George Brazil’s Phoenix plumbing company now belongs to its employees
George Brazil started his plumbing company in Santa Ana in 1955 and changed how the trade charged and equipped its trucks. Seventy years later, the Phoenix company that carries his name is owned by its workers.
Phoenix, AZ
In 2012, late one afternoon, the office of George Brazil called Plumbing & Mechanical magazine with an unusual request. Brazil wanted a copy of the issue that had his Phoenix company on the cover, sent overnight, so he could read it. Bob Miodonski, who had written the story, later wrote that neither UPS nor FedEx could get it there in time. Brazil died the next morning, May 16, 2012. He was 83.
“He was active in the business up until the last week of his life,” his wife, Patricia Langlin Brazil, told The Arizona Republic.
The cover story was about an airship. Brazil had spent about half a million dollars on a hot-air airship to fly over Phoenix freeways at rush hour, with a 27-foot version of the “George Brazil man” from the sides of his trucks painted on it, the magazine reported. “Owning an airship is not for the faint of heart,” he told Plumbing & Mechanical. “But a faint heart never won a war; that’s how I look at it.”
The plumbing and electrical company he left behind is still in Phoenix, with the same name and orange-and-white trucks that still carry the painted George Brazil man. It no longer belongs to the Brazil family. It is owned by its employees through an employee stock ownership plan, and it is run by its president, Marc Erpenbeck, a lawyer who once worked as a civil engineer. Getting there took 70 years and the work of two people named Brazil.
Brazil was born in California in 1929 to Portuguese immigrants, the company writes in its history, and he chose plumbing shortly before he would have finished high school. He started his plumbing company in Santa Ana, California, in 1955, Plumbing & Mechanical reported. The company writes that the first business did well enough that he sold it and retired in the 1970s, then came back in the 1980s and bought another California plumbing company.
He became known in the trade for how he ran things. Contractor magazine called him one of the original innovators of flat-rate pricing, which means charging a set price for each job instead of billing by the hour. Contractor also credited Brazil with creating the cab-over aluminum box service truck and called him one of the first plumbing operators with branches in more than one state. Plumbing & Mechanical wrote that he built the truck so his service plumbers could work faster on calls. “There is not one of us on this [Service Roundtable] forum who isn’t benefiting from one of George Brazil’s innovations today,” Kenneth D. Goodrich, a Las Vegas executive with ARS/Rescue Rooter, told Contractor in 2012.
In August 1992, Brazil and the contractor Frank Blau led a group of 16 contractors who formed Contractors 2000, a member-owned group for sharing business methods, according to Plumbing & Mechanical. It took the name Nexstar in 2004. “People accused George and me of having the same personality,” Blau told Plumbing & Mechanical after Brazil died. “We were both tough SOBs on the outside and very generous on the inside.”
The Phoenix branch opened in 1990, and Brazil moved to Arizona from California in 2000, the magazine reported. The Southern California locations that carry his name were owned and run by another contractor, Mike Diamond, by 2012. In 2012 the George Brazil businesses in Phoenix, counting plumbing, electrical and heating and cooling together, were on track for $40 million in revenue and ran 150 service and installation trucks with 65 service technicians, Plumbing & Mechanical reported.
The heating and cooling work now sits in a separate company. Plumbing & Mechanical reported in 2012 that Brazil had sold the HVAC side of the business three years earlier to a separate company that kept using the George Brazil brand. That company, George Brazil Air Conditioning & Heating, agreed in 2022 to join NearU, a home services company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, according to NearU’s announcement. Later that year NearU took on the investment firm Freeman Spogli & Co. as a partner and shareholder. The plumbing and electrical company is operated by AJAC, Inc., which licenses the George Brazil trademark for plumbing and electrical service in Arizona from George Brazil IP, LLC, according to the company’s website.
Patricia Brazil, known as Pat, had her own long career before she came to the business. She taught high school in Maine and later became director of vocational education for the state of California, according to her obituary. In Arizona she was a co-owner, director and officer of the plumbing and electrical company, and she stayed active in it until she died in 2021 at 96.
Training was the cause she took up after her husband’s death. “It was George’s longtime goal to create a school for plumbing service and repair technicians here in the Phoenix area,” Lavern Burk, the company’s technical training and safety manager, told Plumbing & Mechanical in 2017. In 2015, Pat Brazil and Erpenbeck chose the East Valley Institute of Technology in Mesa to host the George Brazil School of Plumbing Service and Repair. The company designed 14 training stations, each with a working bathroom and kitchen and 40 inches of space under the floor, built to copy the homes technicians find in the Southwest. The course ran 620 hours, all in the evening, and graduates came out accredited by NCCER, a national construction training organization.
“We wanted to make sure the school would be training service plumbers to be the best they can be so that they care more for their customers than they do for themselves,” Pat Brazil told Plumbing & Mechanical. Not everyone got in. “Good moral character, high ethical standards, and the ability to communicate well are important traits, or prerequisites,” Burk told Plumbing & Mechanical.
Erpenbeck had worked with her on the school. He was a civil engineer at Harza Engineering in the mid-1990s and was licensed as a lawyer in Arizona in 2000, according to his attorney profile, which lists him as president and chief legal officer of AJAC since 2013. In 2017 the company had about 60 people, Plumbing & Mechanical reported.
As late as 2024 the company’s website called it family owned. Federal benefit-plan filings show AJAC sponsoring a leveraged employee stock ownership plan, a structure in which a trust borrows to buy company shares for workers, with 87 participants in its 2024 filing. By 2025 the website said the company was now employee-owned. In a 2025 announcement, the company counted 100 employee-owners.
That year the Better Business Bureau gave the company its Torch Award for Ethics for the second time, after a first award in 2018. In the company’s announcement, Erpenbeck said the award belonged to every employee-owner, and the company described a set of values it calls the George Brazil Way, which includes reliability and ethical conduct. AZ Big Media named it one of Arizona’s Most Admired Companies of 2025 and wrote that it invests in continuous training for its employees.
Brazil once told Plumbing & Mechanical what he thought he was doing. “The whole point is we can raise the bar a helluva lot higher than it is now,” he said. “I’ve been at this for 50-some years. It’s been raised a little bit.”