Gold Rush Electric

The paintings and pictures are still on the wall.

Deer and pheasants, mostly. James Martin was a hunter, an electrical engineer from Wisconsin, and the kind of man who moved to Helena in 1975, took a job as a building inspector for the city, and then decided he'd rather build things himself. In 1977, he started Gold Rush Electric out of a rented space in the old Kessler Brewery. He kept it small — himself and one other guy, wiring houses and running service calls around town.

Nearly fifty years later, his son Craig sits in the office at Gold Rush's current shop on Birch Street, James's paintings still hanging behind him. His daughter Shelby is in the front office, managing the schedule for a crew of twenty-six. Outside, trucks with the Gold Rush name are heading to job sites in Helena, Bozeman, Jackson Hole, and parts in between.

Three generations of the same family. Same name. Same values. A very different scale.

Craig went to work for his dad in 1991. He bought him out in 1997 and built upon what James started.

Before he became an electrician, Craig went to Capitol High, then gave Montana State a try for a year before realizing college wasn't for him. He came home, started an on-the-job apprenticeship under his father, and never left the trade. Not because he stumbled into it, but because it was the only thing he wanted to do.

"I was going to be an electrician," he says. "That's it."

When he took over the business in 1997, Craig wanted to push Gold Rush into more commercial work — bigger projects, bigger scope. It took a few years to get there, but they did. The crew wired Shodair Children's Hospital, the state health lab, large-scale apartment complexes, and projects stretching into Bozeman and beyond. Today, Gold Rush runs a three-year project at the Yellowstone Club and a growing operation in Jackson Hole.

But ask Craig what work is most rewarding, and he doesn't talk about the big jobs.

"The most rewarding is residential remodel or service work. You can see the gratitude in somebody's face when you fix their outlet, or fix something that wasn't working."

He tries to diagnose problems over the phone before sending a crew out. About twenty percent of service calls turn out to be a tripped breaker or a GFI reset — things he can walk a homeowner through in two minutes. "I'm just trying to save you from having to have an electrician come out," he tells them. Some customers are surprised. Most are grateful.

That instinct — to do the right thing even when the billable option is easier — runs through everything at Gold Rush. Last year, the company donated one hundred percent of the electrical work for a Habitat for Humanity house in Helena. They sponsor 4-H. They sponsor sports at Capital High, where all four of Craig's kids went to school, as well as supporting Helena High, East Helena High, Legion Baseball, Bighorns hockey, and multiple youth sports programs.

"That's part of being in the community," Craig says. "Not just trying to extract as much money as you can out of it."

He still wears his tools every day. Still gets in the trench with a pick and shovel when the job calls for it.

"I won't ask any employee to do anything that I will not do."

Shelby confirms it. "That's one thing the guys say a lot. Craig's not standing there yelling at our crew. He's in the hole with them working."

Shelby Martin came into the business officially in May 2023, though she's been around it her whole life. She grew up riding in the truck while Craig pointed out houses around town. "I wired that one. We did this house." She still drives around Helena and does the same thing. "I'll be like, oh, we worked on that person's house. We wired this one. It's kind of funny." Doing so reminds her how much this community means to her.

Now she handles the scheduling, the estimates, the logistics, and the customer calls that keep twenty-six people deployed across multiple cities. She learned by doing.

"I was really bad at it at first," she says. "I had to call him every day. But now I've got it pretty much figured out."

Craig trusts her with it. That trust didn't come automatically — not because she's not capable, but because letting go is hard for a man who's been doing this for thirty-five years. With Shelby, the answer came through watching her learn the operation from the inside out and prove she could handle it.

By the end of this year, Craig plans to restructure the business into a three-way ownership between Craig, Shelby, and another long-time employee. He'll keep working. He'll keep wearing his tools. But the torch is passing.

Craig thinks a lot about the next generation — not just at Gold Rush, but in the trades as a whole. He goes to Capital High once a year on career day to talk to students about becoming an electrician.

"There's two types of people in the trades," he says. "There's the people that have the entrepreneurial spirit, and the people that just want to work for somebody. And that's okay. Both are needed."

He's watched seven or eight former employees leave Gold Rush over the years to start their own companies. Every one of them has been successful. He doesn't resent it.

"That's the American dream. You can't be upset about that."

With AI driving demand for data centers and power infrastructure, Craig sees the need for electricians growing, not shrinking. Utility linemen to bring the power distribution in. Electricians to build the plants. The energy grid is expanding in ways most people haven't thought about yet.

But he's honest about what held the trades back for years — the instability that nobody talks about.

"Twenty-five years ago, there wasn't the volume of work. You might have forty hours this week. You might be laid off for a month. You weren't able to look to a future."

That's changed. And Craig has made it a point to change it at Gold Rush. He pays above union scale, covers one hundred percent of employee health insurance, and gives people room to take care of their families.

"The work will be there tomorrow," he says. He didn't always think that way. "Getting older. Different perspective."

People still call Gold Rush and mention his dad, James.

"We'll get people that call and say, 'Hey, I knew your grandpa. Your grandpa wired my house,'" Shelby says. That was years ago. The trust carried forward and they don’t take that lightly.

Scheduling such a busy operation is always a delicate balance. Craig describes it as a ballet — one subcontractor misses their step, and five electricians have nowhere to go the next morning. A painter doesn't show, a taper falls behind, and the cascade reaches Gold Rush's calendar before anyone picks up the phone.

Shelby handles it. Her tracking system, lists of names and locations for every job, and the ability to adjust on the fly when a homeowner's electrical service gets ripped off the house by a tree trimmer at three o'clock on a Thursday.

"Most people are understanding," Shelby says about rescheduling. "You call and explain what happened, and they say, 'Yep, see you next week.'"

Craig was asked what Helena gives a business like his that a bigger city wouldn't. He thought about it for a second.

"A sense of community feeling. You run into somebody at the store and say, 'Hey, thank you.' They see your sponsorship at the field. Their kids are playing softball."

He paused.

"But if you do a bad job on something, you're going to see that person at the grocery store too."

That's the deal. Small-town accountability runs both ways. Gold Rush Electric has kept it running in one direction for almost fifty years.

James's paintings are still on the wall. The work keeps going. And a torch is being passed.