Corey Hunt on Turning IBEW Travel Years Into a Business Blueprint
Corey Hunt spent years traveling the country as an IBEW member, working with different locals on jobs that stretched as far as California. Most people who take that kind of work do it for the paycheck and the hours. Corey took something else from it too: a mental list of what he would do differently if he ever ran the show. That list became Rocky Coastal Electric, the company he launched in Lewiston, Maine, in March 2023.
Watching how different crews solved the same problem
Every IBEW local runs a little differently. Corey saw crews in different states approach the same type of job with different tools, different sequencing, and different ways of managing a client relationship. Some of it was regional habit. Some of it was just how a particular foreman liked to run a site.
He started paying attention to which approaches actually saved time and which ones just felt busy. That kind of comparison is hard to get any other way. A person who works for one company in one region only ever sees one way of doing things. Corey saw many, back to back, over several years.
The idea that stuck: Build for the customer relationship, not just the job
The biggest thing Corey carried home from his travel years wasn't a wiring technique. It was an idea about how electrical work should feel from the customer's side.
On union jobs, the electrician often never meets the person who owns the building. The work gets specified, scheduled, and inspected through layers of people. Corey noticed that this distance sometimes let quality slide in small ways nobody higher up would catch. He decided that if he ever ran his own company, the person doing the work and the person answering for the work would be the same person, as often as possible.
That idea is baked into how Rocky Coastal Electric operates today. Corey stays close to the jobs his company takes on, rather than treating the business as something to manage from a distance.
Turning a license into a company
Getting the Master Electrician license was the technical requirement. Starting the company was the harder step. Corey had two young children by the time he made the decision, and travel work was no longer something the family could build a life around.
Rather than staying in the union system and looking for more local assignments, he chose to start something of his own in the Lewiston-Auburn area, the region where he grew up. That choice meant trading a steady structure for one he had to build from nothing.
Applying the road lessons at home
Once Rocky Coastal Electric was running, the ideas Corey picked up on the road started showing up in daily decisions. He built the company around being reachable and accountable, the two things he felt were missing on some of the bigger jobs he had worked. He also kept the standards he'd seen from the best foremen he worked under, even on small residential jobs where nobody was checking his work against a blueprint.
Three years in, Corey describes the business as steady and growing. He credits a lot of that to sticking with the idea that shaped the company from day one: do the work as if the person paying for it is standing next to you, because eventually, on a small local company, they usually are.
Where the idea is headed next
Corey has stayed interested in solar work and EV technology since his early years in the trade, and he expects both to shape where electrical work goes in Maine over the next decade. He treats ongoing learning as part of the job description, not an extra. That habit traces back to the same years on the road: an electrician who only knows one region's methods has fewer tools than one who has seen a dozen different crews solve the same problem a dozen different ways.
For Corey, the value of those travel years wasn't the mileage. It was the chance to collect ideas from people he never would have met if he'd stayed local, and the discipline to bring the best of them home.
