Design Master Electrical is “Worth Its Weight in Gold” to Badger State ConsultingBadger State Consulting provides electrical consulting, design and inspection services throughout Wisconsin. The firm focuses on small to midsized commercial projects of all kinds. Based in Wausau, WI with an office in Kaukauna, WI, it currently has two employees.
Owner Ron Janikowski founded Badger State Consulting in 1984. Since retiring as the electrical inspector for the City of Wausau in 2009, Mr. Janikowski has been devoted full-time to his consulting business. He purchased Design Master Electrical in 2012.
“With Design Master Electrical, two people can work on the same project at the same time,” Mr. Janikowski explains. “With all its built-in features Design Master is a great time-saver. Once the circuiting is complete, the program prints the panel schedules and calculates loads automatically. If you want to add receptacles just click-click-click, click “Update Schedules” and it’s done. And it’s simple to create custom blocks for any specialty loads.”
“The business is growing and thanks to Design Master we can do more jobs faster and increase income,” Mr. Janikowski asserts. “We can work on four or five projects at once, no problem. We could never keep up if it wasn’t for Design Master—doing everything by hand just takes too long.”
Mr. Janikowski continues: “Some of the drawing software out there is so complex you just about have to go back to school to learn it. I hit the ground running with Design Master and was working on plans in a couple of hours.”
“Competing programs can cost thousands of dollars. Design Master does a lot for us and doesn’t cost nearly that much. I pay for it monthly, which is very convenient and affordable,” adds Mr. Janikowski.
“I’d recommend Design Master to any electrical designer—it’s wonderful! And the customer support is awesome!” offers Mr. Janikowski. “Anytime you call they resolve your issue within minutes, if not immediately.”
“If you run into trouble they’ll just take over your computer remotely and straighten things out while you watch. Even the documentation is good,” Mr. Janikowski says.
“Design Master lets you make changes so quickly that clients can e-mail me changes wherever I am and I can turn revisions around in real-time,” Mr. Janikowski notes. “My associate John and I keep our Design Master files up ‘in the cloud’ using DropBox so we can work on them simultaneously from our respective home offices.
“I can work on the lighting and save that to the DropBox and he can grab those up-to-date files and work on the power layer. Networking remotely like that works so well we only need to meet face-to-face about once every two weeks.”
“In design/build scenarios, I can take my laptop running Design Master to job sites and meetings and update plans on-the-fly to capture what the customer really wants,” describes Mr. Janikowski. “I can project drawings onto any white wall and move fixtures or add receptacles in seconds. Then I go back to the office and do the circuiting and so on.”
“This makes me very easy to do business with and makes us look good in front of customers—they love it!” chuckles Mr. Janikowski.
“We’ll take an AutoCAD drawing, add various layers and send that off to the general contractors or architect we’re working with,” Mr. Janikowski observes. “They import our layers into Revit or some other program and do the BIM. That process works very well for everyone and takes basically no extra time on their end.”
“Having been an electrical inspector for over 30 years, I know the permitting process and what inspectors look for,” Mr. Janikowski relates. “Often I’ll e-mail an inspector a PDF straight from Design Master and essentially get ‘preapproval’ or find out if there’s something else they want to see.
“Inspectors love that! They don’t want to go on a job site. They want to look at this stuff in an office. This makes the whole process flow so much better.
“Solving problems before they even exist—that’s the name of the game right there,” Mr. Janikowski emphasizes. “Get the work done with no change orders and no holdups. It saves money and time for everybody.”
“That’s one more reason Design Master Electrical is worth its weight in gold,” Mr. Janikowski recaps.
