Peach Tree Plumbing is one man: its owner, John Daru. “Right now it’s just me,” he says. “I’m a one-man operation.”
The way he runs the business follows from that. A customer who books Peach Tree gets a two-hour window for his arrival. “We usually give a two-hour window for us to show up,” Daru says. “We’re usually pretty good at making it in that window.” Customers can reach him by phone, text or email, and the plumber who comes to the door is the same one who will come next time. “You’re always going to get the same technician when you call us out,” he says.
A one-man company has an obvious weak point, which is the day the one man can’t get there. Daru plans for it. When he can’t make a job, he says, “we definitely network with other companies that we can refer people to, so they’re not just left out from getting help.”
He has been in the trade a long time. Peach Tree has operated since 2012, but he started plumbing right out of high school, around 2005 or 2006. “It was either get in the trades or go to college,” he says. He spent about a year in a union in Chicago, then moved to Colorado and worked new construction for a while. He found he preferred service work, where he deals with homeowners directly instead of with contractors.
Residential service and remodel work is still the bulk of what Peach Tree does; Daru puts residential at about 80 percent. The rest is commercial. He has done plumbing for coffee shops, Chinese restaurants and Dollar Tree stores. Asked for a favorite kind of job, he won’t name one. Water heater calls are good work, he says, but “they’re all good jobs.” One day it is water filtration, the next a faucet repair or a toilet.
He ties the way he works to owning the company. “It’s a necessity of being an owner,” he says. “You need to take care of the people that are supporting your business as well.” A short note on the company’s site, signed with his full first name, Jonathan, argues that money spent at a small local business goes to local families rather than to a chief executive’s vacation home or new car.
He would like to hire eventually, though he says hiring brings its own challenges. “It’s just finding the right talent and the right people that have the right drive,” he says.
Until then, the map stays large for one plumber. Daru says he covers roughly a 40- to 60-mile radius around Denver. “We’ll go from Castle Rock to Broomfield and Golden to Aurora,” he says.