Verity Plumbing gives customers a two-hour arrival window, and Jennifer has a rule about the first half of it. If her husband, Mark, isn’t at the house within the first hour, she tells him, the customer starts to think they’ve been forgotten. So she calls or texts before that happens.
“Hey, we haven’t forgotten you, we’re running a little bit behind,” is how she describes the message. The truck may still be inside the window. She sends it anyway.
The rest of the routine is simple. A call gets booked into a window, and the customer is told it’s booked. They hear again when the truck is on its way. Jennifer answers the phones, does the booking and handles the accounting herself. She and Mark own the company together.
The name Verity stands for truth and honesty, she says, and she explains the habit in plain terms. “If we say we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it.” She traces it to her father. “If my dad said he was going to do something, you could take it to the bank,” she says. She keeps a second standard in mind, too, one she borrows from Chick-fil-A: a customer should be greeted by somebody friendly and smiling.
The company serves Ellis County and southern Dallas County, and it keeps that territory tight on purpose. “We try to limit our space so we can get to customers and serve them as soon as possible,” Jennifer says. Its listed hours run until 8 p.m. on weekdays.
Mark is, in her words, “usually who you get.” He came to Verity after a long career in the trade: first as a commercial plumber, then as a lead plumber for Dallas County for 21 years. He went back and earned his master’s license.
Verity started in 2020, while he was still on the county payroll. For a time he ran it on nights and weekends on top of the full-time job, and he moved over to Verity full time after retiring from the county. Jennifer says a run of big freezes helped put the young company on the map.
Most of the work is residential repair. They do some bathroom and kitchen remodels, which are larger jobs, but they stay away from new construction and send it to other plumbers. Jennifer says Mark makes friends as he works, and the couple keeps up with some customers when they are going through hard times.
The punctuality shows up in what customers notice. One longtime customer, writing about a badly clogged kitchen sink, said Verity came out the same day and showed up a little earlier than promised, then cleaned up the mess afterward.
The company has two mascots, and Jennifer introduces them by name. Hope and Faith are the couple’s dogs, and they are where the dog in the Verity logo comes from. Hope and Faith are adopted lab crosses. Their mother was a yellow lab, and their father’s breed is unknown. The dog on the side of the van is a chocolate lab.