“We always tell the customer before we do anything,” Juan Martinez says. “We can’t just hit them with the bill and here’s what it is. That’s not how it works. We need approvals before we do anything.”
At his company, Juan & Only Plumber, that rule gets practiced. “We have meetings every Wednesday, and we do some role playing,” Martinez says. “We harp really hard on taking care of the customer, not overcharging.”
Martinez, a licensed master plumber, started the company in 2024 after working for bigger plumbing companies. “I wanted to always be on my own and serve the community and not rip people off,” he says. A partner came in about a year and a half later. The company takes residential and commercial work around the Austin area and runs out of an office on Ferguson Lane.
The Wednesday meetings grew out of what he watched at those earlier jobs. The companies he worked for, he says, pushed hard on upselling and overcharging. The people on the receiving end were often elderly, or simply didn’t know much about plumbing. He says some would tell customers they needed things they didn’t, or break something so it looked broken and then sell the repair.
The other half, he says, is how he grew up. “I don’t want someone to rip me off,” he says, and he wouldn’t want it done to his family either. “I believe in karma, which goes around, comes around.”
None of this means his plumbers stay quiet about problems they spot. They just don’t push. “If we see some issues, we give recommendations, but we’re not pushing them to do it,” Martinez says. “We make them aware of it.” Whether to go ahead is the customer’s call. The crews also show customers preventive maintenance they can handle themselves.
The rule extends to how the crews carry themselves inside a house. “We show up on time, we put on shoe covers, we respect their homes like if they’re ours,” he says.
One homeowner described a main water line replacement at a house where a 70-year-old galvanized pipe had started leaking. The crew arrived on schedule and used a mini excavator to cut a curving trench, routed to disturb the roots of a big front-yard tree as little as possible. They laid new PEX line, replaced a shut-off valve that no longer worked, added a pressure regulator the house had never had and smoothed the soil back over. The crew chief and his assistant stayed afterward to make sure the new line was working. The homeowner put the whole job at about three hours.
Asked what he wants for the company long term, Martinez doesn’t hesitate. “Grow it and keep it for generations,” he says. The name, a pun on his own, carries the other goal. “We want to be the community’s one and only plumber,” he says.