People enter careers through different doorways. Jasen Hamilton became a plumber via the beauty salon business.
Hamilton had worked his way up in a wholesale salon and beauty supply distributing company that served numerous Midwest and Southern states including his home state of Missouri. He drove a company delivery van to hair care shops, nail salons, and waxing, pedicure and massage studios. He ferried to the stores such equipment as barber chairs, hair driers and pedicure thrones.
He then was given responsibility for servicing some of the equipment he delivered, including shampoo basins. “That’s how I got my start in plumbing,” he says. When the beauty salon supply business slowed, Hamilton looked elsewhere for work and, remembering the satisfaction he found in fixing leaky basins, decided to make plumbing a career. He also had noticed that salons sometimes had to wait to get plumbing service, suggesting that there was a void he could help fill. “It was a natural step,” he says.
For the next decade, he worked for a plumber, first as a parts runner. His commitment to his new trade was evident in his decision to begin studying for and earning a master plumber’s license. After taking his certified plumbing skills to a couple of other small plumbers, Hamilton took the biggest step in 2019 and began working for himself.
In 2019, he and his wife Brianne opened the doors of RoyalTee Plumbing in Kansas City, Missouri.
WIDE RANGE OF WORK
The 46-year-old tradesman serves the general Kansas City metro area, including encircling cities like Liberty and Platte Woods north of Kansas City to Independence and Shawnee, Kansas, to the south. It is a flexible service area, Hamilton says. “Anywhere within a 30- to 40-minute drive. If we can get there, we will try to go.”
Service calls range from fixing a leaky faucet to cleaning a clogged drain. The traditional plumbing work constitutes the bulk of RoyalTee’s business with 70% of it being residential. He says most of his calls are to homes rather than commercial properties, “which is a pretty good mix for us right now.” The company has yet to land an institutional account — say, a college or hospital — but RoyalTee plumbers do serve several apartment buildings.
The company installs or repairs two or three water heaters each week, mostly tank heaters as opposed to tankless units. “There is a little bit of a shift toward tankless,” he says. “They have gotten a little more reliable and people have begun to notice.” He recommends A.O. Smith and State heaters to his customers. Delta kitchen and bathroom products are his first option.
In bathrooms, the company also offers more than repair of fixtures and installation of showers and tubs. It advertises “bathroom remodeling services.” Hamilton was asked how complete of a remodel he is talking about. “We will strip a bathroom all the way if needed.” He has a subcontractor he calls for carpentry and drywall help.
When Hamilton was earning his master plumber certification, he opted to do so with an add-on — master plumber of gas lines. That is, he is certified to work on natural gas lines serving water heaters and home-heating units. It is not uncommon for plumbers to do such work and RoyalTee has benefited from being able to do so. “We do quite a lot of it,” says Hamilton. “It is a good part of our business.”
He is the only master plumber in the company but has journeyman plumbers and apprentices on staff. Hamilton himself fills in on calls as needed; he mostly supervises now. Most service calls are made with a team of an experienced plumber and an apprentice.
“We constantly are teaching new people and growing them into what we are looking for in an employee, before giving them a truck.” His youngest apprentice is his 18-year-old goddaughter Riley. RoyalTee is, after all, a family-owned business.
ROLLING ALONG
Brianne Hamilton works for the company part time, also being an employee of Holman Fleet and Automotive services, which specializes in fleet vehicles. She concentrates on upfitting the trucks and vans for particular kinds of work. Her work at Holman made her appreciate plumbing-outfitted service trucks. “I had no idea that plumbing trucks were not just born that way! They put really cool things in each box,” she says.
RoyalTee presently has three service trucks and each are outfitted with tools and equipment for usual household and commercial plumbing tasks, including Spartan jetters along with Spartan and MyTana inspection cameras. The mix of equipment will change soon: RoyalTee is getting into pipe rehab work, including pipelining. The system of choice is NuFlow’s pipeline cured-in-place lining process along with a high-speed Picote cleaning unit.
The equipment and service trucks roll out of a yard and office on, naturally, Royal Street in Kansas City that includes a 3,500-square-foot shop. Being a young and relatively small company, RoyalTee rents a mini-excavator when it must resort to digging up a drainpipe and such. The Hamiltons also have an office in their home.
The company advertises seven-day, 24-hour emergency service responses, but off-hour service calls are infrequent. While Hamilton didn’t express disappointment about not being called out in the middle of the night to fix a bum pipe, he did stress the company’s willingness to do so.
“I tell my customers, I want to be your plumber,” Hamilton says. “That means that if they need to call me at 2 a.m., they shouldn’t hesitate to do so and I will go. If I am going to be their plumber, I don’t want them calling anyone else.”
Emergencies of another sort occurred frequently this last winter as record-cold temperatures visited the Kansas City area. In February, highs included at least one daylight reading of 9 degrees Fahrenheit and an overnight temperature of negative 9 degrees. Such frigid weather — even in a region that regularly experiences four seasons — tests pipes and fittings. Hamilton was asked if frozen pipes brought him more business. “They did.”
KEEPING PACE
Jasen Hamilton is a successful tradesman and business co-owner partly because he has gumption. That was evident in his decision not only to get into plumbing but to “master” it. He also had the drive to start his own business. Perhaps even more indicative of his mindset was his decision to go back to school.
Hamilton never earned a high school diploma. As he embarked on a career as a tradesman at age 33, he decided to go back and earn a GED to lay a foundation for his master plumbing license. “I did it for myself, but also for my sons. (They were in middle school at the time.) I wanted them to know how important education is. It was the right thing to do,” he says.
Her husband is something of an idealist, Brianne suggests. “When Jasen saw an American Standard poster that read, ‘The Plumber Protects the Health of the Nation,’ he took that absolutely to heart. That’s how important plumbing is to public health and it is extremely important to him.”
A stated core value of the company is, “We Grow.” Growth as professionals or growth as a company?
“It is talking about both of those,” Jasen Hamilton says. “About becoming a better plumber and better people as well as growing our company to help more people.” RoyalTee is experiencing growth, according to the Hamiltons, and the owners seem to be keeping pace.
