Some Royal Elite Plumbing service calls are over almost as soon as they begin. The plumber shows up, and the customer, as one of the company’s partners puts it, “literally had no problem at all.”
“We just twisted the screw or pressed the button, everything was fine and we walked away,” the partner says.
The partner is careful about what that means. “We don’t necessarily provide free work. It is a business.” On those visits, though, “we felt too bad even charging,” and the company “didn’t necessarily charge anything.” The partner’s explanation is short: “We have a soul.”
The rest of the company runs on a rule the partners set from the start. Once the plumber has diagnosed the problem and knows exactly what needs doing, the customer gets a flat price before any work begins, along with an explanation of the options. If the customer agrees, the job gets done at that number. “That price doesn’t change,” the partner says. A service fee for the time spent diagnosing is always waived when the customer hires the company for the job. It is charged only when the customer does not. The visits where nothing was wrong sit at the soft end of that policy.
Royal Elite is a young company with three partners. One is a master plumber who has been licensed for more than 25 years in multiple states and has more than 30 years of hands-on experience. The other two, including the partner quoted here, come from tech and operations. Together they set out to run a plumbing company in a more modern way, with “faster pickup of phone calls, better customer service and more automation.”
The phone is where that shows most. The company keeps hours from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, and the partners try to answer within seconds. Unless an emergency has everyone tied up, the partner says, “it’s pretty rare that we cannot get to someone within a couple of seconds.” A Boca Raton customer described getting an immediate response on a Sunday and a replacement water heater installed the same day.
Most of the work is residential, and much of it is emergency work: drain cleanings, leaks and the other problems that arrive on a schedule nobody chose. The company also takes commercial jobs, and its site lists commercial buildings and multi-unit properties among them, but the partner says the focus is homes. The service area covers Palm Beach, Broward and Martin counties, with Wellington among the cities listed.
The company’s leak-detection approach follows the same instinct as those no-charge visits. Its plumbers start with a visual inspection, the company says, because many leaks can be found without equipment, which spares the customer that cost. Thermal imaging and acoustic listening devices come out only when the eye isn’t enough.
The partner says the company has never had a no-show, while acknowledging it has only been in business for a year or so. After a job, someone follows up. “We always call the customers later,” the partner says.
None of this runs on a manual. “We’re a very small team,” the partner says. “We talk all the time.”