When Joe Fuentes entered the plumbing trade in his early 20s, he did so as an oldest child and a single parent. In other words, he was familiar with the concept of responsibility.
Over the next decade, Fuentes worked hard and learned to be a journeyman plumber. In 2016, he decided it was time to go out on his own and started S&J Plumbing. By that time he had moved to another level of personal awareness, which is reflected in a phrase Fuentes uses to describe S&J Plumbing — “a confident company.”
Confident. An unusual adjective to describe a business. Fuentes, 40, says there are two facets to the confidence building at S&J — enhancing skills and creating trust in leaders.
A training regimen is the first part.
“We do a lot of training,” Fuentes says. “A lot. Our guys are not afraid to say they don’t know how to do this or how to do that, so we do a lot of training.”
The training could be about how to install fixtures, replace sections of pipe, find leaks in a natural gas line or change out a water heater — the honing of skills that make S&J technicians proficient and expert.
The second part of “confident” goes along with the first. Fuentes constantly encourages trust in his journeymen among the helpers and apprentices.
“I tell my guys in my recruiting that you are going to be working with some of the best plumbers in the trade,” Fuentes says. “Instead of being stuck working with someone for 30 years who does it wrong for 30 years, you are fortunate to have some of the best people to work with here.
“It all goes back to me being able to work under some of the great journeymen in Chicago. I never shied away from work. They had to tell me to slow down sometimes, to not do something rather than do something, but it was pure luck of the draw for me to have been able to work with them. I was very fortunate.”
Now, he is passing along his good fortune.
Read more about S&J Plumbing in the April 2023 issue of Plumber magazine.
