesman, traveling around the northern part of Georgia and selling Cleveland Electric Company’s motor repair services. Jimmy Sr. once recalled, “In those days, cotton mills were humming, running, and were big business,” he said. “They had a lot of motors in them, and they burned them up quite frequently. They didn’t have the electrical protection we have nowadays, and when there would be an electrical storm, it would burn out fifteen or twenty-five electrical motors in somebody’s cotton mill somewhere. So, we would make a ‘milk run,’ you might call it, out about a hundred-mile radius of Atlanta, and we would call on those mills and pick up electrical motors

that had been burned out. We’d bring them to Atlanta, repair them, and take them back to the mills the following week.”

For those motors that could not be repaired in paper and textile mills and other types of businesses, Cleveland Electric Company also offered the chance to purchase new motors. In fact, it did not take long for the business to become the largest independent supplier and distributor of electric motors, and the company garnered exclusive contracts with an array of motor companies across the country, including General Electric Company and Reliance Electric Company.

What’s more, Ras officially launched a service department to support all of the motor work; Lawrence Bobo, who joined the company in 1946 and acted as a jack-of-all-trades across the organization, was instrumental in developing that department. The overall diversification was good for the business, and it encouraged Ras to consider other lines of business that would complement the work he had been doing for so many years. Then an idea presented itself to him. As Louie says, “It became apparent that people who might call [my father] for work on apparatus might also want him to do some wiring in of material, so he soon had to start a construction or contracting phase of the business.”

When Ras established a new electrical contracting division that would support construction projects across Atlanta, he knew he would need help to get it up and running, as he was still focused on the motor repair side of the business. He continued on page 15

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MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

In 1976, Ron Benier, a Cleveland Electric employee, monitors equipment inventory in the huge company warehouse.

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CHAPTER ONE STATE OF REPAIR: THE FOUNDING OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

continued from page 11

hired N. G. Harrison to manage the electrical contracting work, going so far as to offer him stock in return for coming on board. Initially, the deal was a good one, with Harrison helping to grow the construction business quickly in its earliest days.

For several years, the company worked on everything from small warehouse buildings to more complicated projects over time. However, things began to change as Harrison aged. According to Jimmy Sr., who started driving a route truck when he officially joined the company, Harrison simply did not keep up with growing the business and eventually stopped all new business development efforts in the electrical contracting arena.

Jimmy Sr. recognized the issue and addressed his concerns with his father. As the father and son began to consider what would need to happen to advance the electrical contracting work, Ras’s health took a turn with the first of a series of heart attacks—and one that would change the way the company would operate into the future.

A Tale of Two Businesses In his early eighties, Ras Cleveland survived a heart attack that led him to recognize his need to step back from the company that he founded. He charged his sons, Louie and Jimmy Sr., with taking over the organization, each one assuming responsibility for a particular side of the business. Louie, who had made a name for himself in the motor repair shop, became head of that division, while Jimmy Sr. took charge of the electrical contracting division. While Harrison was still with the company, Ras informed him that Jimmy Sr. would assume control of that element of the business. Within a couple of years, Harrison retired, giving Jimmy Sr. the

WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE Dating back to 1952, Cleveland Electric Company contributed to the country’s booming space and missile program, participating in the Navaho, Vanguard, Bomarc, Jupiter, Thor, Atlas, Titan, Perishing, and Polaris missile launches over the years. The company technicians worked on thirty-five specialized projects, including the installation of electrical equipment for complex units at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The projects encompassed installation of electronic components and all major wiring phases for the missile launches and they extended beyond Cape Canaveral to the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The work illustrated how flexible and adaptable Cleveland Electric Company could be, with its comprehensive knowledge about the industrial electrical field, laying the groundwork for the company to continue building its reputation in the technology sector in the years to come.

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MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

complete freedom he needed to advance his plans for the division.

“We had a pretty good volume of electrical contracting work. At that time, that part of the business was not particularly interesting to me, but [Harrison] was not growing the business, and that bothered me,” Jimmy Sr. recalled years later.

“At the time, we had five electricians working. I just decided we’d better do something with that outfit, and we did. Our growth hasn’t been with any design or formula. It’s just been by working hard and growing through the years. We had to get some business. I became involved and began to do things—some of the things, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I did them anyway.

We kept pushing, shoving, doing more, getting good people to come work for us, still doing the right things, still following my father’s operating principles and maintaining the reputation he had.

Really, our growth is almost directly responsible to the contacts he had made early on. We did not have doors closed in our face because of his reputation. We elevated ourselves a little by doing much larger work than we had tackled before.”

For instance, Cleveland Electric Company turned the motor repair work it had been doing for years for The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution newspapers into much bigger electrical contracting projects, according to Jimmy Sr. “Big” contracts representing $15,000 jobs for

Newspaper presses, such as this one at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1972, often required maintenance and repair, a reliable source of work for Cleveland Electric.

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CHAPTER ONE STATE OF REPAIR: THE FOUNDING OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

companies throughout Atlanta were brought into the mix, and those contracts eventually grew into million-dollar projects decades later. “We took some chances. Sometimes I had our neck stuck out as far as a giraffe’s,” Jimmy Sr. says. “We were always trying to find a niche others were not involved in. We have elevated ourselves up to where we’re on the level of being a select bidder, I would say. That comes about by your past type of work that you’ve done, the size of it, who the companies were, who the architects were.

There’s a certain gamble on lump sum projects.

You just have to know what you’re doing.”

To complement the electrical contracting work, Jimmy Sr. added a mechanical contracting

element to the work done by Cleveland Electric Company. He explains that working with mechanical engineers during on-site jobs could be very challenging, stating, “You’re trying to install your electrical work over, under, or around his mechanical work, or he’s trying to do his mechanical work around your electrical work. So it was a hassle. We made a decision that we needed to get into the mechanical business to get rid of that adversity.”

Initially, the company lost money on the proposition, spending nearly five years trying to get its footing in the mechanical arena. However, through diligence and honest hard work, that continued on page 20

Shown here in 1959 are (L to R) Louie Cleveland Sr., his father, Ras Cleveland, and his brother James Cleveland Sr., who prized their solid reputation in the community and frequently strategized about ways to expand the company.

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MAKING THE CONNECTION 100 YEARS OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

continued from page 17

division also began to take root. Soon enough, civil engineering also became part of the picture, with Jimmy Sr. adding another new division to the company. He says, “We got to the point where we were a prime contractor.

That is, we put together all parts of the bid—the electrical part, the mechanical part, and the civil part of a construction job.” These efforts essentially made Cleveland Electric Company a one-stop shop for a range of companies, including renowned ones Jimmy Cleveland Sr. like General Electric, which hired the company to do the electrical work for the construction of its new transformer manufacturing plant in Rome, Georgia, in the early 1960s.

The work with General Electric actually stemmed from the longtime relationship the organization had with Ras Cleveland. As Jimmy Sr. built the electrical contracting division, Louie kept his eye on the motor Louie Cleveland Sr. repair business, which had been his focus since his earliest days with the company. In his new role at the helm of that side of the business, he worked to grow and expand both the repair and new motor sales elements; over the years, Cleveland Electric Company became a major distributor for 20

GE, selling its motors all over the South. In fact, Cleveland Electric opened branch sales offices in North Carolina; South Carolina; and Augusta and Savannah, Georgia, at various points, and sales took off every time.

The company even built its salesforce, giving individuals their own territories to visit regularly. In 1991, Louie Sr. reflected on those opportunities, stating, “My daddy handled GE motors going way back. They know us, and now they’re learning we can do more than we have done. So they’re giving us more territory, more executive sales advice, and holding sales meetings. They have real confidence in us.”

In 1960, Cleveland Electric Company added an entirely new electronic control department to complement both the motor and electrical contracting sides of the business. The department offered complete industrial electronic control service and panel fabrication and worked with companies like Lanham Machinery Company Inc. of Atlanta, which had Cleveland Electric Company fabricate a control panel that would allow it to operate the motors and associated equipment on a bakery conveyor system that it manufactured. The new division boasted a group of qualified elec-

CHAPTER ONE STATE OF REPAIR: THE FOUNDING OF CLEVELAND ELECTRIC COMPANY

tronic control technicians to be on call to serve customers, and it further diversified the company’s burgeoning suite of services.

As both sides of the business grew, the Cleveland Electric headquarters on Marietta Street could no longer support them. By 1968, the electrical contracting division relocated to a new facility at 1281 Fulton Industrial Boulevard. The motor repair operations followed suit a few years later, moving to a building at 3795 Wendell Drive in Atlanta. And not long after that, the construction side of the business expanded even further with a warehouse and fabrication space located at 260 Six Flags Road. Additionally, over the years,

sales offices dedicated to pursuing construction projects opened in Macon and Savannah, Georgia, thus cementing Cleveland Electric Company’s reputation not only in Atlanta, but also in the Southeast and beyond. Collectively, it was an impressive feat for the sons of the man who had a very specific vision.

“Our philosophy has always been that we bend over backwards to do things right, even if it’s out of pocket. We go over and beyond if the customer—even if the customer is wrong—thinks we ought to do it. That was my dad’s philosophy.

He treated everyone so good. That’s where our reputation comes from,” Jimmy Sr. says.

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This photo, taken in 1966, shows a Cleveland employee overseeing the dynamic balancing of a rotor, a process that improves its performance by adjusting its mass evenly around its axis, reducing vibration and avoiding extra wear and tear on its components.

The performance of each task on a Cleveland Electric Company jobsite, no matter how seemingly simple, builds on the last to achieve the highest-quality result for the client.