Kevin Ellis had been learning plumbing since he was a young teenager, spending summers working alongside his stepfather. He served in the Army National Guard, and when he wasn’t working for the Guard he took side plumbing jobs and took classes. He became a master plumber and master gas fitter and worked for several plumbing companies, at the supervisor level on contractor job sites, before going out on his own.
He started Ellis Plumbing & Piping in 2016, and for a while it was just him and his truck. Employees came later. Today the company has three or four people and works out of a shop in Powhatan.
He still handles most of the estimates himself, going out to look at each job in person. There are no big service systems doing that work for him. The same goes for the heavy work. When the crew is putting in gas lines and digging, Kevin is on the shovel too.
Water heaters bring in a good share of the calls, whether the job is flushing one or installing a new one. The company works on homes and on commercial projects, and Kevin would like to grow the contractor side, doing the plumbing for builders and for businesses. During the pandemic the company had contracts putting plumbing into new schools.
When a customer is without water, the company will usually find a way to get there even on a packed schedule, and that can mean Kevin working a Saturday to make it happen. One homeowner’s review describes exactly that: a callback within minutes, then Kevin returning on a Saturday to finish fixing the problems.
Punctuality starts with Kevin, who is a stickler for being on time. When a plumber runs late, Kevin has a talk with them. There is no showdown, but the plumber knows he isn’t happy about it. The crew keeps to the schedule partly because nobody wants to let him down.
Customers reach real people. During the week the office answers, and on weekends the emergency line goes to Kevin himself. There is no AI answering service in between.
The office exists so that Kevin can stay in the field. Calls to his phone that aren’t about a customer’s plumbing problem get sent back to the office.