The Gulf Coast’s relationship with hurricanes produces, over the years, a certain kind of business: founded by people who lived through one, built for the next. Jubilee Generator in Daphne is exactly that. Steve Dukes and Tim Ikner — childhood friends from the same Miss Grable preschool class in Daphne, photographed as a pair in clown suits — have spent a combined four decades in HVAC and electrical work, and they have now pooled it into a company that does one thing: sell, service, maintain, and warranty home standby generators.
Why Generators, and Why Here
The founders’ pitch starts with the region’s history. The Gulf Coast’s storm memory runs long — from Hurricane Camille’s devastation of the Mississippi coast in 1969 to Hurricane Sally, which in September 2020 knocked out power across south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle for days. When Hurricane Sally struck, homeowners with in-home generators never missed a beat; homeowners without them discovered, as one of the founders did firsthand, that a grinder-pump sewer system, a refrigerator, air conditioning, and even ceiling fans all go dark together — and that a generator is the only piece of equipment that fixes all of them at once.
That is the whole product, they say. A standby generator simply turns natural gas or propane into electricity when the grid can’t — and it is not just for hurricanes. Medical equipment that needs power, wells that need pumps, sump systems that need to keep running: a standby generator is the piece of equipment a coastal house doesn’t know it needs until the night it does.
Miss Grable’s Class
Dukes and Ikner’s friendship is Baldwin County history in miniature. Steve was born at Quantico, Virginia, where his father was a Marine; the family moved to Daphne when Steve was four, after his father’s commission ended, and that is when he met Tim at Miss Grable’s preschool — the famous class photo shows the pair in full clown costume. “That was Miss Grable’s class, and we’re still clowning around,” they say in unison.
Steve’s dad went to work for Coastline Supply, a heating-and-air supply house in Bay Minette, and later founded AB Heating & Air. Steve started working for his father at 13, graduated from Baldwin County High School, completed Bishop State College’s 18-month HVAC program, and went to work full-time for the family business — buying it outright from his dad in 2007.
Tim never left the Eastern Shore. After Miss Grable’s “clown school,” he graduated from Daphne High School and earned his electrical and instrumentation degree, also from Bishop State. His father worked 32 years at Scott Paper Company in Mobile. Tim started Shoreline Electric, doing service calls and electrical installation for new home construction.
The two stayed friendly through different circles, and their businesses merged in practice around 2016, when Tim began subcontracting electrical work to Steve’s HVAC jobs. In 2018, Steve began selling in-home generators as part of his offerings, with Tim providing the electrical installation. By 2019, Steve was fielding offers to buy his HVAC business — and the idea of doing only generators started to sound less like retirement and more like the right business.
Their Own Storm Story
Tim’s reason for the switch is the most quoted line in the company’s story: “It’s outside,” he says. “I’ve spent 25% of my time in people’s attics. I’m not going to be hot anymore.” The trade-show version of that joke — “every social event I go to, the host has some electrical issue they want me to look at” — is how electricians end up sweating in an attic while everyone else enjoys the party.
The founders installed their first generators in some capacity around 2004, in the years after Hurricane Ivan, and the market’s growth tracks the coast’s storm history ever since. After launching Jubilee Generator in May 2025, the company spent three months getting recertification training and service authorization for every brand of in-home generator on the market.
What Jubilee Generator Does
The company’s model is deliberately narrow. “We only do generators,” Steve says. “We don’t do commercial property, just residential.” That focus makes them unusual: Jubilee is a distributor and service provider for Generac, Kohler, Briggs and Stratton, and Cummins — the only shop in the area, they say, that sells, services, maintains, and provides warranty service across all four brands.
That matters because most generators are mechanically similar but brand-specific in their electronics, batteries, and parts. “You have to have special training and tools for each brand,” Steve says. “When your generator won’t come on, who are you going to call?” The answer, for a 16-year-old Cummins customer of theirs, was Jubilee — at a moment when only three of the parts the unit needed were available in the United States, with a 70-day wait. Jubilee ordered it on the spot and got the customer running again. It may be knowing which battery a specific model needs; it may be keeping regularly needed parts on the truck and bigger ones back at the shop.
Servicing existing generators is the first goal — “Maintaining and understanding every brand is what we are trained and experienced to do,” Steve says, comparing a standby generator to a classic car: you take care of it so it starts when you need it. New installations, when they happen, run $13,000 to $20,000 depending on the load calculation and the customer’s choices, and take about three weeks from start to finish — a timeline the founders credit to knowing every inspector and permit requirement in the county.
Keeping It Local
“We want to keep it local. We serve Baldwin County. When people call, we don’t want to say no,” Steve says. The company launched in May 2025, does no advertising, and drew about 300 calls in its first year — almost entirely word of mouth, built on two reputations from the HVAC and electrical trades. The goal is a steady three service calls a day: “When you can’t get anyone to come service your generator, give us a call.”
The wives and families anchor the story. Steve’s wife Natalie is Dean of Allied Health at Coastal Community College; their four kids include a nurse, a physical therapist, and a social work student at the University of West Florida. Steve is a member of the Crossroads Volunteer Fire Department, and his son volunteers as a firefighter too. Tim’s wife May is on staff at Haley Dermatology in Fairhope; their three boys and a daughter round out a family that has lived the Eastern Shore’s growth from the inside.
Asked about the future — AI, automation, job security — the founders have a trade-school answer: machines still need people with tools. And on the Gulf Coast, the weather guarantees the phone keeps ringing. The storms will come; the question is only who you’ll call when they do. In Daphne, the answer clowns around.
What a Standby Generator Actually Is
For homeowners who have never priced one: an in-home standby generator is a permanent appliance, installed outside the house on a concrete pad, wired into the electrical system through a transfer switch and plumbed to natural gas or a propane tank. When utility power fails, the unit starts — often within seconds — and carries the house’s essential circuits until the grid returns. The math that matters is the load calculation: what the house actually needs to run, which is why identical houses can end up with different sized units and price tags. New installations along the Gulf Coast typically run between $13,000 and $20,000 installed, and about three weeks from contract to commissioning — most of it permit and inspection time.
Maintenance is the part owners forget. A standby generator that starts only during hurricanes still needs oil changes, battery checks, and exercise-cycle verification — the automotive analogy the founders use is exact. Brands share engines and alternators but differ in controllers, batteries, and proprietary parts, which is why multi-brand service capability is the rarest skill set in the trade. Jubilee’s recertification boot camp across Generac, Kohler, Briggs and Stratton, and Cummins product lines is the company’s core credential.
The Business Lesson Inside the Story
There is also a small-business parable here. Two tradesmen who each ran larger companies chose, deliberately, to run a smaller one: no advertising, no commercial work, no employees to hire in a post-COVID labor market where, as Steve puts it, “it’s just harder to find good, reliable people.” The founders do the work themselves, cap their ambition at Baldwin County, and let two decades of reputation fill the calendar. “It’s something we know and have been doing a long time… this is something we can do ourselves, and do it well. A lot less headaches.”
The strategy mirrors what has worked across the Gulf Coast’s trades for decades: be the person who shows up when the storm hits, do the work right, and let the neighborhood do the marketing. On a coast that measures time in named storms, that reputation compounds faster than any ad campaign.