For eight years, Rene Garza did nothing but commercial plumbing. Then, in 2017, he started Elite Master Plumbing in San Antonio. He says no big contracting company would take a chance on the new outfit.
“I had to survive off of residential,” he says.
He had never done that kind of work, so he learned it. “I had to take a deep dive in residential, and I had to learn service and everything else in between, tunnel work, little house repairs,” he says. He did not expect the company to last past its fifth year.
It did. Elite Master Plumbing still takes residential calls alongside commercial work, and Garza says commercial is what he would rather be known for. It has also grown a specialty in medical gas. The company’s website describes that work as the piping in healthcare facilities that carries gases such as oxygen and nitrous oxide for anesthesia and respiratory therapy, and it lists the company as med gas certified. “Medical gas is what we specialize in right now,” Garza says.
Garza came up through the trade the long way. He started in plumbing at 19, in 2006, was licensed one step below master at 23 and earned his master plumber’s license at 27. The plumbers who trained him worked for a company that has since closed. He says they were “really, really big on craftsmanship,” and that is the word he reaches for first when he describes his own company.
“We sell a product,” he says. “We pride ourselves in our product.”
Customers have noticed the follow-through more than anything. One wrote in a Google review that pulling a city permit for a new kitchen gas line took more labor hours than installing the line itself, and the crew saw the permit through to the end anyway. Another wrote that every inspection by the city on a remodel the company finished passed on the first visit.
Outside the San Antonio area, Garza says, the company travels only for medical work. That has taken his crew to Round Rock and Fredericksburg, and as far as Houston. The long trips usually follow the same pattern. San Antonio contractors the company works with land a job elsewhere, and Elite Master Plumbing goes with them.
Garza is the company’s only owner, but he does not describe the people around him as employees. “I refer to them as co-workers,” he says. “They’re not my workers. Everybody has a part in this company.”
According to the company’s website, every employee passes an FBI background check before being hired, and plumbers arrive with fully stocked trucks so a job does not stall on a trip to the supply house.
Garza traces his habits with customers to the jobs he held before plumbing. He worked in customer service and telemarketing when he was younger, and that training covered problem solving and conflict resolution. “They’re going to be upset,” he says of customers. “You just kind of walk them off that edge.”
He runs the schedule on the same principle. When the calendar fills, he says, the company calls customers and contractors right away to tell them, and lets them decide whether to wait or hand the job to someone else. “We’d rather give you bad news instead of no news,” he says.
He still trains his crew on job sites and handles the phone calls himself. Office work he hands off when he can. “There’s nothing that my team doesn’t do that I can’t do myself,” he says. “And if they run into a snag, then I’ll stop what I’m doing and I’ll go help out.”