From a Conversation to a Career: How One Person Found His Spark at Ryan’s Electrical

Some career paths start with a guidance counsellor. Jaimus LeBlanc-Joyce’s started with a family friend, a coffee shop, and a program he’d never heard of.

By Wade Cleveland, Western REN

A One-Guy Truck That Grew

Ryan’s Electrical didn’t start big. Back in 2000, it was Mike Ryan and a truck, taking on whatever electrical work came his way. Twenty-five years later, it’s one of the region’s largest electrical contractors. This year the company hit its peak: 33 employees, an eight-person crew working out of Halifax on Department of National Defence contracts, IWK work, and commercial security. It also runs a growing residential, commercial, and industrial base stretching from Digby all the way to Shelburne.

General Manager Steve Wright has been steering that growth for three and a half years. He spent his career in Southwestern Ontario leading multimillion-dollar builds. Mike Ryan brought him on with a clear mandate: build the company up, make it marketable, and get it ready for the day Mike is ready to step back.

It’s working. Ryan’s is now taking on general contractor work Mike never touched before. The company is riding a wave tied partly to the region’s booming lobster pound consolidation, and its backlog sits at about four months. Ryan’s is even stepping out of the heat pump business entirely, choosing instead to pour its energy into what it does best: electrical.

There’s just one problem. Growth like that needs people, and in Southwest Nova Scotia, skilled trades people are hard to come by.

The Hardest Part of Growing Isn’t the Work. It’s Finding the Workforce.

Steve doesn’t sugarcoat it: finding tradespeople right now is genuinely difficult. Ryan’s pays top journeyman rate for the province and has a full-time marketing person driving the company’s digital presence. The company shows up at everything from the Bluegrass Festival to the Congrès mondial acadien to get their name in front of people. None of that changes a simple, stubborn math problem. The cost of relocating to rural Nova Scotia is steep, and most of the province’s electrical talent already clusters around Lunenburg, Bridgewater, and Halifax.

So, if Ryan’s can’t always import experienced electricians, the next best strategy is obvious: grow your own. That’s where apprentices, and connections like the Western REN Connector Program, come in.

Enter Jaimus, By Way of a Family Friend

Jaimus LeBlanc-Joyce’s road into the trade wasn’t a straight line from a career fair or a school pamphlet. It started with a family friend who worked in immigration. That friend happened to know Shelley Bellefontaine, Connector Program lead at Western REN, and happened to know that Jaimus wanted to get into the electrical trade.

That’s really all it took. The family friend passed along Shelley’s name, and Jaimus reached out. By February the two of them were sitting down in a coffee shop to figure out what exactly this program was and whether it could help him.

Jaimus was still working through his own education at the time. He was clear on one thing above everything else: he wanted to be an electrician. Not “explore the trades” in some general sense. Electrician, specifically. Shelley took that clarity and matched it to a company that had, as it happened, exactly one apprenticeship spot open. Then she asked a question that would end up shaping his whole career: was he okay with driving to Yarmouth?

He was. And that was that.

The Perfect Storm, according to Steve

From Steve’s side of the table, Jaimus’ timing couldn’t have worked out better. One apprentice spot remained when Shelley reached out about Jaimus. Steve did what any small-town GM does before hiring someone: he asked around. The answers came back good, so Jaimus came in for an interview, treated exactly like any other candidate walking through Ryan’s doors.

“I haven’t regretted it at all,” Steve says.

From there, Jaimus registered as an apprentice through the provincial apprenticeship board. Ryan’s confirmed it was willing to bring him on, and his hours officially started ticking from that point forward. It’s now his responsibility to track his own training and progress through the four levels of the apprenticeship, basic through advanced. Each level unlocks with hours on the job and a stretch of schooling along the way.

There’s a real incentive built into that structure, too. Ryan’s ties apprentice wages to a percentage of the province’s top journeyman rate, climbing in steps as each level is completed. Pass level one, and the raise is immediate. It’s deliberate: Steve wants his apprentices motivated to keep climbing, not comfortable staying exactly where they are.

Learning the Trade from Everyone in the Shop

Ask Steve about training philosophy and he’ll tell you flat out that skills are best learned with your hands. It’s a belief shaped by his own apprenticeship decades ago, sheet metal work that started with weeks of bench work: taking flat stock and, through pure repetition, turning it into finished fittings. He hated it at the time. He credits it now with making him a far better tradesperson than any classroom ever could.

That philosophy shows up in how Ryan’s structures its apprentices’ days. Jaimus rotates through different journeymen on purpose, because every one of them approaches the work a little differently. There’s Ron, 65 years old and affectionately known around the shop as Uncle Ronnie, who’s been in the trade forever and has quite literally seen it all. There’s Jacob, a heavy industrial electrician out of Western Canada who’s especially strong on pipe work and commercial jobs. Between them, and everyone else on the crew, Jaimus is picking up more range than any single mentor could offer alone.

By his fourth year, if he stays the course, Jaimus will be allowed to take on an apprentice of his own. Steve calls that becoming “an earner”: the point where a tradesperson is accountable for showing up on time, managing materials, and running a job on budget, not just doing the technical work correctly.

What Comes Next for Jaimus

Right now, Jaimus is doing exactly what a first-year apprentice should be doing: racking up hours. When enough of them accumulate, he’ll get notified that a level one seat has opened at school. He’ll take a temporary layoff from Ryan’s, collect employment insurance while he studies, and then head back to the shop once he’s written and passed the level. Do that four times, with a raise waiting at the end of each one, and he comes out the other side a fully certified journeyman electrician, with years of real, on-the-tools experience most classroom-only graduates simply don’t have.

For Steve, that’s precisely the point of the whole system: give young people the aptitude, the attitude, and the support to grow into it, and they end up better journeymen for it. For Jaimus, it’s a career that started because one family friend happened to know the right person to call.

What the Connector Program Can Do for You

Jaimus’ story is a reminder that the right opportunity is often just one conversation away, even when it comes from somewhere unexpected. That’s exactly what the Western REN Connector Program is built for: linking people who have the skills and drive with the businesses that need them, and letting relationships, not job boards, do the matching.

Are you a business owner looking for your next great apprentice? Or someone ready to start building a career in Western Nova Scotia?

Learn more about the Western REN Connector Program and take the first step today.

Western REN (Western Regional Enterprise Network) supports business growth, workforce development, and economic prosperity across Western Nova Scotia. Learn more at westernren.ca.

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