Plumber Grows a Thriving Plumbing Business With Customer-First Service
Florida plumber’s customer-first mindset leads him from plumbing to property restoration, proving that smart diversification can drive success and satisfaction
Of the various reasons to diversify — as a hedge against an economic downturn, say, or in response to a competitor’s initiative — the rationale of Matt Black is perhaps the purest: to better meet customer needs.
“The Benjamin Franklin Plumbing philosophy is, always do what is in the best interests of your customers,” says Black, who co-owns a Benjamin Franklin franchise in Port St. Lucie on the Atlantic side of southern Florida.
He indeed goes extra miles for his customers. Example: If water backs up in a kitchen sink or bathroom fixture, he can send one of his 13 plumbers and apprentices to resolve the issue. If the blockage turns out to be in a drainpipe, he can clear the line using a RIDGID sectional drain cleaning machine or jetter.
If that fails, his technician can send a Spartan Traveler camera into the line to see if there is an obstruction. And if a damaged pipe is found instead, he can offer customers trenchless repair using another Spartan tool, the LightRay LR3 ultraviolet spot repair system.
All of that extra-mile versatility provides customers complete solutions, rather than just service calls.
“But it’s a big investment,” Black notes. The LR3 solution, for example, is a $23,000 system. Offering a diversified lineup of services doesn’t come cheap.
His customer-first thinking is the reason Black recently undertook his most dramatic business tangent to date — starting a sister company that restores damaged properties.
It came about this way: A plumbing customer asked Black a while back to recommend a restoration company. Black did so. Months later, the customer came to his office in disappointment, showing him, line item by line item how that company billed for service not performed, a total of $8,000 in bogus work.
Black was chagrined and apologetic.
“We have 1,800 reviews for our plumbing work and a 4.9 (out of five) average rating. We take our customers seriously,” Black says. “Doing something after learning of that situation was a no-brainer.”
What Black did was purchase a DRYmedic Restoration Services franchise and open up shop in Port St. Lucie. So far, a year in, the franchise has received nothing but five-star reviews for its work.
DRYmedic has been around for more than 30 years, working through business partners to help property owners recover when homes or businesses have been damaged by water, fire, mold or other contaminants. In Florida, the biggest threat is mold.
“It is humid in Florida, so once mold starts, it runs wild,” Black says. “Tenants who live here and don’t run their air conditioners can find mold all over their walls.”
State authorities require that any mold infestation greater than 10 square feet in area must be assessed by an inspector, who then issues a cleanup protocol that restorers must follow. It can mean painstaking cleaning and spraying of disinfectants to eradicate the fungus.
“We have done fire and odor jobs, but the bulk of our work so far has been water and mold,” Black says.
Restoration jobs can become major projects. Smoke- and fire-damaged interiors are taken down to wall studs and those boards cleaned and sprayed to seal any remaining odor. If damage to the framed structure requires demo work and rebuilding, Black’s company can do that, too.
Cleanup projects can take weeks.
“We had a water job where a longtime roof leak damaged many rooms. We had to gut the whole house,” Black says. “We spent almost a month working on that one, our crew of four plus temporary help as we needed it.”
In another tip of the hat to diversification, Black says he is going to begin offering biohazard restoration work, too, as soon as his company is certified to do so. That will mean that funeral homes in the area that are called to collect human remains discovered in a residential facility can, in turn, call Black’s company for a cleanup of the area where the body was found.
Black, 53, began working for the plumbing house more than two decades ago and worked himself up to service manager and then general manager in 2007, at which time the company was under the Benjamin Franklin brand. He had been champing at the bit for some years, with lots of ideas about how to improve service and more efficiently run the business. In 2019, the owner decided to sell it.
“He sold it to someone else, actually, but that fell through and he came to me,” Black recalls.
He told the owner he would have to talk to his wife, MaryBeth. Her response? “Why not? You’ve been running it for the last 20 years!”
So Black got a business loan, earned his master plumber license, and the couple became owners of the shop.
To say it has been a successful venture is an understatement. Each year has been more profitable than the last, with business volume more than doubling since they took over. The five employees Black inherited is now up to 23 with the number of box trucks bearing the company name growing from six to 10.
Black attributes much of the growth and success to employees simply doing their best work.
He incentivized such performance by adding numerous benefits to his employment package. Benefits now include a 401(k) matching program, a $100,000 life insurance policy and a gap policy to protect employees’ assets. He essentially changed the culture of the company and now there is a waiting list of people wanting to work at the business.
“All of these things are giving back to employees. Our profit margin is not as high as I would like to see it, but we have happy employees,” Black says.
More to the point, the owners have happy employees who are satisfying happy customers. The employees have taken ownership of the company, in a manner of speaking, by pitching in to help promote it in the community. For example, employees came up with the idea to take a meal to a different fire station each month — there are 17 stations in the district. They donate school supplies for area students on behalf of the company, and so on.
“The whole reason we are successful is the team we have here,” Black says. “They are great to work with and they care about the business and the customers.”
Black also deserves credit for the company’s success, of course.
He has grown the bottom line of the business without growing the footprint of the service area, which is to say he is exacting more value from the same customer base. He is accomplishing that even though some 95% of customers are residential, with the remainder light commercial — there are no big commercial accounts fueling success.
Black runs 14-foot box trucks on his plumbing service calls, the trucks stocked not only with faucets and tools but with toilets and Rheem or Bradford White water heaters. That’s because the runs might be 45 minutes to an hour north or south of Port St. Lucie, perhaps to some isolated coastal property without The Home Depot in the neighborhood for a quick purchase. The trucks carry everything a plumber might conceivably need.
“That’s why we drive the trucks we drive, to be more efficient,” Black says.
The DRYmedic franchise works from two vans, a number that is sure to increase because Black expects the restoration work to continue to grow. He is, in fact, looking for a service manager to oversee the plumbing business so that he can concentrate more fully on growing the restoration side.
“We have a lot of gears in place and the plumbing business is running pretty smoothly,” he says.
Black wants DRYmedic to run the same way and to grow similarly.
“I anticipate our DRYmedic franchise will surpass our Benjamin Franklin franchise in the future,” he says. “In five years, we could be equal and I say that expecting Benjamin Franklin to have 10% growth every year.”
Offering customers a variety of products and services can swell both customer satisfaction and the bottom line. There are also crossover benefits to diversification, Black says.
“When you can use your internal database for multiple opportunities, you can capitalize in multiple ways. If we have a wholly satisfied customer on the plumbing side, they hopefully will refer us to someone who is looking for restoration service.”
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
When Black and his wife committed to owning a company, it was a family first.
“There were no entrepreneurs in my family. They always worked for somebody,” Black says.
It was a big step — and he was immediately rewarded by the arrival of the pandemic and all the disruption of market forces that it produced.
“We had three really, really tough months after we bought the company,” Black recalls.
It was made worse because the spouses of several employees were laid off during this time — one was a school teacher, for instance, and schools were closed.
“Everyone was relying on us. It was nerve-racking,” Black says.
But the Blacks and their employees survived that time and Benjamin Franklin Plumbing of Port St. Lucie entered a period of, so far, uninterrupted growth. And now DRYmedic Restoration is included as well. That is called a happy ending.
