Andrew Auer’s first plan was to build a plumbing division inside someone else’s company. By then he had been a plumber for 25 years and had worked for several companies, the last one for eight and a half years. He wanted to do something different. The partner he lined up was a local air-conditioning company. The deal didn’t work out.
So he went home with a different plan. “My wife and I decided we were going to start our own plumbing company,” he says. Auer and his wife, Deandra, own XFactor Plumbing together, and it was fully licensed and in business in 2025. Auer is the license holder, under state certified plumbing contractor number CFC1433760.
He had spent his career inside other people’s shops, and he built his own to match the big ones. XFactor runs three vans. He describes them as new models, fully stocked and wrapped, and the company’s invoicing goes through a dispatching system. He wants the polish of a large operation without its ownership. The company offers, he says, “the same look and relationship that all the big companies have but with the locally owned business that cares about their neighbors.”
The second half of that sentence is the part he means to keep. Auer wants XFactor to grow. He does not want it to end up in a portfolio. “My goal is to grow one of the best plumbing companies in Orlando to provide local service,” he says. “I do not have any plans or intentions on selling to any large corporate interest because we need local businesses serving local families.”
He and Deandra describe the company as local to the Maitland and Winter Park area, serving Central Florida. Its main work is residential: service calls, remodels, new construction and whole-house repiping. That last job is where a plumber’s habits show. On the company’s own description of a repipe, the crew runs new PEX through attics, crawlspaces and existing pathways, with brass fittings and quarter-turn shutoff valves. Wall openings are kept to a couple of dinner-plate-sized holes per room and patched with matching texture after inspection. Most houses have water back the same day. The work is permitted and inspected before the job is called finished.
The skill Auer leans on most is the one that is hardest to put on a van. He has spent his whole career in the same region, and he says that is the point of the name on the door. “We have the X factor, and that is my 25 years of plumbing experience in Central Florida, so I understand how homes are constructed around here, how to rework drain lines, how to put an addition on somebody’s house and connect all the plumbing properly.”