RAMON LARA

By Shirley Coyle, LC

individuals or, at least, individuals willing to be trained,” offered Ramon. Peace Services’ installers need to be willing to travel, and the work needs to be high quality and done efficiently. Ramon adds, “You’re asking guys to do what no one wants to do: travel, work overnight and work weekends.” Asked about weathering the pandemic, Ramon noted, “We hit stop in the pandemic like everyone else, but we were able to keep everyone on.”

Ramon Lara has learned that the secret of success as co-owner of Peace Services, LLC – a Texasbased lighting and electrical services installer – is a combination of ingredients: surrounding yourself with good people who are motivated to learn, and bringing those people together to achieve a common goal. He also points to the importance of delegation: “I had to learn about delegating and leading – at first I tried to do it all, even though I had good people there…delegation allows me to focus on developing new business” to ensure the success of the company.

At the age of seventeen, Ramon left a fast-food industry job to go work for a lighting retrofit company, starting “at the very bottom as a cleanup guy” during the early-ESCO era of replacing T12s with energy-saving T8s. While he didn’t know about lighting as a business before joining, the job gave him the chance to get his foot in the door without having trained first as an electrician, and Ramon soon knew this was the kind of work he wanted to do.

Fast forward to 2023, and Peace Services has crews of lighting technicians working all over the United States, in Mexico, Puerto Rico and other markets. What sets Peace Services apart is the fact that they specialize in supplying labor, not product. Supplying labor-only to do the install on lighting retrofits allows Peace Services to work with many NALMCO member companies – often working for the same end user but working with multiple lighting management companies in different markets. The Peace Services crews are all from the Dallas or Houston areas.

“My biggest challenge is finding trained, skilled

After twenty-one years in lighting, Ramon’s hard-won lessons have come from on-thejob learning as well as substantial benefit from NALMCO. NALMCO was Ramon’s first experience in outreach to contractors and buyers to come together for training on lighting materials and technology. He notes that NALMCO has been a good venue for feedback, from installers to manufacturers. For example, feedback that a kit included Tek screws that weren’t sharp enough to go through the material, or feedback on the placement of material packed in a shipment – putting the material in front that would be used first…“Don’t make us dig all the way to the back of the shipment!”

NALMCO also provides a forum where companies like Ramon’s can tie together what they see coming in bids with information on new trends and technology: “NALMCO helps us stay relevant, to take advantage of new technology – there’s a lot of focus now on solar and EV charging.” Peace Services has added divisions to handle HVAC and controls and is also planning to add other areas. Reflecting on advice for young people coming up in the industry, Ramon comments, “Start from the bottom, work your way up – see and understand every step in the process, and don’t act like you can do it all. You need to learn to bring people together to achieve a common goal, in spite of them not all being in agreement.”

As Ramon has worked over the years to build the Peace Services business, he has been careful to make sure his decisions were also based on the welfare of his family – his wife and two children. Just last year, Ramon graduated from college after 2 years of combining full-time work and school, and his wife is now going to college. Ramon has been taking flying lessons, with a goal to get his pilot’s licence one day. Asked how it feels to be flying, “You’ve gotta understand,” says Ramon, “I’m an immigrant. I came to the United States (from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico) when I was 10 years old. To be doing some of the stuff I’m doing now…I never dreamed I’d do something like this in my life.” ■