A Jacksonville plumber built PureFlo Plumbing on hourly pay and no salespeople
Ryan Heitman spent nearly 20 years plumbing for other Jacksonville companies, then built his own around hourly pay, no salespeople and an owner who answers the phone.
Jacksonville, FL
Water was gushing everywhere when Ryan Heitman pulled up. He got there within 30 minutes of the call, and within 45 minutes the leak was fixed. As Heitman went to shake his hand, the customer asked how to pay him. Heitman told him not to worry about it.
The customer told the story in a Google review, and Heitman, the owner of PureFlo Plumbing, answered it. It was no big deal, he wrote. He had been in the area, he knew the situation was bad, and the customers already had enough on their plate with the water damage without an extra bill.
Heitman spent nearly 20 years plumbing in Jacksonville for other companies, large and small, before he started his own. Part of that job was handing people the bill. Working for other companies, he wrote to another customer in 2024, he had to collect on invoices that he could not have afforded to pay himself.
PureFlo is his answer to those invoices: a small company run on a few plain rules, with the owner on the other end of the phone.
For most of his career Heitman had no plans to run a shop of his own. He wrote in 2024 that he never wanted to start a company until his last three years working for others. What changed his mind, he wrote, was watching homeowners’ costs rise for no good reason and watching the plumbers around him stall, in pay and in training. He left his employer in 2023, formed PureFlo Plumbing LLC with the state that year and, by his account, launched at the start of 2024. PureFlo will stay small, efficient and affordable for its customers, he wrote, and he does not believe there is a better way to run it.
The rules are short, and the company puts them in writing. Technicians are paid hourly instead of by commission. There are no salespeople and no flat-rate sales systems, the price books that assign a fixed price to each repair. Work is priced on the labor and materials it actually takes. As Heitman put it in a reply to one customer, they are plumbers, not salesmen.
The phone is part of the plan. The company number is his personal number, he told one reviewer in 2024, and when someone calls PureFlo, the owner answers every time. The next year, when a reviewer thanked a rep, Heitman set the record straight. There are no reps, he wrote. He or his wife answers every call. One customer who woke up to water all over her garage called a little before 8 a.m. and reached the owner. By 10, a PureFlo plumber named Cameron had repaired her main water line.
Customers notice the small things. Jen C., who manages properties and calls plumbers often, wrote in a Google review that PureFlo was the first plumber she had ever hired where she did not have to wipe anything down after they left.
The crew is partly family. Heitman’s nephew Jack works for the company and is learning the trade on its jobs. When a customer praised Jack’s work, Heitman answered that comments like that made him a proud uncle. Another customer wrote that everyone had a laugh when it turned out her water heater was older than Jack.
In one reply Heitman named four of the men he works with: Donald, Marcel, Jack and Beau. He wrote that he is extremely lucky to have that crew, and that they believe in him and in what he is trying to do with PureFlo.
PureFlo does residential and some commercial work across Jacksonville and St. Johns, Clay and Nassau counties. The company takes emergency calls at any hour. Most homes in the area are built on concrete slabs, with water lines running under the foundation, so a leak can show up as a warm spot on a tile floor or as a hallway full of water. One of PureFlo’s first customers had the second kind. Heitman booked her the same day, found a slab leak under the floor and had it repaired by the end of the day.
Some jobs stand out in the reviews. Heitman and two of his plumbers pulled the old cast-iron drains out of one house in a single day, working through heavy rain because they had said it would take one day. On a camera inspection for a house that was about to change hands, the crew found Orangeburg pipe, an old sewer pipe made of wood fiber and tar, falling apart where it met the city tap. Neither the customer nor her realtor had heard of it. Another customer had her 45-year-old house repiped from end to end. The clients include a long-running Irish pub, landlords and house flippers, one of whom wrote that she now uses Heitman on all of her flips.
Heitman has written about what he is trying to rebuild. When he was a kid, he wrote to one customer, people knew their plumbers and mechanics personally, and there was a level of trust that is rare now. That trust, he wrote, is what PureFlo is trying to bring back.
In 2026 the company tried something less expected. PureFlo hid 10 golden thrones around the Jacksonville area and put out riddles pointing to them. Local shops, among them Screaming Cat Ice Cream and Pine Grove Deli, played host. Each find meant a donation from PureFlo to a Northeast Florida nonprofit, including Hubbard House and Feeding Northeast Florida.
The last throne turned up at about 9:27 p.m. on the Love Locks Bridge on the Riverwalk. Its finder had solved one riddle to reach the spot and then a code that unlocked the final gift: $1,000 for a local charity.