Three Uniforms.
One Standard.

A Navy veteran. A fifteen-year Pennsylvania patrol officer. A licensed electrician. One family business. One set of standards that doesn't move.

The Second Uniform — Fifteen Years on Pennsylvania Patrol

After the Navy I came home to Pennsylvania. I worked as a carpenter for several years, then trained as an electrician, then got laid off when the 2009 recession hit the trades. That layoff sent me into law enforcement.

For the next fifteen years I served on patrol across four departments. Colebrookdale Township Police, where I was a full-time patrolman until that department merged into Eastern Berks Regional Police. Eastern Berks Regional Police itself. Boyertown Borough Police. And Bally Borough Police. I was awarded two Life Saving Awards across those years. I worked nights and double shifts and the kind of unglamorous, never-on-TV police work that small-town Pennsylvania departments actually do.

But the call I responded to most often — the one I couldn't shake — wasn't a violent crime. It was a homeowner standing on their porch telling me they'd given a deposit to a contractor, and the contractor never came back.

Sometimes the deposit was five hundred dollars. Sometimes it was fifteen thousand. Sometimes the homeowner was elderly and had been saving for a roof repair for two years. Sometimes it was a young family who'd put their tax refund toward an electrical panel upgrade. The story was different every time and the same every time. Money in. No work done. Contractor gone.

I'd open a case file. I'd take a statement. I'd refer them to the District Attorney's office. And I'd watch them face the slow, exhausting reality that most of these cases don't go anywhere. The contractor's name is fake or the LLC is dissolved or the company moved across the state line. The money's gone. The work was never done. The homeowner is left with the porch, the empty bank account, and the slow loss of trust in the idea that you can just hire somebody to do work in your house.

That pattern repeated until I couldn't keep watching it.

Megan Merry -
Majority Owner

Merry Brothers is owned 51 percent by my wife, Megan Merry. She's been involved in the business from the beginning, and her role is growing as the business grows.

Megan handles permits, paperwork, customer relationships, and the operational backbone that lets the rest of us focus on the work in the field. She's increasingly running the behind-the-scenes work the company needs as we expand — the part of the business I can't run from a job site. She's the reason invoices go out the same day the job finishes. She's the reason a customer who called once becomes a customer who calls again. And she's the reason the Christmas cards go out in December and the birthday recognitions land on time, because she actually cares about the relationships customers build with us over the long term.

Megan is a majority woman owner of an electrical contracting business in a state where that's still uncommon. We're proud of what that means for the way we operate and what we hope it signals to younger families building businesses in the trades. The certification work that goes with this status is underway as of 2026.