Matt Moody started The Leak Geeks Plumbers with one van and a name his kids helped pick
After more than 25 years in his father’s Mobile plumbing business, Matt Moody branched off with one van and a name he and his kids came up with.
Mobile, AL
The Leak Geeks Plumbers started with one van and a set of hand tools. Matt Moody incorporated the company in Mobile, Ala., in 2024, and he and his son went to work.
“I’ve built this from scratch,” Moody says.
He did not come to it cold. His father owns Advanced Plumbing Service, a family company that has worked Mobile and Baldwin counties since 1979. Moody and both of his brothers worked there, and he stayed, off and on, for more than 25 years. He is the youngest of the three.
“My dad has a plumbing company, he put me and my brothers to work,” he says. That is how he learned the trade. It is also the model he wants to copy, under a name of his own.
The name is the first thing people notice. The Leak Geeks is not what a plumber calls his company if he wants to blend in. Moody and his kids came up with it together, and he says he was scared to go with it at first. He worried about older customers.
“I thought some of the older people would be like, what’s that?” he says.
They weren’t put off. Moody says most of them told him they liked the name and found it catchy. So the company leaned in. Its mascot is a cartoon Albert Einstein, white hair and white mustache, in work overalls and often giving a thumbs-up. The vans are wrapped in red and black, with the company’s services printed in rows across the panels. The back of a company T-shirt reads “Experience not experiments.”
What Moody wanted, he says, was the polish of a chain without the feel of one. “That’s what we want, is kind of to have, like, a franchise vibe, but still know that, hey, this is a local business,” he says. “You’re still getting that local care.”
He takes the look of the fleet seriously. The wraps come from one shop, and Moody has stayed with it because he wants every van to match. Send the same artwork somewhere else, he says, and “the printers are different, the ink’s different.”
The specialty is in the name. The Leak Geeks hunts for leaks, from slab leaks to pipes failing behind walls, as the company’s website puts it. A photo from one slab leak job shows a thermal camera held low over a tile floor. Customers put it in plainer terms. Called out for a water leak, Moody and an assistant inspected the property thoroughly and found the problem in no time, one customer wrote in a Google review.
The other big line is tankless water heaters, which the crews install, flush and repair. Customers write about that work in detail. One had two Navien heat exchangers replaced under warranty. Another had a heater quit the night before a long weekend, with no appointment until Tuesday, and wrote that Moody came out over the weekend anyway and had it fixed faster than expected.
On one home-warranty call, a customer wrote, the warehouse was closed, so the plumber went to Pascagoula, Miss., for the parts and finished the job the same evening.
The company’s project page reads like a map of the area around the bay. It lists a grinder pump rebuilt in Satsuma, a copper replacement in Semmes, a commercial eyewash station serviced in Mobile, a Sloan flush valve replaced on a commercial job, a roof drain cleaned downtown and a smart water monitor with an automatic shut-off installed in Fairhope. A few jobs reach farther: a toilet tank repair in Orange Beach, a bathroom remodel in Navarre, Fla.
Moody would rather keep most work close. He likes to stay within 15 or 20 miles, partly because the trucks run on diesel, and a job an hour away and an hour back doesn’t pay well. The shop sits in the middle of its market, with Grand Bay and Theodore to the west toward Mississippi and Daphne and Fairhope across the bay in Baldwin County. “We’re kind of right in the center of everything,” he says. For the right job, though, crews will drive 100 or 150 miles.
Most of the business is repeat work. The regulars include a few contractors, a couple of people who buy houses and turn them into rentals and bed-and-breakfasts, and a nursing home. “We’re a small business,” Moody says.
Small drain-cleaning jobs from people shopping on price usually go to someone else. “I don’t try to be cheap,” he says.
Moody is Mobile born and raised. “It’s the only place I’ve ever lived, for a long period of time, anyway,” he says. He has been plumbing for more than a quarter century. “All I’ve ever done is plumbing,” he says.
His son helped him start the company, and Moody has other sons. The plan he describes looks a lot like his father’s. Once The Leak Geeks has a solid structure, he would like to open more shops along the coast: one in Pensacola, Fla., to cover Pensacola and Destin, another in Biloxi, Miss., then New Orleans. As his kids get older, each could run one, if they want it.
“Something that they can have their own,” he says.