Kevin Brennan spent six years of his life helping to build a business with a partner. Then he left. It was a high-wire decision, but one he could not shy away from. He and his business partner had a serious falling out over the company, a plumbing contractor in Will County, Ill., outside Chicago.
“We had two different ideas about where the business should go,” Brennan says. “I believed in diversification, and my partner didn’t. I walked away, left him with a client list, left him with all the tools and material, stock, advertising — the whole nine yards.”
He had no choice, Brennan says, but he knew it was also a roll of the dice. The gamble paid off. Today Brennan operates his own company, Expert Plumbing Service Inc. in New Lenox, Ill. There, he has been able to follow the strategy he had always advocated: building a diversified mix of business.
“I started with a single truck on my own and have added equipment and employees every year since,” Brennan says. “We’ve never had a year without growth.”
Three divisions
He credits diversification. Expert has three divisions. The plumbing division does commercial and residential repair and service plumbing, and commercial new construction plumbing.
The jetting division provides mainline and residential cleaning, which includes vacuuming of sewer lines and manholes. The pipe lining division offers cured-in-place pipe (CIPP) lining technology, using the Perma-Lateral system from Perma-Liner Industries Inc.
Each division has its focus and territory, but each one also feeds the other two. “I never wind up with two slow divisions at the same time,” Brennan says. “Diversification has been a huge key to the success of our business. The plumbing service business in our area is very competitive. The number of competitors is staggering.
“But we haven’t laid anybody off. There are weeks we are slow, and we will work portions of weeks. But while my competitors are dropping people, we can roll people from one division to another, and we don’t lose highly trained people for lack of work.”
Plumbing is where most calls start: Those crews usually go first to the site of a complaint to diagnose and fix routine problems. “Plumbing probably generates 50 percent of the revenue,” Brennan says. When bigger cleaning challenges arise, Brennan sends the jetter — which generates about 35 percent of the business. “We run it nonstop,” he says.
“The balance is the cured-in-place pipe lining,” he adds. “But that division is going through extraordinary growth this year.” In use in Europe for some 30 years, pipe lining remains unfamiliar to many Midwestern customers, Brennan observes. That’s changing, though. “Through our marketing and education, it’s now becoming an acceptable form of repair, without the rehabilitation costs of sewer replacement.”
Foe to friend
Enthusiasm for the technology is a turnaround for Brennan, who once feared it as a business-killer. “I first saw it four years ago as a threat to my plumbing company,” he says. Dig-and-replace sewer repairs represented about 30 percent of Brennan’s plumbing business at the time, and he feared that lining would eradicate that.
But instead of hiding from the new technology, “I found the best product I could find and decided rather than lose the work, I’d get in the business,” Brennan says. The Perma-Liner approach uses a three-layer flexible tubing (two layers of flexible needled felt and one of scrim reinforcement).
The outside layer is coated with a 2-mil thick polyvinyl chloride, and the tube is designed to expand slightly after installation so it fits snugly inside the original pipe. After being inserted into the pipe and inflated with forced air, it is adhered to the pipe with a two-part epoxy.
Brennan says the system is available for pipes from 2 to 64 inches. “It’s much more cost-effective than dig-and-replace,” he says. “There are no streets to replace, no lawns to replace, no driveways to dig up. By the end of the first quarter of 2007, we had already signed more contracts to start this spring than we had done each previous year.” Towns and villages, not just homeowners, have become interested in the process.
And it’s not just for storm or sanitary sewers: The same technology can be used to line electrical and other utility conduits. That’s welcome news for Brennan, who owns a distributorship in Illinois for the Perma-Liner system. Besides covering the entire state, he’s won business in Indiana and even Ohio. Demand is soaring — literally: “We’ve been on top of high-rise buildings in the City of Chicago.”
Staying on top
Brennan has come a long way from the one-man, one-truck operation he opened on Sept. 1, 2001. “The first year was extraordinarily hard,” Brennan says, “but I very rapidly built a reputation for offering more solutions than the average plumber” (services like hydrojetting), “and I built a reputation for honesty and integrity.”
Today he has 12 employees and 10 service vehicles. They include six Chevrolet G-vans with 16-foot box rears (2001 to 2005). A 2005 Chevy one-ton pickup outfitted with a 350-gallon nurse tank and transfer pump serves Brennan’s 2004 O’Brien 1840 hydrojetter. Other vehicles include a 2006 Ford Super Duty pickup truck, a 1999 GMC 8-ton dump truck, and a 2004 Ford 250 van for deliveries. For vacuuming sewers, he uses a Warden trailer-mounted unit with a 400-gallon debris tank.
One of the biggest challenges he faces is finding qualified personnel. “On average it takes us 12 attempts to really find the right person,” Brennan says. Once he hires people, Brennan does all he can to keep employees moving up. “Our guys receive about 50 hours apiece of continuing education in the shop every year,” he says. “That is to keep them on the cutting edge of the technologies we do.”
Crew members are encouraged to teach each other. “There’s a lot of sharing of knowledge on the part of our plumbers about codes and about manufacturing materials.”
Brennan’s wife, Teresa, is his business partner now. They have three adult children — two in the military and a third studying nursing. None have shown interest in taking over the business. Still, while at age 47 Brennan is nowhere near retirement, he has been thinking hard about the long-term future of Expert Plumbing.
Reaching new levels
“We’re hitting a point in our business where we’re beyond being a mom-and-pop,” he says. “I brought in a consulting firm, and they gave me great direction. Over the next 10 years, I want to set the business up to run on its own.”
That means hiring based on specialty and creating a mix of employees, each highly trained for a particular aspect of the operation. “We no longer rely on everybody to do every aspect of the business,” says Brennan. “I don’t depend on my plumbers to be salesmen any more.”
Over time, he expects to be able to back off some, handing over the reins to others in the company so that he can pursue personal interests. “I’m mentoring people here to take on ownership at a later date,” Brennan says. “I’ve got some really sharp young guys working for me, whose fathers worked for me, so it’s become a family affair.”
