What I'd Do Differently If I Started My Plumbing Business Today

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Every plumber starting out pictures the same thing. Big shop, double doors, wrapped trucks, the whole setup. Dennis spent 25 years building a $12 million plumbing company and says that vision is exactly what holds most trades owners back. The shop should be the last thing you buy, not the first.

In this episode, Dennis breaks down what he'd do instead if he started his plumbing business over today. He covers the fixer-upper strategy for building rental income and keeping crews productive, why buying equipment you want instead of what your company needs is a costly trap, and why idle crews sitting in the shop waiting for calls destroys morale and kills sales. The line that stuck: confidence sells.

Topics discussed:

00:00 - Why he wouldn't buy a shop first
00:40 - The fixer-upper strategy instead of a fancy shop
01:48 - Spotting project houses while on the job
02:51 - Turning slow days into crew training
04:20 - The $70K mistake and the want vs. need trap
05:19 - Why he never bought a backhoe in 25 years
07:18 - When the big shop is actually justified
08:36 - What he lost by not buying rentals sooner
10:28 - Why idle crews kill morale and sales

The Podcast that helps plumbing and heating service contractors stop working for free and actually turn a profit. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If I could start my plumbing business over today, I would not buy a shop. That wouldn't be my first goal. Hi, I'm Dennis. Dennis, the apprentice on most socials, and I've spent 25 years in the trades. I built a beautiful plumbing company to $12 million and eventually sold it. This is trade traction. You started your business with big dreams, right? I did. Picture them big double doors and wrap trucks. Six months in. That dream goes quiet, doesn't it? In the next few minutes, I'll tell you what I would do instead, why every plumber I know gets this backwards and what it's going to cost you the longer you wait to figure this out. Of course, we need a rental space, right? A retail space with our signs for Google Maps. And maybe that's where the person answers the phone and where the accounting's done. But I'd drop the big dream of the big fancy shop for a while. And instead, I'd make the crew gathering place. That's what a shop is, right? That's where everybody comes and hangs out in the morning. That's where everybody comes and hangs out when it's slow. I'd make that my first rental, my first fixer upper. You see, what happens when they come hang out at the shop in the middle of the day is they're all looking at you, wondering, who screwed the marketing up? What's going on, right? And the truth is, most of our plumbers can work wherever they want. And it's a waste of time. And see, I had a shop and I had three bathrooms, and I was always looking for a place to, you know, do some training. But the office staff didn't want me tearing up the office. It was uncomfortable to do that, right? Because they knew we'd tear it apart and then a call would come in and we'd take off and leave it. And that actually happened a couple times. You see, I would buy the fixer upper and make it a rental. We're always in these homes. That's one thing cool about service. We're in and out of homes all day long. And, you know, just as clear as me, every once in a while you're in a house and like, man, this would be a great fixer upper. It'd be so easy to add a second bathroom or a third bathroom. It'd be go right here. And they kind of look like they want to sell. And it looks like it's run down. They're not taking care of the yard. Maybe they'd like someone to take this off their hands, right? I would find one of those and I'd buy that. When I could afford it, I'd buy it and I would stretch myself to get it. But that's where we're going to hang out when it's slow. That's probably where we're going to hang out in the mornings. And when I mean hang out, we're not just going to sit around, we're going to get something done. And Thursdays, I don't know about you, but Thursday was our slow day. Inevitably, if I had a bet on which day was going to be the slowest, besides Monday, a beautiful sunny Monday in Seattle, that turned out to be a slow day too. But typically, normally, Thursday was the lowest call count day for us. And so that's why Thursday afternoons is when we did our hands-on training. And I would do that at my fixer upper project house. Let's call it a project house instead of a shop. And I'm going to do some training there. And my guys are going to learn how to repipe the house and redo all the stuff at the bathroom, maybe do some concrete work, maybe do some drywall work. I might get my buddy to come over and help me rewire it. So my guys learn about wiring, you know? And what's going to happen is my guys are going to get more well-rounded. They're going to understand how all the different trades interconnect and how they work together. They're also going to stay busy in slow times. And also, when it's slow, I'll be working on my asset and I'll be building another asset besides my business and even eventually besides my shop property, right? But I would do that and then get that rented out. If there's any maintenance issues or anything that comes up, I've got people that can run over and deal with it. And then I'd let the guys know, hey, it's time for another project house. And I guarantee you, either myself or some of my guys will know just the house to talk to, just the people to talk to. Like, hey, someone was talking about how they might not live there in my slaughter, they were thinking about selling. And I go over there and make a deal, and I get a second project house. So I get a second property, a second project house, and then a third, and then a fourth. And I wouldn't buy my shop until, hear me, until my company demanded that I buy it. Hear me out. We all want stuff, right? There was a time when I wanted a perma liner, you know, sewer lining. I wanted my own equipment. And I got it. I sprung for it. I think it was like $70,000 or something. I got it. I got my beautiful. I didn't use the trailer because we were in downtown Seattle area. So I got a biggest Suzu box truck and I built it out to be my liner truck. And the problem is we didn't have much demand for it. The other problem is we didn't really know how to sell liners very effectively. And you know what that thing did? It sat around most of the time. It didn't really make us money. And during the recession of 2008, we sold it. And we learned the lesson that we don't buy stuff because we want them. We buy stuff because our company needs them. For instance, we all want a backhoe, right? Doesn't a backhoe sound cool? I own my own backhoe. As kids, we just dreamed, wouldn't it be cool to own my own backhoe? Some of us did anyway. And so that's a dream. But we did a million dollars a month for quite a while. We got up to that big. And for 25 years, we never owned a backhoe. It actually never made economic sense. Now, my ego, it made sense to my ego, but think about it. Every job's a little bit different. If you buy a backhoe, you got to use the same backhoe. But I rented mine. I get to call in and say I want the small one or the medium-sized one or the what's the biggest one you got, right? For a really deep sewer. And they would deliver it. See, I didn't have to buy a big pickup and a big trailer. I didn't have to have a place to store it. I would just make a phone call and they would deliver it to the job site. The one I wanted, the one I needed. And the next thing is, if it ever broke down, and they occasionally do, right? Hydraulic hose, the track issues, other issues. You got a mechanic? Do you know how to fix a backhoe? It's hard enough to find a good plumber, let alone a good plumber that knows how to fix backhoes, right? Now, of course, we might have fun fixing it on a Saturday afternoon, but hey, I'm trying to make money here, aren't you? And so we didn't have those problems. We let the rental company fix the backhoe. Now, yes, there is a day. Maybe all you do is sewer work and you're using a backhoe every day. Yes, there is a day it will make sense for your business to own a backhoe. I'm not saying don't buy it then. I'm just saying when you're just starting out, we've got all these dreams of the things we want. And I'm encouraging you not to buy them because you want them. Buy them because you need them. And that does include the big shop. Yes, we all want the big shop. Eventually, I got my big shop. And it was awesome. And it was so worth the work. But I see so many people spring in for that big shop before they need it. What is needing a big shop look like? We had so many trucks that literally probably once a month a plumber would come in and say, hey, the neighbor's calling the cops, or the cops are just down the street. And we would go jump, we'd have to stop the meet and go out and move our trucks. Because we had trucks parked everywhere. And so we had to buy a new property. We finally had to buy the property I always wanted. And we went and found a beautiful property. It was awesome. But that's my encouragement to you. Let your company need it before you get it, rather than get stuff that you want in hopes that you'll need it. And see if you'll do that, especially with these project houses, you're gonna have four or five, six, seven, eight project houses that you'll be able to call up. What happens when have you ever been to the supply house and there's a scratch and dent and it's not really a big deal, but you really don't have a use for it? You can take advantage of those scratch and dent deals and you can put them in the rental properties if you've got them. See, I'm I'm wishing here. See, I didn't do that. So here's the deal. Yes, I built a big, beautiful business that was worth a lot of money. And yes, I finally got that big property. But you know, when I sold my business, luckily the business that bought the company that bought my business rented my shop from me, but only for two years. And then, like, I'm probably moving where my all my kids have moved across state. I'm probably moving across the state too. And with all the hassle, we sold it. And I don't know if that's the right thing or not, but it seemed right for us. So now my two biggest assets are not cash flowing any longer. And I'm not crying about it. Like I'm well off because of it. It worked out good, but all of a sudden, I don't have the cash flow I could have had. See, we saved our money for years and years to buy the big property. And so we could have bought smaller properties along the way, is all I'm saying. And if I had done that, I'd probably still have everything I had, but now I'd have some rental properties as well. And I'd still have those. And here's the next thing. And the way we did it, all our eggs are in one basket. Like if business was slow, sometimes I miss paychecks more times than you would think. And I had no other income coming in except my business. If I had rental properties, I'd have some rental income coming in. And then what do you do with the money that comes in? Now, I could have paid off some of those rental properties, right? I could have put the money and paid the rental properties off. For sure, this is for entertainment purposes only. I am not a financial advisor, and I don't want to be one. This is me looking back on my life. You know, if I could do it over again, I'd buy some fixer-up or project houses before I bought the big, beautiful shop property. Here's another huge benefit. When I was slow, we either sent people home, which is necessary, right? When it's really slow, you don't want to just have people sit around for hours and hours and hours. But the other thing is we would sit around hoping the phone would ring, like you'd sit around for a couple hours hoping that something came in. But the whole time they're sitting around, they're getting depressed. They're getting tired. And after a couple hours, when the call finally comes in, they really don't want it. You ever experienced that? Like the energy's gone. Like they would rather go home. They don't actually want the call. We finally got a call, and no one wants to go on it. And the reason is because us tradespeople are kinetic. Like we get our dopamine hits by doing stuff and fixing stuff and helping people. And when we're sitting around in the shop waiting for the phone to ring, you're just getting depressed and you're also wondering who screwed something up. So if instead we could have waited for the phone to ring at the project house and we could have replaced the water heater or got a little bit more done on the repipe, right? Or broken up the concrete for the new bathroom or patched the concrete, right? We've stayed a little bit busy. And then when the phone finally rings again, we're in a much better mood and ready for the call because we've been moving and fixing things and working all day. We're still in the rhythm of work. And it also helps them be more confident in themselves. And guess what? Confidence sells. So that's what I would do if I had to do it all over again. What would you do different? Or what are you doing different? Hey, I'd love it. I'd be honored if you'd like this video, subscribe, share this with a buddy that's in the trades. The trades are the place to be. And if you're not really feeling it yet, we should talk. All right. See you next time.