Dave Harrison still drives out to job sites to see how his plumbers are doing. If a crew has fallen behind, he picks up the work himself. “I just go to work, get right in the ditch with them if that’s the case,” he says.
He built the crew he is checking on. Harrison says he trained every plumber at Division One Plumbing from the time they were apprentices. All of them are fully licensed plumbers now, and each has 10 years of experience or more. When he explains why a homeowner should call his company, that is where he starts: the quality of the work and what his plumbers know.
He also thinks the size of the place matters. Customers pick Division One, he says, because it is small and family-owned, and because the plumbers are from around here. “Our plumbers are pretty good about building relationships with every customer,” he says.
Harrison did not start out as the boss. He worked for one plumbing company for more than 20 years before deciding to try it on his own. BBB records date Division One to 2021. The company tells its early history this way: Harrison put his savings into one truck, stocked it with tools piece by piece, and made his son his first hire. The shop was his garage. It has since moved into a bigger building in Spokane Valley, and the company now runs three trucks.
The habits he passes down are ones he picked up young. He credits the mentors he worked under early on with instilling the work ethic he now expects of his own crew.
Most of what the crews do is ordinary household plumbing. Harrison says residential service makes up the bulk of it: water heaters, toilets, faucets and small remodels. Commercial work fills out the rest. “Commercial is a little bit bigger stuff,” he says, though he calls the two about the same to him. The crews cover Spokane County, in places such as Veradale, Liberty Lake, Mead and Greenacres.
Two of his rules are about showing up. Bids get written on the spot. “We do our bids at the customer’s house immediately,” he says. And nobody gets left waiting. “We never no-show,” he says. “We call everybody if we’re running late, which usually is not a problem.”
His time in the field is not just supervision. One homeowner whose sewer pump needed replacing on short notice described Harrison and another plumber arriving, diagnosing the pump and installing a new one within a couple of hours, early enough that the customer still made it to work.
He wants the company to get bigger, but he is in no hurry. “We’re looking to grow,” he says. “It’s just we’re doing everything really slow instead of expanding super fast.”
He started with one truck and a garage full of tools. “It’s something we’re enjoying growing from the ground up, and if we get bigger, we get bigger,” he says.