Built To Serve: Erica’s Plumbing Story

Peakzi Podcast: Want to see what people-first service really looks like? We sit down with founder Erica Sullivan of Erica's Plumbing in Boca Raton, FL to explore how a woman-owned plumbing, HVAC, and restoration company thrives by hiring for character, training for mastery, and building a brand customers trust the moment a pink truck pulls up. From the first phone call to the final walkthrough, Erica shows how empathy, clean work, and code-level rigor create a uniform experience that turns one visit into a lifetime relationship.

Erica traces her path from fashion school and marketing to identifying a real gap in home services: homeowners crave skill, honesty, and communication they can count on. She explains why a woman technician can instantly lower stress at the door, how clear options and tidy installs build confidence, and why she insists on weekly training for both technical skills and customer communication. We talk hiring for integrity and coachability, interview scenarios that reveal true character, and the pride that comes from work so clean you want to show the before-and-after.

We also dig into growth in the age of AI. Erica shares how partnering with Peakzi helped her brand show up in AI-driven search, where more customers now start their journey, and how new recruiting insights surfaced strong candidates with real data. Market exclusivity, proactive introductions, and measurable results reinforced a strategy that goes beyond ads to long-term visibility and team building. Finally, Erica opens up about legacy: creating careers with benefits and advancement, giving back to the community every month, and building a company her kids may lead one day.

If you’re building a home services business or leading a team that serves people at home, you’ll find practical ideas here: brand differentiation that actually matters, culture that holds under pressure, and training that never stops. Subscribe, share this with a fellow contractor, and leave a review with your favorite takeaway so we can bring more stories like this to your feed.

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More info at: https://www.ai.ericasplumbing.com/

https://www.ericasplumbing.com/

Peakzi Podcast: Home Services Success Stories

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Julian Placino 0:00

Welcome to the Home Services Success Stories podcast powered by Peakzi, the number one AI platform for growing your home services business. I'm Julian Placino, your host, and we have another great episode in store for you today. Because today we have Erica Sullivan, who is the founder and owner at Erica's Plumbing Air Conditioning and Restoration. Erica, welcome to the show. How are you?

Speaker 2 0:21

Thanks for having me, and uh I'm doing great.

Erica’s Role And Hands-On Leadership

Julian Placino 0:24

Yeah, excited to learn more about you and the business. So let's jump right in. So, Erica, start by telling us a bit about your role today and what you personally oversee within the business.

Speaker 2 0:35

So today I'm I'm very hands-on. Um, I'm not just the owner, I'm also the operator. So I wear a lot of hats. Um, I've been doing it for 16 years. So I'm overseeing the vision, the operations, leadership, um, branding, uh, marketing, um, the customer experience, training. Um, so a little bit of everything. Um, I'm I'm deeply involved because I think that being personally um there for my team helps them represent my brand and me and the way that I want the customer experience to go. Um, so it's important for me to not be disconnected from um anyone on my team, from the CSRs to the dispatchers to the guys in the field. I want the customer feel, the customers to feel like if it's not me and their home, I've trained my people to be just like me in their home. Um, so you know, just my role is to make sure our company is delivering uh professional, ethical, high-quality home services consistently.

Julian Placino 1:44

So very hands-on, strategic, tactical, overseeing every aspect of the business. And I have to ask, Erica, you are very different, as you know, when it comes to this world, right? So I'm curious, what was the genesis story of the business? What why did you found the business back in 2009?

Speaker 2 2:01

So in 2009, I started the company because I saw a major gap in the home services industry. Um, you know, homeowners wanted skill, they wanted honesty, they wanted communication, accountability. And um my father was a plumber. I didn't get into it because of him. I was actually dating a plumber at the time, and I realized this is a male-dominated field and could really use some women. And um, so it didn't come from uh I was, it didn't come from, you know, someone giving me the company. It came from me wanting to do something different and do it better. Um, I believed I could build a plumbing company that treated customers fairly, um, employees with respect, um, and just really be different in this male-dominated industry.

Julian Placino 2:54

Interesting. So, what was your background before starting the business?

Why Home Services And Early Customer Trust

Speaker 2 2:58

So I went to school for fashion design, um, got into marketing. Um I had gone back to school in when I was doing marketing uh to get my business degree, and then um dropped out because I found that um my entrepreneurial mind was like, I'm really good at marketing. Let me go ahead and start a marketing business. So I started a marketing business. Um, and like I said, I was dating a plumber at the time. So I loved owning a business, but things got slow with that. And then I saw this opportunity in the plumbing industry, and I was like, I'm gonna own a business that's plumbing.

Julian Placino 3:42

Interesting. So there's kind of a confluence of experience and things coming together. Yeah. But I am curious, what was it about the industry of home services that was interesting to you as an entrepreneur?

Speaker 2 3:53

Um, being able to help people every single day. It's like being their hero, right? It's something that they they couldn't fix on their own, right? They wanted someone that they could trust in their home. Um, you know, the the industry has uh kind of um this negative kind of view of the butt crack plumber to kind of put it in a nutshell.

Speaker 1 4:29

Right.

Speaker 2 4:31

But uh I wanted to be different, I wanted to be professional. Um, and when I started going out to jobs, it was like people received me so well versus my male counterparts. Right. So the the person that would usually be at home, right? The husband may call for the service. Hey, our water heater's broken, but the person that led us into the home was the wife. And when I show up, she's like, oh my gosh, I'm so happy. It's a woman, you're here. Like, I can trust you. I can, it eases my mind. It puts me in a place of, okay, I can relax. I'm not afraid of having this male in my home. Um, so it was uh it was it was something I found that was really needed in this industry.

Learning The Trade And Experience

Julian Placino 5:22

Wow. So so how did you, I guess, acquire, let's say, the technical expertise of plumbing, right? So you're great with marketing the business, great with interacting with a customer. How did you learn that side?

Speaker 2 5:35

So, like I said, my father was a plumber. So I I knew a lot of things. Um I I had friends in the industry. Uh, also I was dating uh a plumber, so I worked part-time, uh, plus my college credits counted towards um my experience. So um I learned the technical by being in the field, um, but it didn't take long to pick it up.

Julian Placino 5:58

Got it. So, as a certified woman-owned business, what are some of the things you have done differently within the market to stand out and better serve your customers?

Speaker 2 6:08

So the things that I've done different is um definitely my branding, right? Um, so I decided six years into owning my business to um rebrand and put pink trucks on the road with my face on it. So that really stood out in the male-dominated field. We're in South Florida. Um, there are hundreds of thousands of plumbing contractors, um, but I needed to figure out how to be different from just a name. So that's when I decided to put my name on the truck, Erica's Plumbing, um, and put my face on it and make the trucks pink. I did put a little bit of blue on it so that the the guys wouldn't be so opposed to driving pink trucks, but they actually love it. And um my my team loves working for a woman. So many of them have said we've only worked for men and we'll never go back to working for a man again. Um, because you know, we're not only um empathetic with them, we teach them how to be cleaner than, you know, leave the home cleaner than the way they found it, and our customers love that. Um it's it's important that I train my guys to be exactly like me. And that puts all of our customers at ease.

Hiring For Character And Craft Pride

Julian Placino 7:35

Interesting. So that being said, we're on the topic of your team. You have built a large, diverse team across plumbing, HVAC, restoration, dispatch, and leadership. So, what are some of those qualities that you look for in a person to make sure that they fit your culture and vision for the business?

Interview Tactics And Team Culture

Speaker 2 7:52

So I believe that skill can be taught, right? I was taught the skill. Um, character can't be taught. That's something that is instilled in you from a young age or you're born with. Um, so skill can be taught, character cannot. We hire for character. Um, we look for integrity, um, accountability, coachability, right? If I can't train, you know, someone that let's say they're older. I've experienced this throughout the years of owning the business. And unfortunately, it was it was more of the men that I would try to hire that were older than me, that they uh they wouldn't listen to me because they thought they knew better. And they weren't coachable. So they had great character, but they didn't have the other things that we needed. If I can't coach you, how can I help you to help our customers do better? So you have to be coachable and they've got to take pride in their workmanship. So if they're not proud of their own work, you know, plumbing is an art. It can look pretty. Um, it can look great. ACs, they can they can be installed beautifully and they can be installed terribly. We want them to look beautiful, right? They're they're not something everyone's opening the closet and admiring. But when we show a before and after picture, we want it to look like two completely different systems: the old system versus how beautiful the new system looks. You know, the piping should be straight, everything nice and clean. Um, so and the area around it is clean because that's something we teach our technicians to do. Um, so we want people that care about doing things the right way, um, understanding they're entering someone's home. So they need to be like super professional and also caring, you know, treat it like it's their own home. Um, and so we just we want people that are here for not just a job but a long-term career.

Julian Placino 10:07

So the technical can be trained, but the characteristic attributes are sort of wired into the person, right? So I'm curious in your interview process, what are some of the techniques or or methods that you use to suss out a person's character?

Speaker 2 10:20

So, you know, uh I will ask them a series of questions. How, you know, how would you handle a difficult customer? How would you handle conflict amongst um your teammates? Uh, let's say this scenario popped up. How would you handle it? So that I can kind of see what their answers are, to understand um how they would deal with something that's not easy to deal with. Like if a customer's yelling at you, how are you gonna handle that? Um, because that's gonna help, you know, it's it's just an interview, right? And and it takes time to get to know a person. But to understand hearing their answers, um, I've been doing this a long time, I can kind of weed them out like that.

Julian Placino 11:07

Interesting. Okay, so like behavioral-based questions, setting them up for specific situations, particularly difficult ones, and seeing kind of what comes back. So I that sounds like it would make for a very interesting culture. So, how many team members do you have now, Erica?

Speaker 2 11:21

Uh, we have 26.

Julian Placino 11:22

26. Okay. So, what does culture mean to you? And how are you intentional about growing or perpetuating your culture?

Training, Codes, And Communication

Speaker 2 11:31

So, culture um for me is I believe it's it's important for everyone in the company to have the same culture, right? We build that as a company so everyone knows our vision, um, so everyone understands what type of service we're expected to deliver, what kind of integrity we're supposed to have, um, how we're supposed to price jobs and be fair, um, cleanliness training. I mean, that's all part of our culture. Um, so we invest heavily in training, in certifications, in um individual personal development, right? So I've had we're part of um many groups where we we train our technicians, we send them off to training, we reward them for doing um great performance jobs. Um excuse me.

Julian Placino 12:33

Got the braining on the tumblr, also. I love it.

Peakzi Results And AI Visibility

Speaker 2 12:37

Yeah, so you know, whether it's a technician or a dispatcher or a customer service rep or a leader, we all need to be on the same page. Um, we all have to align in our values and what we want for the long term, right? I I tell everyone if from the very first phone call, if the customer experience is amazing, the customer will feel that. They'll book the call with us. And then the next person they see is the technician. And if that experience is amazing, they'll spend money with our company. We'll earn them in their business and their home for not only plumbing, but air conditioning and potentially restoration if they ever had a disaster. So we can offer them home services for their whole house for the lifetime that they own, the lifetime ownership of that home. Um so it's important for everyone to be buy into that so that the customer experience is the same across the board from the first call to when the technician leaves the home and every single trade that arrives at that home. Uh, the customer feels that. They'll be like, wow, this technician really loves working for this company. I haven't experienced that before. They talk so well about their boss and about their team. And that makes the customer also want to be a part of our culture and stay with us as a company. And they stay with us for years. I have customers that still have my cell phone number from when I started the company 16 years ago that are still with us. And that says a lot, I believe, about our culture.

Julian Placino 14:28

And that's how you create the whole uniform experience for all of your customers, regardless of where they are and all of that. So I think that makes a lot of sense. So so much of what you do has to do with like the human person, whether it's the customer or for the team member. Um, and I think you touched on it already, but how do you go about training the technical aspects to assure your customers that you know your technicians are not just great and empathetic, but also highly skilled when it comes to the trade?

Recruiting Insights And Market Support

Speaker 2 14:53

Absolutely. So um, because this is a trade, um, it's it's not just you know a job, it's a responsibility. Um, plumbing, HVAC, restoration, all of those things impact health, uh safety, the customer's property value, and sometimes their lives. Um so we have to follow strict codes. We have to constantly be um getting new industry uh recertifications. As they come up with new codes, we need to learn those. We have consistent trainings every single week with all of our technicians in all trades. Um we also train our technicians on um not just the skill, but also how to communicate well with customers. Not everyone's born or taught the best communication skills. So we have to teach that too. Um, so we're always training them every single week, you know, every single week of every single month of every single year. Um it doesn't, the training doesn't stop. So um we don't want to cut corners um, and our customers trust us with their homes because we take that responsibility very seriously through and and we do that by training.

Legacy, Community Giving, And Family

Julian Placino 16:13

So constant training, hard skills, soft skills, technical skills, uh perpetually growing and improving uh the purse and the culture in and always reaching for excellence. I think that that's great. So um, so this podcast, as you know, is powered by Peaksy. You're a customer of Peakzi. So tell us what has been your experience using the Peakzi platform.

Speaker 2 16:34

So Peakzi has been great. I feel like um, you know, they have some really amazing people on their team who have been um part of the amazing experience. So um Peakzi overall has done everything that they said that they were gonna do. Um, and that's important, right? So we get as contractors a lot of these people that are trying to sell us something, come come join this. We're gonna do this, this, and this for you. And then, but it's gonna take months till you see any results. Um, and then, you know, we've been let down a lot, right? As I'm sure with any industry, but this one particularly. But um, that hasn't been the case with Peakzi. They've said every, they've done everything they said they were gonna do. They've actually done things they didn't even have to do, which isn't even in their their um their contract. It's completely outside of, you know, they set set us up with some meetings with people that they were like, oh, someone in your area um, you know, might be looking to sell. Maybe you should reach out to them, you know, something that was completely, they didn't have to do it, yet they made that connection. Um, so I feel like they're they go above and beyond of not just what their scope is, it's about building that relationship. And um, I would I would highly recommend them to anyone. And we've we've seen the results. Um, so they've delivered what they said they were gonna do.

Julian Placino 18:08

Can you talk to us a bit about some of those results and any of the really interesting features you found?

Speaker 2 18:14

So um I love chat GPT. So um they they said that they were going to help start getting us rankings on Chat GPT and more visible. And they just they did just that. So we have great Google reviews, we have um, you know, we have all of the internet presence, the the ads and and everything that you have to have as a business in South Florida um to be successful. But AI is coming, whether we like it or not, and um, it's not going to slow down. So we need to get on board, right? Or we're gonna get left behind as contractors. Um, so if I love ChatGPT, I've used it on vacation to pick restaurants and help plan an itinerary and do all these things. Why wouldn't our customers start going that route? So I put myself in the customer's shoes and um and and Peakzi put us on the map. They put us up there in a short amount of time. Uh so so it's been um it's been great.

Julian Placino 19:28

So really helping you become present when it comes to AI search. And uh it is, it is, it's not just the future, it's happening now, right? So um have you had any kind of experience with any of the other, let's say, market insights or any of the recruiting aspects, any other features that you could speak to?

Speaker 2 19:45

So the recruiting uh has been very cool. Um, so that's definitely a feature that we are utilizing right now. So we have uh some four candidates that we are going to heavily be looking at um because of the data we've received from Peakzi. Um so it's something that nobody has ever presented to us before. And it is so cool. So I'm really I'm excited um to be able to reach out to these um these contacts on the recruitment side that Peaksy has given to us.

Julian Placino 20:28

Nice, nice. So uh before we close out the conversation, anything else that you'd like to mention about Peakzi?

Speaker 2 20:35

Um, I mean, it's just been a really positive experience. And I feel, you know, they were super honest with us. They don't work with anyone in our market. And I think that, you know, for me, that got me excited. I wanna, I have some pretty big competitors in this market. And um, so I'm just I'm excited to be one of the first ones to use them in our market. I feel like they're gonna, they're gonna help put us to the top um as a team, you know? So the marketing strategy, um, and and they're gonna help us with the growth that we're looking to have.

Julian Placino 21:15

Well, certainly appreciate your words, and we're looking forward to continue to working with you and and increase your ability to be uh and sustain and grow as a home services leader. So uh, well, Erica, close us out. You've been in business since 2009, and there certainly doesn't seem to be any signs of you stopping, right? So, what is the legacy that you want to leave behind for your customers, your employees, for your community?

Speaker 2 21:38

So, you know, we give back to the community, we want to be there for our customers, and I wanna provide an environment for my team, my team to have a career, not just a job, you know, somewhere they know that they can grow and they can learn and they can retire with, you know. They have every ability to do that. I watched my team, you know, they have 401ks, they're buying houses, they have stay-at-home wives, they're not having kids. And I'm just I'm watching this knowing that as a company, we've helped contribute to them having an amazing life for their family here at this company. So it's for my team. Um, every month we do something to give back to the community. We're always doing we just did a toy drive for Christmas. Um, so we do something every month to give back. And um, the legacy I want to leave behind is I have um four children, two adopted and two biological. And um, two of them so far want to go into the business. So um leave it for generations to come.

Julian Placino 22:54

Love it. So I heard like a real just love for the people in your business, your team members, your employees, your family. And it seems like there's going to be a generational aspect to the company as well. So uh, Erica, this has been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Uh, tell our viewers, our audience how to connect with you, follow you in social, learn about the business. Tell us about that.

Speaker 2 23:14

Yeah, so we're on every platform, right? That's where you need to be. So we like uh we love to make fun TikToks. Um, so you can follow us at Erica's Plumbing on TikTok. Uh, we're on Instagram at Erica's Plumbing, uh, same on Facebook at Erica's Plumbing. And also we do some YouTube shorts uh so you can find us on YouTube at Erica's Plumbing as well.

Julian Placino 23:40

Love it. And we'll make sure to have all that information in the show notes. So, Erica, again, this was a true pleasure. Thank you for sharing your story with us.

Speaker 2 23:47

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Julian Placino 23:50

And everyone, that is it for today's episode. So thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Home Services Success Stories podcast powered by Peakzi, the number one AI platform for growing your home services business.