EJ Plumbing is on the move in more ways than one. 

Service technicians of the San Francisco Bay-area company constantly travel the so-called “Silicon Valley” fixing faucets, jetting clogged pipes and repairing underground lines without disturbing the turf above it. The company is a busy full-service residential plumbing house with plans to become even busier and fuller.

Emanuel Jimenez owns the company. He founded it 17 years ago, built it up and still is the majordomo of the enterprise. A year ago, Jimenez was joined in the family business by his 26-year-old son, Emanuel Jimenez Jr., who is proving to be a driving force of his own.

“My father has been bugging me to join the business since I was in high school,” the younger Jimenez says with evident good feeling. “I said, ‘Forget it. I’m going to do what I want to do.’” He opted to head off to school in Arizona where he was first a student at a leadership college and, upon graduation, invited back as an instructor. When his father reached out again last year, the younger Jimenez good-naturedly told his father he probably couldn’t afford him! 

However, the company was approaching a crossroads and today Jimenez Jr. is back in Santa Clara as the company’s business development manager. He is helping the plumbing house strengthen itself as an organization before pushing out in new directions.

SETTING OUT ON HIS OWN

The company founder started out in the plumbing industry working for nothing. He was the oldest of three children and, at age 17, told an uncle that he would work for free if he could ride along with the uncle’s Triple A Plumbing crews as they made their service calls. It was a deal! “He sort of helped pave the way for his family,” the younger Jimenez says.

The teenaged Jimenez shadowed skilled plumbers, learning the trade, until he turned 18 and became a full-fledged service tech. He continued for seven years in that capacity, accumulating know-how and refining his skills. Finally, in 2006, Jimenez cashed in all his hands-on experience and started the company.

Like many entrepreneurs, launching the enterprise proved to be a fairly exhausting experience. His son says the elder Jimenez wore many hats in the beginning. “He worked by himself. He answered the phone, scheduled the jobs, did the jobs. That’s how it was for a year or two until he brought somebody on.”

Such demands on personal time might seem like a good reason not to go all in and start a company. Strangely enough, it was the issue of time that persuaded the company founder to quit working for someone else. That is, even though the hours would be long working for himself, he knew that, as boss, he could flex the work schedule and create more time to be with family.

“That’s why he went to work for himself,” says his son. “Rather than work the hours for someone else, [my dad] knew he could get a job done in a way to still have time for family. Family was important to him.” It should be noted that the year after he started the company, Jimenez and his wife expanded their family, welcoming twins.

In the beginning, the plumber worked out of his home in Mountain View, a community in the center of the area south of San Francisco that’s popularly dubbed Silicon Valley. Actually, his son says it is more accurate to say his father worked out of his truck. The downside of that was that his truck was swiped. More than once. Tools and all. “It got stolen multiple times and he had to start over each time. Stuff like that.” Eventually, Jimenez was able to open a storefront location for his business.

The business targeted residential plumbing customers — and still does. “It’s easier to work in a residential setting. It’s easier to work directly with a customer in a home,” says Jimenez Jr. As he began his business, the company founder cleaned drains, repaired or replaced fixtures, repaired or installed water heaters and fixed leaking pipes.  

MORE THAN JUST PLUMBING

Today, EJ Plumbing techs do a lot more. They still work on fixtures and drains, of course, but also run new pipe, hydro-jet clogged sewers up to eight inches in diameter, install tankless water heaters, repair natural gas lines, and utilize trenchless technology to make underground pipes whole again.

The company has grown from one employee to 63, and the fleet of service and repair trucks from one — when it wasn’t stolen — to 30. The variety of plumbing tasks has been organized into departments with techs assigned to each.

There is a service department, which includes water heater work, drainage department, which focuses on any and all drainage issues, a sewer department and, separate from it, an excavation department, which offers underground solutions like pipelining, pipe bursting, and pipe jetting. The excavation department has the most technicians working in it, the service department is the next largest.

Equipment for these various departments include Perma Liner pipelining machinery and TRIC Tools pipe bursting tools. A General Pipe Cleaners jetter with a 3000 psi output clears lines and Quadra Plex cables unclog drains. The fleet of trucks carries Milwaukee Tool cordless equipment and RIDGID tools and either RIDGID or Vivax-Metrotech cameras.

All the trucks roll out from behind a storefront location in Santa Clara to residential properties up and down the valley — between Redwood City and San Jose — with the most distant destination not over 30 miles from the office. Consequently, the need for a satellite office hasn’t arisen. Jimenez says techs are pretty much confined to calls in the valley corridor, rather than being sent to more distant neighborhoods such as communities on the East Bay front.

A BIGGER PLAN

This all sounds like a company with a plan. The business development manager describes the plan in two words — household services. 

“That’s the goal, within the next year we want to offer household services,” Jimenez Jr. says. 

To accomplish that, EJ Plumbing will leave its comfort zone and expand its offerings to include heating, air conditioning and electrical services. It will be a whole new department staffed by a new set of experienced technicians rolling out from the Martin Avenue office in Santa Clara.

“We’ve found that we want to expand what we offer and become a full-service company, a more holistic company, a one-stop shop for our community. We want to offer our customers all the services they need for their homes,” says the younger Jimenez. He has begun to work on a makeover of the company website and logo to reflect the broadened mission.

More importantly, he is working to strengthen the company’s structure and its workforce so it can take on its new workplace challenge. He likens the inward changes to an individual preparing to run a marathon or give a speech — the private work that precedes public performance. 

Part of his foundational work is instilling or reinforcing core values in company leadership. Says Jimenez: “I hold management to a higher standard. I want each to be the best they can be in their own personal lives, to want to better themselves, to be better husbands and wives. If we push ourselves in that way, people around us will benefit from it. That’s the model I’m trying to implement.”

His father exemplified this attitude for years. “Not all employees are wired the same,” he told his son. “We need to relate to them according to their personalities or ‘love languages.’ We need to make sure people know that they are appreciated and that their job is secure if they are doing it well.”

So, the company moves ahead. If all goes as planned, a couple of years from now, it will have a different name reflecting its many services and a new reputation as a total-home services provider in the valley. 

And where does the founder’s son fit in that picture? “I want to go back to teaching,” he says. “When everything is up and running, I’ll have no problem with stepping back.”