Eric Lazear started out on the ground floor in 1979, fresh out of college, as an elevator salesman.
Today, he’s at the top floor of a big elevator company, having recently been promoted to president and chief executive of Whittier-based Amtech Elevator Services. He will be in charge of all branch operations.
Lazear started his career at U.S. Elevator Co. in San Diego, poring over construction blueprints and negotiating contracts. Now, he runs a company that services elevators rather than manufactures them.
“We put all of our resources in customer service instead of engineering and construction,” Lazear said.
The company operates 16 branch offices nationwide, servicing about 18,000 elevators across the country. Los Angeles is the company’s biggest market Lazear estimates that Amtech services about 8,000 elevators locally.
“If you’ve got an elevator in Southern California, there’s probably a 25 percent chance that we serviced it,” he said.
Included among Amtech’s Los Angeles clients are Kaiser Permanente, Macy’s department stores and the L.A. Unified School District.
Lazear has seen many technological changes in elevators, from the old-fashioned “car switch” elevators that he remembers as a kid, to today’s microprocessor-controlled automatic models.
Modern elevator service technicians are armed with personal notebook computers to diagnose problems. Much of Amtech’s business consists of installing computerized upgrades on elevators that are 15 to 20 years old.
About 30 percent of Amtech’s business is taken up with retrofitting elevators for the disabled to comply with the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act. These upgrades involve placing control panels and emergency telephones lower so they can be more easily reached by people in wheelchairs.
Lazear’s career choice might have had something to do with his upbringing. Raised in New York, he said he was never nervous about riding the elevators up skyscrapers. But other forms of building transportation made him very nervous.
“I had a fear of escalators when I was a little kid,” Lazear said.
Chris Denina
