Diego Lujan is making a name for himself and showing what it means to be a part of a community.
Besides giving his Colorado plumbing business the unique name Alphalete Plumbing & Heat, Lujan is reinventing what it means to be a community plumber and to be fully engaged in a community. The firm has steadily grown over five years from one employee to 10 and is already rebranding itself as it adds another major service component.
Lujan’s company has been recognized by other organizations in the community. The Hispanic Business Council — affiliated with the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce — has awarded not one, but two awards to the company in recent years: the Hispanic Business of the Year and, to Lujan personally, Rising Professional of the Year.
Lujan doesn’t bring up the awards himself, but he doesn’t mind explaining that they’re pegged to the rapid growth of his business and to his community involvement — “the way we serve our community. We’re here to solve problems, not add to them.”
IN A NAME
Alphalete is a word Lujan created by joining “alpha” and “elite.” First and best — that’s the reputation Lujan wants for his company. So, from five notebooks of possible business names that he compiled as a teenager, he selected “Alphalete” as a registered company name in 2015. He was 27 years old.
“We are the alpha of the industry and want to become elite,” Lujan says. “I googled the joined words and found only two other companies in the world with the name.” The company’s trademarked symbol is a stylized lion, which also has roots in Lujan’s early years. “My father is named Leon and the lion was bred into me.”
Lujan grew up in an entrepreneurial and construction-oriented family. He says he did “every trade growing up. I wasn’t interested in college and loved working with my hands. At some point, I decided I didn’t want to be a roofer. Then I fell in love with plumbing.”
After registering the name, he worked for a plumber for another year before making the leap. “I would work eight hours a day as a plumbing superintendent for a company and then work another eight hours on my dreams of being in business for myself. Finally, when I felt I couldn’t give a hundred percent to the other company, which is unfair, I put in my notice and opened the doors to Alphalete Plumbing & Heat.” He worked alone for a year before hiring his first employee.
The most frequent service calls for the company are to clear drains and repair or install water heaters. He places about a thousand new water heaters each year in older neighborhoods in and around Colorado Springs.
About 60% of his service calls are residential, the rest commercial. Some 30% of all of his work is plumbing new homes, but Lujan wants to reduce that part of his workload in favor of more service calls. “When the economy tanks, service calls are where it’s at. And I love serving homeowners, as opposed to working for contractors.”
Calls to Alphalete Plumbing tend to come from inside Colorado Springs, but service trucks make regular runs outside the city limits, too. A frequent destination is Manitou Springs, a nearly 150-year-old tourist town picturesquely situated west of the city near the base of Pikes Peak.
“We spend a lot of time in that town,” Lujan says. “It’s a challenge to work there because everything you get into is going to take a patch or a full replacement. But sitting there on the mountain next to Pikes Peak, it’s all worth it.”
ADDING MORE SERVICES
Recently Lujan decided to add HVAC services. The expansion of services was partly serendipity: Lujan met Bob du Pignac through a mutual friend, and the two men found they had much in common. He brought du Pignac aboard.
“I wanted a full home-services business,” Lujan says. “Plumbing and HVAC go hand in hand. I’ve had so many customers ask me if we would service their furnace, but we weren’t set up for that. Bob is a perfect fit to do that.”
The company’s new senior HVAC technician has a master plumber license, earned in California, from which du Pignac moved to Colorado some years ago. He became an expert HVAC technician and a licensed mechanical contractor. The 65-year-old du Pignac is eager to share all of his expertise with another generation of technicians at Alphalete. Now, plumbing apprentices at the company also are HVAC apprentices.
“I wish I had that opportunity in the trade when I started, learning both trades at once,” Lujan says, adding that he remains a plumber first. “We always emphasize plumbing. That is my first love. It is just an added business within the business.”
The makeover in advertised services — that is, adding HVAC to promotional material — is coming along. Once company vehicles are wrapped with the additional service prominently displayed in the name, Lujan is confident the expansion of services will be a “gold mine.”
Lujan has eight company vehicles. The newest is a 2020 Ford Transit van, the popular work vehicle with a sliding cargo side door powered by a 275 hp V6 engine. “That is going to be the prototype van for the company. It should inspire us to work hard to get more of them.”
The work trucks carry the normal staples of plumbing and drain cleaning equipment, in this case, Spartan 300 mechanical snakes and RIDGID SeeSnake CS6PAC and Compact2 cameras.
GOING VIRTUAL
The pandemic had a terrible impact on the nation’s economy and on many businesses, particularly small companies. It tested the capacity of business owners and managers to tailor their operations to new adverse conditions.
Alphalete Plumbing, Heating & Air adapted and survived. One of the company’s adaptations was the introduction of virtual service calls. The idea of such calls had been floating around in Lujan’s mind for a while and was quickly implemented in March 2020 after COVID-19 appeared in Colorado.
“We developed it right away to protect us and our customers,” Lujan says. “People were in need, some had been laid off, and calling the plumber was the last thing they wanted to do.”
For $35, a customer could call Alphalete and a service tech would listen to a complaint, visually examine the situation using a cellphone camera and, if the homeowner could fix the problem, talk them through the process. In the event the problem couldn’t be resolved without professional help, the $35 was applied to the cost of a subsequent service call by the tech.
Lujan recalls a typical virtual call. “A lady’s disposal quit working. We talked her through the steps to fixing it. Afterward, she was ecstatic. She had lost her job, had no extra money and the virtual repair was important to her.”
The virtue of such a service during a pandemic is readily evident, but virtual service has value that transcends such conditions. For one, a problem can be resolved faster than is possible waiting for a technician to arrive. For another, it’s less expensive.
“After the pandemic, we are going to keep it as an offered service,” Lujan says. “Not everyone can afford a service call. Some people don’t even know where a shut-off valve is and we can help them find it. And they don’t have to wait for a tech in a truck to arrive to do that.”
TEACHING THE TRADE
Lujan says he is building his business on four pillars: educate, elevate, motivate and inspire. The goal is to achieve at least one of these in each transaction with his customers. “If we can do this, then we have won. Our goal is to inspire our community. I want them to say, ‘Hey, if Lujan can do it, I can do it.’”
His commitment to education is capped by plans to open a trade school for plumbers, operating it out of his 3,500-square-foot office-warehouse. Eventually, it will be relocated into a separate new or leased building.
“I am passionate about trade education,” Lujan says. “Plumbers in Colorado now have to have eight hours of continuing education each year, which is great. We will offer it and a full apprenticeship program that will be registered with state and federal agencies.”
Lujan himself will be among the school’s faculty members. His company’s apprentices will have free access to the school. “I’m pretty excited about this. It will serve the community and the business and the cause of education.”
And the business won’t be sacrificed to the school. Lujan’s vision is more far-reaching than that. He says he hopes eventually to make Alphalete Plumbing, Heating & Air into an operation that can be franchised. Gearing up for that — as well as getting the school going — may consume the next few years, “but within 10 years I want it to be a franchise-able business and to have multiple locations operating across the country.”
Lujan credits his wife, Brittany, for the progress the company has made. “She’s a full-time mom and I wouldn’t be able to do this without her. My wife and kids are the driving force behind my success.” The couple has four children.
The business owner seems to have blended the various facets of life — work, community, family, self — into a single challenge. To anyone aspiring to start his or her own business, he says, “It is a lifestyle, not a career. You have to want to welcome and to solve the pressures and problems that arise. If you don’t love solving pressure, then you won’t succeed as a business owner. If you don’t like serving the community, then you have no reason to get into business.”
Daunting as it might sound, Lujan encourages people to go for it. “We are only going to live once, so we should give it all we’ve got. If we do, then win, lose or draw, at the very least we will have shown we had the nerve to try.”
