When Mitchell Carter was a kid, his father woke him at 4:45 in the morning. “He’d pick me up out of bed and sit on the couch with me, and we’d watch TV for the first 30 minutes of the day,” Carter says. “And I’d watch him leave at around 5:15, 5:30, and he wouldn’t get home sometimes till after dark.”
His father was a plumber in the area for 25 or 30 years, by Carter’s count, and kept a plumbing truck at the house. Carter started Carters Plumbing LLC in September 2024. The company is based in Fairhope and serves Baldwin County, and Carter holds master plumbing and master gas fitting licenses. His father’s work ethic, he says, was something he wanted to model himself after from the time he was a boy.
He does not expect his crew to match it. “I don’t expect my employees to do as much as I do,” he says. “There’s no way you could. They don’t own the company.” When work is off, he tries not to call them with work questions. Sometimes he calls just to ask how things are going.
What he does expect is that they know the plan. “If your guys know what they have to do for the day the day before, if they know what metrics are on the board, and if they know that you’re going to be awake and out and doing stuff before they ever leave the house, I think it sets a precedent for how they have to operate,” he says.
He learned the first part of that the hard way. Carter once had an employee he calls a great plumber, and he did not manage that man’s expectations well. The plumber eventually moved on to another company. “That was one of the mistakes I made early on,” Carter says. He did a lot of reflecting and set out to make the business more organized. People who work for a disorganized outfit, he says, spend every day waiting for the other shoe to drop. He wants his crew to know that even when things at home are going crazy, work has structure.
The next step is still ahead. As the team grows, he wants “more group huddles first thing in the morning,” so everyone starts on the same page. He wants to see for himself that the vans are clean and that every technician is clear on the day’s tasks.
One rule is already in place. “If one technician goes out to a customer’s house, I make it a point to send that technician back,” he says, “because they’ve already developed a relationship with that homeowner, and I want them to see the same face every time if possible.”
Plumbing came to him by way of a phone call. After high school, when college did not work out, Carter called his father and said he did not know what he was going to do. His father told him to go get a trade and did not say which one. Carter went to a company that did plumbing, HVAC and electrical, sat down with the owner, asked for a job and got it.
By the time he went out on his own, he held both master licenses. He did not like the idea of working for somebody else and having to prove himself all over again. He had a good relationship with his old company and its plumbing manager, and he did not take any of its customers with him. In the early days he hooked up generators for electrical companies around town, using his gas fitting license, and took whatever else came along, including new construction and commercial jobs.
Now he wants to be known for residential service. He would rather deal with homeowners one-on-one, he says, and see their faces when he fixes a problem that several other plumbers could not. The jobs he goes after are swapping water heaters for tankless units, adding filtration systems and repiping houses whose pipes have leaked again and again. In those jobs, he says, he can change a homeowner’s view of plumbing, teach them one-on-one and then show them the finished result.
A property manager for short-term rentals got a taste of that after a fellow board member recommended Carter and his father for a stuck shutoff valve that was holding up a dishwasher install. By her account, Carter answered right away and swapped the valve in a few minutes. She then asked him to check all her valves and her water heater. The heater was 19 years old. It was replaced, along with the bad valves and a rusted regulator.
Carter says he has worked with his father a lot over the years, and that his father has helped steer him through a trade full of conflicting opinions and advice. Of the man who got him up at 4:45 to sit on the couch before leaving for work, he says, “He’s a softie.”