Built with Purpose: How Alykan Electrical Is Redefining Success in the Trades

Last year, Sally Higgs and her husband, Tristan, packed up and left their business for a month.

Not a long weekend. Not a working holiday with a laptop propped on a camp table. A full month out in rural New South Wales, prepping for a large-scale four-wheel drive event, largely unreachable, genuinely away. And when they came back, Alykan Electrical Solutions wasn't just intact. It was in an even better position than it had been before they left.

That's not a normal thing to be able to say about a trades business. Or most businesses, for that matter.

But for Sally, it wasn't luck, and it wasn't happenstance.

"We've built the systems, we've built the processes, and we've built the people to enable them to do that," says Sally Higgs, General Manager and Co-founder of Alykan Electrical Solutions.

Built from Two Worlds

Sally grew up around people who built things. Her father was a drain layer, a carpenter, a mechanic — a jack of all trades in the truest sense, raising his family in New Zealand with his hands and his skills and a quiet certainty about the value of physical work.

That world stayed close to Sally even as her career took her somewhere else entirely: corporate banking, property finance, a decade in product management at enterprise software companies, In the process, she learned exactly how large organizations work — and which ones actually thrive.

When Tristan — retail manager, former customs officer, mature-age apprentice who didn't start his electrical trade until he was 35 — was ready to go out on his own, Sally was ready too. They'd always talked about running a business together. Now they had the trade, the timing, and in Sally, a co-founder who had spent 15 years studying how businesses succeed and fail from the inside.

Defining Success on Their Own Terms

They started Alykan Electrical Solutions with a clear-eyed view of what they were building and an equally clear view of what they weren't.

"Success for us does not involve growing to a 50-employee business or a 400-employee business. For us, having good quality staff, having fun, good profitability, and being in business for the long haul matter most." Sally Higgs

In an industry where growth is often treated as the goal, Sally had a different question: did growth equate to profitability, and at what cost?

"It's all about profit. It's not about revenue. Revenue is a vanity metric." Sally Higgs

She'd watched a direct competitor, a company working with the same builders and the same clients, go bust while chasing numbers that looked impressive from the outside. The lean model wasn't an ideology. It was architecture. And like everything Sally builds, it started with the foundations.

"It's a really tough industry. We've got to stay true to who we are, invest in our team, stick to our pricing, and make sure our processes are great." Sally Higgs

Systems First, Always

Before Alykan took on its first job, Sally made a decision that most business owners only wish they'd made earlier. They wouldn't do a single job without a job management system and online accounting software in place.

"I knew if we didn't do it at the start, you get sucked into paper-based manual processes that are really hard to manage. And when things start taking off, it's much harder to change."

Eight and a half years later, Alykan has generated roughly three or four folders of paper. Total.

The decision to build the infrastructure before the volume arrived came directly from what Sally had spent 15 years experiencing. In her product management work, she'd been inside the backends of some of Australia's largest companies — and the pattern was clear.

“The most successful businesses were the ones that had fewer people making better decisions, with good software and good processes. The ones that had heaps of people, not great processes, and not great software were relying on individual capability.”

The ones that struggled were held together by individual capability, which meant they were only ever as strong as their most capable person on any given day. Sally had no interest in building that.

Choosing the Right Technology

Their first platform served them well up to a point. But as Alykan grew into larger commercial jobs — office fitouts, construction projects, work that demanded strategic visibility — the reporting wasn't there.

The move to Simpro, paired with a transition to Xero, was the next logical step. Tristan had used Simpro at a previous company, and the pair knew what it could do.

"Had I had my time again, I would have just jumped straight to Simpro. We ultimately haven't looked back since."

The 1% Better Philosophy

What Simpro unlocked, more than anything, was the ability to operationalize the 1% better every day philosophy Sally runs on.

"One of the things I always say to the team is 1% better every day means we're 365% better every year. It's always about finding the gap — where have things fallen over, where have things been a bit clunky — and then fixing that."

Building the Pre-Build Engine

In practice, that philosophy produced one of Alykan's most significant operational achievements: their pre-build catalog. Building it took 12 to 18 months of painstaking, iterative work — quote by quote, category by category.

"How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It's a huge project, but you've just got to break it down into pieces and start using it as you go."

Most electrical businesses quote the way the industry taught them to: labor hours on one line, materials on another — a negotiation about inputs rather than a conversation about outcomes. From the beginning, Alykan made a different choice: fixed-point pricing organized entirely around how a customer actually experiences the work. One price, clearly stated, for the thing the customer actually wants done.

"If you can think it, Simpro can do it. "

Combined with a Groundplan integration for takeoffs and supplier pricing feeds pulling directly into Simpro, that catalog became the engine behind something that still catches people off guard: Alykan can quote a quarter-million-dollar construction job — a full floor of a building, a hundred desks, kitchens, boardrooms, bathrooms, collaboration spaces — in under an hour.

Their builders know a quote from Alykan will arrive within two to three hours, that the number is guaranteed, and that the only way it changes is if the scope does. In a construction environment where trades are racing to get pricing in so builders can respond to their own clients within 24 to 48 hours, that kind of certainty is worth more than the cheapest number on the page.

"We can quote a quarter-of-a-million-dollar construction job in less than an hour, because we've invested the time to get all our pre-builds right."

Integrations That Actually Work

The integrations didn't all arrive easily. The SafetyCulture integration — which moves pre-start reports directly into Simpro via SyncEzy, and which the field team now genuinely loves — took some time to get right.

"If you don't have good core thinking and being able to articulate what you're wanting, you can fill your system up with a whole lot of garbage. The goal isn't to use every feature. It's to use the right ones, at the right time, when the team is ready to make them work."

When she was finally able to implement it, the field team's response told her everything: they not only used it, they started asking for more forms to be added. They'd found software that truly evolved alongside their business.

Profit, Purpose, and Real Impact

The goal of every system, every process, every integration is the same: don't get in the way of the people doing the work. And for Sally, that principle has always been personal.

"People who go into trades aren't going into trades to do paperwork," she says. "They're going there because they are hands-on people who like building things, who like molding things, and they like creating things. Everything we do from a business perspective is about not getting in their way."

The visibility Alykan has into its business isn't just generating revenue. It's generating profit, with a lean team, bought into the business, and the way they do things.

And it's not all about the money, either.

"We've got to financially achieve our goals, but it's not all about the money. It's about having enough to do what we want without it coming at a psychological or emotional cost."

A few years into running the business, Sally noticed something happening quietly around her. Team members were buying homes. One. Then another. Then another. She was driving home with Tristan one evening when it occurred to her to count.

"Our business has actually funded the purchase of at least half a dozen homes, which is really cool. That's the part where I get goosebumps — because that's real impact for people."

Growing People, Not Just the Business

It's a definition of success that doesn't appear in any revenue report. But for Sally, it's the one that matters most, the tangible proof that a business built on profit, restraint, and the right systems doesn't just survive. It creates something real for the people inside it.

That creation extends beyond home ownership. Alykan's apprentice program has grown into something Sally didn't anticipate when they hired their first apprentice eight years ago. It's now structured enough, and Alykan's reputation is strong enough, that a major multinational company, known for elevators and vertical transport, sends its own apprentices to Alykan for eight-week rotations to fulfill training requirements their own environment can't provide. The reports coming back are consistent: they don't want to leave.

"That's another validation for us," Sally says. "Other companies are coming to us to train their staff."

A Business That Runs On Its Own

For a nine-person electrical business operating out of Melbourne, that's not a small thing. It's the kind of external recognition that can't be manufactured — a large organization, with every resource available to it, choosing a lean trades business as the place where its people learn best.

And then there's what happened last year, when Sally and Tristan left for a month and came back to find their business in better shape than when they'd gone. The ops manager and the business manager — two people Sally describes as having grown enormously in the past 12 months — had made decisions, run the day-to-day, and kept everything moving without being asked how.

"The level of decision-making that they're doing, the way that they're running the day-to-day operations of the business," Sally says, "has meant that Tristan and I have been able to step back and go — we've actually done it."

Building What Matters

Ask anyone who doesn't work in the trades what an electrician does, and they'll tell you about wiring, about switchboards, about fixing what's broken.

Sally Higgs grew up seeing it differently. The house that kept a family warm. The infrastructure that made a neighborhood function. The physical world, shaped by hand, that everyone else simply moved through without thinking about who made it possible.

That understanding runs underneath everything Alykan does: the systems, the pricing model, the apprentice program, the deliberate restraint around growth. It all exists because the work matters, and the people doing it deserve a business built well enough to honor that.

"The built environment does not exist without these people," Sally says.

The Future of the Trades

It's a perspective that extends to how she thinks about the industry's future. The infrastructure required for AI data centers, renewable energy, and climate technology — none of it gets built without tradespeople. The most consequential work of the next decade will be physical, grounded, and skilled.

"Trades are not about the tasks you do," she says. "It's about what you're creating. It's a completely valid career path that's all about building the environment people live in, and you have the ability to contribute to that."

Alykan Electrical Solutions is Sally's proof of concept for all of it: that a trades business can be profitable without being large, that systems built carefully from the start compound into something extraordinary over time, and that the people inside a business, given the right environment, will grow beyond what anyone planned for.

That success, defined on your own terms and built on your own foundations, is more durable than anything measured by someone else's metrics.

"That, for me, has been what they call an overnight success — just eight years in the making. Alykan is where we dreamed it would be."