Professional Service, Professionally Delivered

Looking back at 75 years in business, it’s easy to see why many clients of Gregory Electric Company have chosen to work with the company, time and again. Gregory’s “professional service professionally delivered” approach isn’t just a marketing tagline; it’s a way of doing business that brings clients to the table and invites them to stay — for decades.

Trusted Expertise

In the early 1990s, Gregory had two employees with deep backgrounds in public utility operations and engineering. Lisa Phillips and Bob Livingston, Jr. had both worked in operations for then-SCE&G, a public utility that provided electricity and natural gas to customers across South Carolina. The company, which was sold to Dominion Energy, turned to a newly launched utility department at Gregory Electric Company for help servicing the needs of customers and maintaining the company’s infrastructure.

According to Lisa, the utility department’s early days were marked by creativity and a penny-pinching thriftiness that never compromised employees’ safety. “We had worn out, ragtag equipment and a small workforce,” laughs Lisa, now Chief Operating Officer and Utility Division Vice President. “We were the kings and queens of spray paint, and we learned how to make a fender out of Bondo. But we had good people who worked hard, so we invested bit by bit to get better equipment.”

Reliable Service

For more than 60 years, Gregory has provided service for Southern Bell and BellSouth, which are now both part of AT&T, says Telecom Project Manager Randy Taylor. “I can remember working in a handful of rooms that still had live operators in them in the 1960s. Even today, Gregory still serves AT&T in a few pockets of South Carolina. “Our service work is what got us in the door,” he says.

Locally Invested

Visit any Publix Super Market in Columbia, Charleston or the Upstate and you might see a Gregory Electric Company service van outside. The Florida-centric regional grocery chain, which opened 45 stores across the Southeast in 2023 and is remodeling many existing stores to fit a new experience-focused format, walks the client service walk.

In a time when most electrical and utility service work is outsourced, Publix stores demonstrate the value of professional relationships by working directly with a local service provider to provide stores with reliable emergency and basic service calls.

Mutual Respect

While emergency service calls and reliable client service support may have initially opened the door for Gregory Electric Company, it’s a quiet focus on providing excellent service that keeps clients like Dominion, AT&T and Publix coming back.

Sometimes it’s responding on nights and weekends or when emergencies strike like the recent Hurricane Helene, which meant being part of a team that replaced more than 1,000 transformers, 2,300 poles and 7,000 spans of wire to safely restore power despite often dangerous conditions.

“Trust and honesty are the foundation of our partnership,” says Randy. “People come and go but reliable, quality service is an anchor point. Dominion knows we are always going to do what we say, and they count on us. Their customers are our customers, and we work hand in hand to keep the lights on.”

When clients know that Gregory will do their project right the first time, it’s preferable to trying someone else who might be cheaper but may cause an issue. “Our job used to be to create dial tone, which was always on even when the lights were off,” explains Randy. “These days it’s more maintaining data links. We do a lot of parallel work that might even be temporary to prevent interruption to data links.”

Spray paint and Bondo creativity are still timeless, but these days Gregory’s fleet and crews are second to none. “The fleet we have today is not the fleet we had in 1993,” says Lisa. “Gregory has continued to improve its workforce through training, and we have increased our number of crews dramatically.” Gregory has also invested in protecting them with life-saving rubber goods. “Outfitting a line crew is a more than $750K investment, but that’s one place where you invest in the best that you can.” Top-notch equipment. Superior service. Reliable response. Gregory’s service record speaks volumes generation after generation.