“Most of the time, me as the owner, I would go to do the job myself,” says David Montero, who runs Sonik Services, a plumbing company in the Orlando area.
To him, that is the main difference between a small company and a large one. When the owner is the one on the job, he says, nobody has to guess what the standard is. “Being the owner, I can set my own standard.”
The reasoning goes past the work in front of him. The company’s name goes out on every job, and Montero talks about it as something still being built. “I’m not only working for the money, but we work for our name and our reputation,” he says. “That’s what I need to work on right now if I want to keep growing.”
He had been doing plumbing for a while before he went into business for himself in 2019. He runs Sonik with his wife, and they have employees. The company is state licensed and works in and around Orlando, in Osceola County and in the surrounding counties. Most of its work is residential, including new construction, and that is where Montero says it is strongest. Larger commercial jobs are something he wants to move into, not something the company does yet.
His standard shows most clearly when the schedule slips. A small company tries to stay as busy as it can, he says, and sometimes something comes up that keeps the crew from making an appointment. His rule is that the customer hears about it first, from him. “We gotta give them a call before the time that we’re supposed to show up,” he says, “that way we don’t waste their time.” He counts a customer’s time as valuable in the same way he counts his own.
The same thinking decides who works for him. Montero says training is how the company passes its values to everyone it hires, and that a person who doesn’t share them “cannot work for us.”
He traces those values to his upbringing. “That’s the way that you’re raised,” he says. He thinks everyone should be that way, though he doesn’t believe most people are.
He has had a couple of offers to buy the company and has no plans to sell. He is, in his words, “pretty young,” and he is thinking in decades. “I want to at least grow it for 10 more years, hopefully grow it into an empire,” he says. “I don’t know how big, honestly.”
The first step he pictures is a company that covers the whole state. Past Florida, he has looked at South Carolina and North Carolina. That would come, he says, “in a few years from now, really, in long term.”