“When they call my company, I’m the only one that comes out, so you get the senior hands on every job,” Adam says.
He means it literally. Pacific Coast Plumbing has no partners and no crew. “It’s just me,” he says. “I don’t have any employees.” The person a customer reaches on the phone is the person who shows up with the tools. He says it’s him “every time.”
This is not a stage the business is passing through. Asked where he wants it to go, he gives a short answer: “I just want to keep it small and just the way it is.”
He learned the trade young. Adam was 16 when he went to work for a friend of his father’s, a master plumber in Kentucky. “From there I just stuck with it,” he says. He opened his own business in Kentucky in 2018 and moved it to Palmdale in 2021 or 2022. He counts more than 20 years in the trade.
The work he takes on is broad for one man. “I mainly do residential small repairs to large remodels,” he says. His website adds full home repipes in PEX and Type L copper, camera inspections of sewer lines, gas line work and the conversion of wood-burning fireplaces to gas. The site also urges homeowners to check whether their gas meter has a seismic shut-off valve. He holds a California C-36 plumbing contractor license, number 1095793. His service area runs from Palmdale and Lancaster across the Antelope Valley and into the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys.
One homeowner described a morning that began with no water at all. Adam arrived as scheduled and found that a buried pressure regulator had failed. Once he replaced it, the flow into the house was still weak. Instead of digging up a stretch of the front yard to go after the pipe, he traced the rest of the trouble to a failing water softener, and the softener was bypassed. The next morning, the homeowner reported, the pressure was noticeably better than before, especially upstairs.
Staying small also shaped how the business came through the pandemic. “I was pretty unfazed,” Adam says. “Didn’t feel it at all.” He gives the reason in the next breath: “I’m a very small company.”
The promise he makes customers is a narrow one. “I give a two-hour window of when I’m going to be there,” he says.