The first appointment of the day at C&K Plumbing is at eight in the morning. After that, the schedule loosens into windows.
“I’ll give them a time window of two to three hours that they can expect us to arrive,” says the owner, who handles the scheduling. When a technician leaves for the house, the customer hears about it. “I let them know when the technician is actually headed their direction.” If a tech hits a traffic snag and will be well behind, that call gets made too. The company, the owner says, does not no-show.
Those calls are the visible end of a habit that starts earlier, on the first phone call. Before anyone is dispatched, C&K asks questions, and the answers shape the rest of the job.
“Sometimes we know before we get there what we need to do, and the guys will pick up the supplies on the way, so that it’s a faster repair,” the owner says. The same questions let the office give a customer a rough idea of what to expect, cost included, before a technician arrives. It is also why C&K skips online scheduling. Appointment times are set according to what each call turns up, the company explains, and most service calls are finished on the first visit. If a part has to be ordered, the customer is told up front.
The owner does not oversell the method. Some problems can’t be diagnosed over the phone. Most of plumbing, the owner says, “is like an iceberg. It’s below the surface where you can’t see it.”
Experience is what lets the office read the part that shows. The company is small, and the owner says every plumber on staff is experienced enough to diagnose a problem, or to recognize one that belongs to somebody else. “Sometimes we’re not the people to do the job, depending on what it is, and we’ll refer you, if we can, to somebody who’s better equipped to do the job so that you’re not wasting time and money.”
That experience starts with Claude Edwards, the company’s responsible master plumber, whose company biography credits him with more than 30 years in the trade. An earlier version of that biography says he started in plumbing in Sacramento in the mid-1990s, doing residential and commercial service work, and moved to the construction side in 1999. After he settled in Pflugerville in 2003, he went straight into commercial plumbing construction, working as a foreman on projects in Austin and the surrounding area, including hospitals, schools, restaurants and banks.
He opened C&K in May 2014, and the company first worked mostly in Pflugerville, Round Rock and North Austin. His wife, Nanci, joined full time as office manager in 2015. The service area now also takes in Georgetown, Manor, Cedar Park, Leander, Taylor and Liberty Hill.
The work is commercial and residential, mostly service calls, along with plumbing for remodels and some new construction, though “not a lot,” the owner says. Backflow testing is part of the mix too. Edwards is a backflow prevention assembly tester certified by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and the owner says the company tests for local communities and is registered with the reporting systems the different cities require.
The team is small and, in the owner’s word, handpicked. Candidates are interviewed for attitude and ethics, and every hire gets a full background check and a driving-record check. The instruction to the crew is short: “How would you want your grandma to be treated? That’s what I expect you to do.”
None of the phone work removes the part of the job that stays hidden. When a call can’t settle it, the owner says, the van goes anyway. “Sometimes it just is what it is, and we gotta go look.”