Your Plumber Is Your REAL Customer (Most Owners Get This Wrong)

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Are you struggling to grow your plumbing business, retain plumbers, or build a profitable plumbing company?

In this episode, Dennis the Apprentice reveals one of the most important lessons every plumbing business owner must learn: your primary customer is not the homeowner—it's your plumber.

Most plumbing contractors focus all their attention on customer service, but the most successful plumbing companies understand that attracting, training, and retaining great plumbers is what drives long-term growth. If you want to grow a plumbing company, increase profitability, recruit top technicians, and build a business that lasts, this mindset shift can change everything.

Dennis shares how he transformed his plumbing service business by creating an environment where plumbers wanted to work. You'll learn why paying plumbers more often requires charging more, how flat-rate pricing helped support business growth, why technician retention matters more than most owners realize, and how investing in training can help your plumbing company dominate the market.

Whether you're a plumbing contractor, service plumber, HVAC business owner, electrical contractor, or home service entrepreneur, this episode will help you build a stronger team, improve recruiting, increase technician retention, and create a more profitable service business.

What You'll Learn:

✔ Why your plumbers are your most important customer
✔ How to attract and retain top plumbing technicians
✔ Why great plumbers can work anywhere they want
✔ How to grow a plumbing company with the right culture
✔ Why cheap pricing hurts your plumbing business
✔ The connection between profitability and technician pay
✔ How training programs attract better plumbers
✔ Why "whoever has the plumbers owns the market"
✔ How to build a plumbing business that top talent wants to join

If you're looking for plumbing business coaching, plumbing company growth strategies, plumbing management advice, recruiting plumbers, retaining plumbers, flat-rate pricing strategies, or home service business growth, this episode is for you.

👇 Take the contractor assessment and discover what your plumbing business should focus on next.

Subscribe for more plumbing business coaching, contractor growth strategies, service business management, leadership training, and home service business success tips.

Chapters

00:00 Plumbing Business Owners Are Thinking About Customers Wrong
01:15 Why Your Plumber Is Your Real Customer
03:20 The Plumbing Business Model Explained
05:10 Why Great Plumbers Can Work Anywhere
07:08 How to Attract Top Plumbers to Your Company
09:42 How Plumbing Companies Pay Plumbers More
12:15 Flat Rate Pricing and Plumbing Business Growth
15:00 The Customer Complaint That Changed Everything
18:05 Why Cheap Plumbing Companies Struggle
20:30 Building a Plumbing Company Technicians Love
23:15 Whoever Has the Plumbers Owns the Market
25:40 Plumbing Training Programs That Attract Top Talent
29:05 Creating a World-Class Plumbing Training Center
32:00 Plumbing Business Coaching and Contractor Growth
35:10 Final Advice for Plumbing Business Owners

#PlumbingBusiness #PlumbingCompany #PlumbingContractor #Plumber #ServiceBusiness #H

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey, Dennis the Apprentice here again, helping you get serious about the business of blue collar. Does that make sense? Like, you're probably an awesome plumber, blue-collar worker. So good that you got in business for yourself. And now you're figuring out that, whoa, business is a whole different ball game, right? So I learned that too. And I spent 25 years learning how to run a very beautiful, profitable plumbing service company. And now I get to share my time and spend my time helping other contractors figure it out much faster than I did by coaching. And so there's several beliefs that we need to adjust, make adjustments to, um, in my opinion, in order to run successful businesses. And number three, belief number three, is that your primary customer is actually your plumbers, not the customer. You hear all the time that the customer is always right, right? And that's kind of true, but who's your customer? It's the plumber. Like, if you are building a plumbing company, what you're doing is you are attracting plumbers to come work for you so that you can serve customers. You're kind of a middleman. You're saying, hey plumbers, I can get you the work to keep you busy and help you be successful in life. And hey, customers, I have the plumbers to solve all your problems. That's that's the business of being a plumbing contractor, is bringing those two together, bringing the customer and the right plumber to fix the problems, right? And so if you don't have plumbers, then you how can you you could have customers, but you have no business. So you need plumbers. So you need to become an attractive place to work. So how do you do that? Well, you have to pay well. See, that's one of the reasons. Back when I first started, we were $88 an hour. And so I started some sales programs and sales contests, and just trying to do better. And it worked. And my guys started bringing in more money and doing more with their calls, and but I didn't have any money extra to pay them. Meanwhile, this thing called flat rate showed up, and there were a couple companies that were saying that they were paying over $100,000 a year to their plumbers. This is back in like 2000. And I wasn't paying near that. I think my top guy was making like $26 an hour. And at the same time, I'm helping them do better than they'd ever done. And they were starting to hear this $100,000 number being paid out. And I'm like, oh boy, I better figure out how to pay my guys well, or I'm gonna lose them. I kind of turned them on to this idea of taking care of the customer and doing really good work and offering to do more and um you know looking nice and all that, and um, and it worked. And so, how do you pay more? Well, if if you understand that you only can pay about 20% in labor typically, or or you're gonna be out of balance. You can pay more, but you won't have money to do something else. You won't be you won't have the money to buy a new truck or to keep the trucks fixed or to market enough to keep the calls busy, right? The phones busy. So you can pay more, but the company won't be healthy, it won't be balanced. Or everything will work great, but there'll be no money left. You won't, as a contractor, make any money. So if that's true, then how do I pay my plumbers more? I'm gonna have to raise my rates. And so that's when I started trying to figure out flat rate, and I that that just took us on a whole nother journey. But here's the deal it all started by me understanding that my primary customer is my plumber. And see, when you figure that out, that changes everything. And isn't it true? Isn't it true that the plumber, a license, a good licensed plumber, can work wherever they want? In my market, every single day I knew they could quit today and get a hiring bonus and start tomorrow somewhere else. That's the environment I built my business in. And it's probably your environment. Don't you worry that your plumbers are going to leave? Don't you worry that you don't want to upset them? Don't we don't we kind of get in a mess here where they kind of we get this prima donna attitude sometimes. And how do we get this attitude going? And it's kind of scary to be too hard on your plumbers because they might leave. They can leave whatever they want. So don't be hard on them, is the first thing. But you have to understand that. And once you understand that belief that your first customer is your plumber, then you start building a business where plumbers can do well, where plumbers enjoy working. Well, that's gonna do that, that's gonna cost more to have nice trucks, right? A good licensed plumber probably would appreciate a nice truck and good working tools, an apprentice that actually wants to be there, and a flexible on-call schedule, uh flexible meaning that if he needs time off, he can get it. Right? Like there's so many things retirement, good benefits, unique benefits, tool insurance, for instance. There's all sorts of things that we can do to create a nice place to work for our techs. But that costs more. And so that costs more to attract the best plumbers. And don't you want to work with the best plumbers? Like, do you actually want to be cheap? I remember a time when we um I had this complaint. We always get complaints, right? There's always complaints, is but you're never going to get away from it. In fact, I had more complaints when I was at $88 an hour than when my first flat rate price was $286 a build hour. It wasn't enough, but that was all we were, we just couldn't figure out how to charge more than that, even though we were supposed to. We were scared. And um, but by doing by knowing that we had to um charge that we did, and it caused complaints. Just like the 88 did. I'm not saying something changed, it's just I got a complaint. And it was that um everything was good, the plumber was good, we were on time, the work was great, everything was great. They just wished it cost less, right? And I remember when I figured out this this one particular time, this customer really beat me up. And so me and my partner went out for coffee just to we went to Starbucks just to kind of decompress. Have you ever been there? And I remember my partner helped me out, and she's like, wait a second, we're not trying to be cheap. Like I wait, I I wait, I never said I was gonna be the cheapest. I I don't want to be cheap. Like, I know what cheap looks like. Um when we were at $88 an hour, we looked cheap, we were cheap, it felt cheap. You know what my first job was when I first came to work at the company? Was I got to work before the plumbers did, and two trucks I used starter fluid to start up in the morning. Honestly, like we our fleet was old, parts were disorganized, our sewer machines were old. Um, we had pieced them together to make them work. The owner of the company was the only one that could figure out, and you know, he would remodel one and get it back up on the road. And it was just kind of like I could just tell, like, oh, this isn't good. Like we're we're kind of backwards. And so I know what cheap looks like. I'm not interested in that. And so, and if I want to attract good plumbers, I can't be cheap. So, but that changed everything for us when we realize we're not trying to be cheap. We're actually trying to put good, competent plumbers on the road. So they do good work, they fix it right the first time, they're organized, they know how to communicate well with me, the owner, the company, and the customer. Frankly, that's more expensive than cheap. And all that came from me realizing that my primary customer is my plumber. So somebody, it's so easy to get that turned around. But I'm gonna say it again and again. If you don't figure out that your job as a contractor is to create a beautiful place, the best place in town for the plumbers, for the best plumbers to come hang out and spend their time with and work for, then you're gonna struggle. Right? Because the plumber can work wherever they want on any day they want. And they will. So, key point if you want to get serious about your blue-collar business, if you want to get good at business, understand that your primary customer is your plumber. Build a business where the plumbers want to work. Another way I say this, you'll hear me say this, is whoever has the plumbers owns the market. Like when a call comes in, when a water heater is leaking, it's gotta be fixed. I can't wait till tomorrow, it's gotta be today. So whoever can run that call is gonna get that work. So your job as a business owner is to figure out what it takes in your market to attract the best plumbers, right? And then you have to charge enough to be profitable creating that environment, and that's the price. And when you understand that, you'll attract plumbers. You'll attract good plumbers that don't cause drama and fix it right the first time and communicate with the customer and communicate with you and are reasonable. Um, you'll attract people that you'll attract apprentices that actually want to become good plumbers. Um, you'll attract good plumbers, more good plumbers will want to work because guess what? Uh feathers flock together. That like, what is that? What how do you say that? Birds of a feather flock together. Eagles like to fly with eagles. And that's what will happen. That's what happened to me. I figured it out, figured that out. I built that, I became a training lab. I built a big training lab, I became a training culture because I've discovered that good plumbers don't want to feel stupid, don't like to feel stupid. And when there's new products come out, they want to know everything about it. So they're not, they don't feel foolish in front of the customer. Have you ever noticed that sometimes you try to get a custom a plumber to go out and he doesn't want to go? It's probably because he's not familiar, he's not comfortable with that product. So we built a training facility. It took time to get to that level, but we ended up having a world-class, remarkable training center. We had every brand of tankless water heaters on the wall. They all could fire all at once. We could train anything. If a plumber had not looked at a certain piece of equipment before, we could walk downstairs and open it up and look at it and fire it off and see how it worked before he went on the call. Right? Or if he came in after a call and had some questions, we could go downstairs and open it up and look at it and talk about it. And so that all took time, but what it did was it attracted good plumbers. And that cost a certain amount of money. And it wasn't cheap, and loads of customers wanted that. We almost always had more calls than we could get to. And we did that by understanding that our primary customer is the plumber. So if you like this, go to my YouTube channel, Trade Traction, on YouTube. Um, join my school community, the trade traction uh in my school community. And also, if you're interested in getting coaching from me, I have I have uh a community of clients, mostly plumbing companies, where we work together. We meet sometimes, often, most of them, two times a week. Once we one meeting we talk about sales, and another meeting we talk about the ownership side of the business. And we work together, we grow together. I love helping contractors figure figure this stuff out. Uh these these businesses are complicated to run. There's lots of moving parts, they're not all under our control. Like our work is done in the customer's home, not at our shop, right? We saw these, we send these people out to do work on our in our name, right? There, there's a lot of moving parts, and it's hard to figure it all out. And even world-class athletes have coaches. So I'd be honored if you'd be interested in me being your coach. Um, there's a link in in the profile up above where you can, there's a score app where it's a little survey, it's a little assessment, and there's 17 questions. It helps me get to know you a little bit better. It helps and it lets me tell you what probably you should work on next. I'll give you some feedback right away. It's built into it, it's kind of cool. And then there's a reason there's a video of me talking a little bit about the test and the results. And then there's also a place for you to book a call with me and see if you might be a good fit in joining my coaching platform. All right. The trades are a great place to be. A great place to be? The trades are the place to be. So let's figure this out and prove it, and so that we can enjoy the success there is in the trades for us. All right. Hope to see you there.