Jimmy Hiller started his plumbing company with $500 and a pickup truck, and he still runs it
A Nashville plumber who once chased builders for payment built Hiller into a 17-location home-service company with strict rules for every truck and a school for his own technicians.
Nashville, TN
Years ago, Jimmy Hiller met an older contractor at a house he had been asked to look at. After the job, the man pulled him aside. “Hey, Jimmy, if you ever want to be taken serious inside this industry, you’re going to have to wake up and shave every day,” Hiller recalled on Trade Talk, a podcast from the warranty company JB Warranties.
At the time, he said, plumbers wore blue jeans and T-shirts and shaved when they felt like it. He took the comment as a lesson that a plumber had to look and act like a professional.
Hiller took the advice and built a company on rules like it. Hiller Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electrical, which he started in 1990 with $500 and a pickup truck, said in 2025 that it had more than 850 employees, a fleet of about 620 trucks, and 17 locations serving parts of seven Southeastern states. It calls itself Tennessee’s largest residential company in those trades. It is still family-owned, the company says, and Jimmy Hiller is still its founder and chief executive. Neither the company nor the trade press has reported an outside investor.
Most of that growth came after he walked away from half his business. “With no business [experience] and really no knowledge of what I was getting into, I decided to go into business,” he said in a 2023 profile by the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA). “Everybody sees where we’re at today and thinks I’ve got it made, but there were a lot of hard times in between,” he said in the same ACCA profile.
Hiller grew up in Nashville, where as a teenager he was a boxer who twice won the Southern Golden Gloves, according to his biography on the website of PRAXIS S-10, the contractor mentoring group he later co-founded. When he finished high school in 1984 he had no plan. His father had a friend who was a plumbing inspector, and the two men decided he would learn the trade. In December 1984 he was roughing in plumbing in new apartments. “I think if you look at the record books, it’s the coldest December in the history of Nashville,” he said on Trade Talk.
He worked as an apprentice and then a journeyman and earned his master plumber’s license. In January 1990, at 24, he went out on his own from a duplex in Antioch, a Nashville suburb. His father helped him buy a 1988 Toyota pickup. “I drove around all day knocking on doors of subdivision job trailers,” he said on Trade Talk. He asked at each one who he could give a price to, and he said on the show that “eventually I’d pick up a job or two.”
For its first eight years, Hiller was strictly a new-construction plumbing company. He often waited 30, 60 or 90 days for builders to pay, his PRAXIS biography says. In 1998 he started a residential service department. In 1999 he drove five hours to a seminar on running a contracting business that made money. There he met Terry Nicholson and Jim Abrams, who became his mentors. That same year his wife, Michelle, left her job as a legal secretary to run the office.
The mentors taught him to stand out. Technicians started wearing shoe covers in customers’ homes, a practice the company still lists among its signatures, along with clean work areas and around-the-clock service. Most plumbing trucks of the day showed a pipe wrench or a sewer machine. Hiller put a smiley face on his. “When it started off, it was a 12 inch smiley face in the corner of the truck,” he said on Trade Talk. Then came a slogan promising that customers would be happy or the service would be free. The company also gives customers a written price for parts and labor before work begins.
Heating and air came by accident. In 2003, Hiller was the company’s Saturday dispatcher. A customer called about water coming through a ceiling, and the plumber he sent found a leaking condensate drain on the air conditioner. Hiller had been trading referrals with a local HVAC owner, so he called the man’s cell phone at about 1 p.m. The call came back at 10 o’clock on Monday morning. “I knew that that wasn’t the type of individual that I can partner with,” Hiller said on Trade Talk. He got his own HVAC license and started a heating and cooling division that year.
The hardest choice came in October 2005. Tired of chasing builders for money, he quit new construction, which he said meant giving up about half the company’s sales the next year. He said on Trade Talk that “really I was scared to death.” That December he spent two weeks at a general managers class run by Abrams in Tampa and came home with what he calls his first real business plan. The company replaced the lost sales in 2006, he said, and made its first acquisition the same year. Branches in Clarksville, Murfreesboro, Knoxville and Bowling Green, Kentucky, followed by 2008.
Since then it has often grown by buying older firms whose owners stay on. When Hiller bought Service Tech in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2023, its founder, Richie Vines, became Hiller’s general manager there. Hiller moved into Florida in 2022 by buying Roussos Air Conditioning in Panama City, and added Gunn Heating & Air Conditioning in Apalachicola in 2024.
Hiring has been the harder problem. “One of our biggest problems is always getting good people and I can’t think of a better group of people than ex-military,” Hiller said in a 2017 Army.mil story.
Hiller first sent its HVAC technicians to Total Tech, a Nashville trade school. It later bought the school, invested more than $2.5 million in classrooms and lab equipment, and added plumbing and electrical courses, according to ACCA. In July 2016 the company and Fort Campbell started Transition to Trades, which lets soldiers in their last six months of service train at the school while still on active duty. Each trade took 30 days and 100 course hours, the Army reported, and Hiller’s recruiter put the lab share at about 80 percent.
Graduates did not have to work for Hiller. “It’s really about the Soldier,” Hiller said in the Army.mil story, adding, “If they want to go back to California, I want to make those connections for them.” He uses the PRAXIS S-10 network, which he co-founded with Abrams and Nicholson in 2016, to place graduates with contractors in other states. By 2023 more than 1,000 service members had graduated from the school, and more than 150 of them worked for Hiller, ACCA reported.
Matt Cabral, a former field artilleryman, was one of the early graduates. “For them to send me to school, train me, and make me proficient in a new career field and then set up an opportunity for me to have an interview and then possibly get hired on was a huge stress relief,” he said in the Army.mil story.
The family is still in the business. Jimmy Hiller Jr. rode along on calls with his father from the age of 5, joined full time in 2009 and was named chief operating officer in 2018, the company said at the time.
Hiller once summed up the run in one sentence. “It really hasn’t been a bad run from me, starting out with $500 to my name, a pickup truck, to 600 trucks, fully stocked trucks, all lettered in marketing the exact same way,” he said on Trade Talk.