Why CF Electrical Services Became a Dedicated Strata Electrical Consulting Company: A Guide for Northern BC Strata Councils

The full guide

CF Electrical Services is a strata electrical consulting firm: we prepare Electrical Planning Reports and EV Ready Plans, and we provide project management for the electrification projects that follow. But the firm didn't start there — and the story of how it got here explains a lot about how we work. Founder Chris Farrar tells it in his own words in the short video on our About page; here is the longer version.

Where we came from

Chris ran an electrical contracting business in Vancouver. The work was hands-on and varied — residential service work, commercial installations, and EV charging infrastructure — and a lot of it came through property managers and strata corporations that needed installations and maintenance done in their buildings.

Working inside those buildings, a pattern emerged. The questions coming from councils and property managers were less and less about the next repair, and more and more about the future: What can we do for EV charging in our building? Can our electrical service handle heat pumps? Where do we even start? Owners wanted to electrify. Buildings wired decades ago for gas heat and one car per household were being asked to do things they were never designed for.

A market that needed more than good intentions

British Columbia saw the same thing coming, and the policy response is genuinely well designed. The Strata Property Act now requires every strata of five or more lots to obtain an Electrical Planning Report, so that electrification decisions rest on measured capacity instead of guesswork. BC Hydro's EV Ready program funds the planning work that makes building-wide charging possible. The theory behind electrical planning is right.

The practical implementation is where councils told us they needed help. A regulation can require a report to exist; it cannot make that report readable, or make the phone get answered, or walk a volunteer council from a recommendation on page 40 to a funded, completed project. Demand for that kind of help was growing much faster than the supply of it. That gap — between a sound planning framework and a council actually getting a project done — is the underserved market CF Electrical Services was rebuilt to serve.

Becoming a dedicated consulting firm

So we made a deliberate choice: stop being a contractor that sometimes gave advice, and become a firm whose entire product is the advice — the analysis, the reports, and the management of the projects that follow. CF Electrical Services became a dedicated strata electrical consulting firm, focused on strata corporations and the property managers who serve them, with three core services: the Electrical Planning Report, the EV Ready Plan, and project management for strata electrification projects.

That focus changed what we could offer. Our only product is the planning and management itself, so our recommendations are made on your building's merits alone — no stake in which upgrades you choose. And the experience from the contracting years didn't disappear; it became the foundation. We have stood in the electrical rooms of these buildings and worked on the equipment an EPR describes. That is the vantage point our reports are written from.

Doing business differently

Rebuilding the firm from scratch also meant deciding, from scratch, how it should treat the people it serves. The standards we settled on are simple, and we hold ourselves to them daily:

• You hear from us. We get back to every client every business day their file is active — usually the same day they reach out.
• Reports are written to be read. Full technical accuracy, in plain language a non-technical council can budget from, vote on, and explain to owners.
• New methods, not just new documents. The Living Report — an interactive web version of your report that every owner can open — is our answer to work that usually arrives as a single static PDF. We keep looking for ideas like it.
• Fixed prices and committed dates. Proposals are fixed-price, not hourly, with a delivery date we commit to in writing.

Honest about the road

Chris is candid about this in the video: turning a contracting business into a consulting firm has been a huge learning curve, and we are still learning. What hasn't changed is why we did it — strata buildings across BC are heading into the biggest electrical transition they have ever faced, and their councils deserve planning help that is clear, responsive, and built around them. That is the work we are excited to do every day.

If your strata is starting that conversation, send us your building details for a fixed-price proposal — or start with what an Electrical Planning Report contains.