Meet Our Team

Sam joined First Choice Electric in 2013 and learned the trade the old way, on the job beside his great-uncle Bennie, with his grandfather Butch close by. Bennie started him on the basics and kept him on them until they were habit, which Sam says now is the only way to learn them. Long before he drove to a job alone he was the one at the door, talking with the customer, while Bennie looked the job over and set the price.

Ranken came in 2020, cum laude. In 2024, the year Butch passed, Sam earned his master electrician license, and the company has worked under it since. He carries a job from the estimate to the last connection, and customers ask for him by name.

He keeps up with electrical system design, OSHA safety standards and each NEC code cycle. The hard finds are his: the wire fished through a finished wall, the lost neutral nobody else had found.

Brody is Butch's grandson. He started in 2024, at eighteen, the year Butch passed. His first day was a wire pull with Sam, and he could not move the line, so he decided that day that he would. Within a month he was wiring receptacles on his own, and Sam still checks his work before they leave a job, and will until Brody holds his journeyman card.

Most of what he knows came off the pool jobs, and he will tell you so. He is happiest on a basement finish, a long run of receptacles, and he is in NEC code classes, OSHA safety training and electrical theory courses alongside the work. He is also on the crew for our volunteer days: food packing, soup-kitchen shifts, the brick path in Forest Park.

In five years he wants his own truck.

Zach grew up at Butch's side, and after school that usually meant the Kirk's Electric office, where fifteen crews were kept working. At fifteen he started spending his summers on the crews. After 2008 closed Kirk's he left for a biochemistry degree with medicine in mind, picking up business studies at Lindenwood and UMSL along the way.

He came back for good in 2017, at twenty-five, and took on everything that is not the wiring: the money and the plan for it, the marketing, the customers, the licensing and the insurance, every job tracked from the first call to the final inspection, and the permit offices, inspectors and utility companies behind each one. Flat-rate pricing, the customer database and this website came from that work. Within two years he was running the company day to day.

He also completed Ranken's Electrical System Design program, summa cum laude, in 2023, and is working toward his own master electrician license.

Jessie handles First Choice Electric's email and online customer correspondence: the first reply to a message, the follow-up after a visit, and the written side of our feedback and reputation program across Google, Facebook and the BBB. If you write to us, she is the one who writes back.

She is trained in conflict resolution and service recovery, and her attention to detail is why nothing you send us goes unanswered.

Lynn married Butch while he was still in the Navy and spent a year in California with him before they came home to O'Fallon. When the railroad let him go in 1990, she started Cave Springs Produce with him, three years of fresh fruit and vegetables that carried the family while his case was open. She stayed out of the business through the Kirk's Electric years. When First Choice Electric opened in 2010 she took the office, and she keeps it.

She and Butch raised Zach and Sam. She is on every volunteer day, and the family rides the Wahooligan Tour for the Davis Phinney Foundation in memory of her brother David.

Bennie is Butch's younger brother. Butch's first electrical license, in 1979, was for one job: wiring Bennie's house. Years later Bennie went to work for him at Kirk's Electric and stayed through all of it, the growth and the end, and when Butch closed that door in 2010 and opened First Choice Electric, Bennie was the one beside him.

He is the one who taught Sam the trade, starting him on the basics and keeping him on them until they were habit. Customers knew him by his first name and asked for him in reviews and on the booking form.

Bennie is retired now. He spends his time with his children and grandchildren and on the road across the country, and if you run into him out there, you will understand why our customers asked for him.

Howard 'Butch' Kirkpatrick II founded First Choice Electric in 2010 with his brother Bennie beside him. He and Lynn raised their grandsons Zach and Sam, who run the company today, and he is Brody's grandfather too.

He learned electrical work in the Navy, as an aviation electrician's mate and corrosion control specialist on Sea King helicopters at Imperial Beach, California, until his honorable discharge in 1973. He came home to O'Fallon and went to work as a signal maintainer for the Terminal Railroad Association in St. Louis, where he rose in the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen and became the man who read the contract. In 1990 the railroad dismissed him; the Brotherhood carried his case to the National Railroad Adjustment Board and won it in 1993. He never went back. He and Lynn had run Cave Springs Produce in the meantime, and in 1992 he had opened Kirk's Electric out of the house.

Kirk's Electric ran sixteen years and grew to fifteen full-time crews before 2008 and a theft by people he had trusted ended it together. He closed the door and started again as First Choice Electric. At the new company's first employee meeting he gave the crew one line, and the company keeps it: your safety and satisfaction are our number one priority.

Butch passed in July 2024. He stood behind his word. He valued your safety the way he valued his own family's, and he wanted you to know that is what you would get, every time you called.

Howard was born in Wellston in 1922, one of thirteen. In the winter of 1934 or 1935 an eleven-year-old boy was found inside a furniture van that had sat parked in Quincy, Illinois, for three days. He had climbed in to nap on a davenport and woken up on the highway. The reporter on the courthouse beat, Earl Nolan, took him home for supper, and he stayed six years. Earl's eulogy, which Howard gave in 1968, is on this page.

He enlisted at Jefferson Barracks a month after his eighteenth birthday and served five years with the 31st Field Artillery of the 7th Infantry Division: Kiska, Kwajalein, Leyte and Okinawa. Three of his brothers served too. One, Roy, went missing in action in Korea a month before his eighteenth birthday.

He came home in 1945, married Doris Waller in St. Charles, ran a doughnut business in St. Louis for a time, and drove trucks as a Teamster on long hauls for thirty-eight years. When Earl Nolan passed in 1968, the state police stopped Howard's truck at the Mississippi line so he could get home to bury the man who had taken him in.