“I started with two drain cleaning machines and a couple bags of tools that he left me,” Allen Richardson says. That was the whole inventory of USA Drain Service at the start. The “he” is his father.
The name came from the work. Richardson was doing mostly drain cleaning, so he called the company USA Drain Service and drove a pickup truck to the jobs. The name outlasted the pickup. “It’s kind of funny,” he says. “It started out as USA Drain Service, and then I put plumbing and drain specialist under it because we just got into so much different stuff.”
The different stuff arrived with the people. Richardson says he kept running across people who wanted to work with him, and they brought their own specialties. One man handles special projects such as tankless water heaters, filtration and wells. Another does bathroom remodels. The Mechanicsville company holds a Class A contractor license and works across the Richmond area, from Hanover and Henrico to Chesterfield and Goochland.
Richardson learned plumbing from his father, who ran a plumbing company in the 1990s and taught him the trade throughout his life. Richardson went into the military, came home and worked for a couple of commercial companies and a couple of residential ones. The company now bills itself as veteran-owned and says it hires fellow veterans.
During the pandemic years, his father told him he was good enough to start his own business and said he would like to see him try. His father died not long after. Richardson started the company with what his father had left him, at first, he says, to see whether he could do it. “Then as I started doing it,” he says, “I was more or less doing it just to prove something to him.”
He worked out of the pickup for a couple of years. Then a few people signed on. “I got a couple guys that believed in me,” he says, “sold them on what I was doing and what I was trying to build.” One of them knew nothing about the trades, and he learned working side by side with Richardson. A couple of vans followed the pickup. Richardson has since brought on people who came from larger Richmond companies, and the company now has nine employees.
What the crew does is broader than the name suggests. Drain cleaning and hydro jetting are still a large share of it, along with camera work to locate breaks and roots in a line. The crew runs the camera down the pipe and shows the customer the roots or the break on a screen, so nobody has to take the diagnosis on faith. Restaurants are among the commercial customers. For them, Richardson says, the company does yearly hydro jetting and cameras all the lines to catch trouble before it can interrupt service.
The bigger jobs go into the ground. The crew jackhammers up concrete slabs and replaces the sewer line underneath. “We bed everything in gravel, just to go the extra mile for the customer,” Richardson says. The point, he says, is that the customer doesn’t have to worry about that line for the next 20 or 30 years.
A homeowner whose sewer line had collapsed laid out how one of those jobs went. The crew arrived on the scheduled day, dug the trench, bedded more than 50 feet of new pipe, ran it through into the crawl space, passed inspection and backfilled, all in about four hours.
Richardson puts a number on showing up. “I’d say 95 percent of the time, we’re there when we say we’re going to be there,” he says.
The company that began with two drain machines in a pickup now has excavators and dump trailers, and its trucks are wrapped.