Commercial clients expect a high-level of service, and that demands quality equipment. Southern California Jetting and Plumbing Co. steps right in with modern waterjetters, video cameras and utility locators, operated by experienced crews who look and act like professionals.
That formula has helped the company build a strong and growing customer base among shopping centers, hotels, golf courses, mobile home parks, and municipal clients. From its base in Murrieta, the firm serves a territory that extends from north of Los Angeles to the Mexican border.
“Our clients are contractors, property managers, and owners,” says Dennis Carver, founder. “When they request a service, we figure out a way to accommodate them by working closely with the manufacturers of equipment designed to fulfill that request. We always try to send the same employee to a repeat client.”
Seeing the potential
Carver entered the business after seeing firsthand its profit potential. While attending college, he worked as an electrician, pipefitter, and plumber for a temporary employment agency. After earning an associate degree in electronics, he worked for eight years in the maintenance department of a food processing company.
“My employer hired outside plumbers, and the jetter and pipe video technology was just being introduced,” he says. “I saw this as a new, special, lucrative business field, and I wanted to own my own company.” He founded his firm in 1994, offering jetting and pipe video services on a subcontract basis. Other services now include leak detection, and pipe lining and patching.
“When I started the company, I did not have a lot of business experience,” Carver says. “We operated not as a growth company but as a way to make a living. Four years ago, we started to grow the company, and now we are beginning to expand and hire new employees with the right attitude and work experience.
“We pay well, but it’s hard to find employees willing to work the long hours, and sometimes in dirty working conditions. Currently we have four full-time employees in addition to my wife, Laura, and me. Laura and I take all the phone calls and dispatch the jobs to our employees.”
Heavy on maintenance
Before launching his business, Carver did what he still does each time he considers adding a service: He called a manufacturer and asked questions. “I called Nick Woodhead, president of US Jetting LLC,” he says. “We talked about my plan to set up my own business, and the fact that I couldn’t afford to purchase a new jetter.
“Nick told me about a used jetter available in Washington, D.C. My younger brother, Terry, knows equipment, so he drove with me to D.C. We rented a van with a hitch, picked up the jetter, and drove it to Califor-nia. I started using it the next day.”
The vast majority of the company’s jobs involve maintaining sanitary sewers and storm sewer drains, and about 20 percent of the work is emergency cleaning. Sixty percent of the jobs require a jetter. “All of our jetters are used every day,” Carver says.
The company owns four 4,000-psi hydrojetters: two 14-gpm model 4014 units from Harben Inc., and two 18-gpm model 4018 units with 100 gallons of water storage from US Jetting.
“When a shopping center’s restaurant tenant has a blockage, we like to be able to show up with one of our jetters and open the blockage within minutes,” Carver says. “That benefits the shopping center, the restaurant tenant, and us, and it saves on damage to the property.”
To help enable fast response, employees take company trucks home at night, so they can go directly to the jobsite upon receiving a service call from the office. The company buys parts and supplies from plumbing supply houses all over the region and maintains accounts with all of them.
Building the business
Carver says commercial clients don’t use the Yellow Pages to find hydrojetters or video inspectors. “We have worked hard to develop business relationships with property developers, managers, and other plumbing companies,” he says. “We subcontract for about 30 other plumbing companies.”
On subcontract jobsites, Southern California Jetting and Plumbing provides seamless service. “Our employees show up wearing the other company’s logo shirts,” Carver says. “Property developers, managers, and plumbers talk with one another and share information on subcontractors. Two of our vans are marked with our name, and two are not. We use the unmarked vans on subcontracting jobs.”
About 90 percent of revenue comes from repeat customers. “They know we don’t need to be baby-sat,” Carver says. “We receive a phone call, and whether it’s at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m., we’ll be there and stay on the site until the job is complete. We’ve been known to bring a camping trailer and camp on the jobsite until the job is completed.”
The demands of commercial clients require the company to use the best and most efficient equipment. “Many of these clients are in commercial neighborhoods that are very busy and expensive,” Carver says. “They don’t have time for us to learn on the job. They expect experienced workers with well-maintained, dependable equipment.
“Customer service and safety come first with us. When we start a job with special safety issues, we make sure everyone is current on safety rules and regulations. Our employees carry up-to-date personal protective equipment in their vehicles.”
Keeping customers happy
In all cases, Southern California Jetting strives to maintain the integrity of clients’ property. “If we do our job right, there will be no plumbing problems,” Carver says.
“One big issue is bootleg tenant improvements — modifications made without permission of the management company or property owner, often by an unlicensed contractor. The management company discovers what was done when the bootleg work fails, or the tenant moves.”
Most of Southern California Jetting’s subcontract jobs involve routine work such as root removal, but some are highly specialized. One annual customer is a ready-mix concrete plant in Irvine, owned by one of the nation’s largest cement companies. “Once a year we blast off the reclaimers stuck to their tumblers,” Carver says. “At other times they call us to clean their overflow pipes.”
In addition to jetters, Southern California Jetting has invested about $300,000 in technical equipment that neighborhood plumbers don’t typically own. “Within months of starting our business in 1994, we began offering video inspection,” Carver says. “We use our video cameras to locate lines and find breaks.
“When we started, a few national franchise companies in our area had jetters and video inspection, but none of the local independent companies did. We set the trend. We were able to offer them subcontract services, and then many of our subcontract clients started advertising their jetting and inspection services.”
The firm has acquired a new inspection camera almost every year. The company now owns six Chaser and Navigator lateral push cameras (for 2- to 6-inch lines) and a Predator mainline camera, all from UEMSI.
The company’s services include e-mailing the results of video inspections to property owners so that they can see problems immediately, understand what repairs are required, and approve the repairs.
Moving into locating
“We’ve added leak-location services and utility-searching services on private property, both of which require additional equipment,” Carver says. “Just as state organizations locate public utilities buried in public property, we search for public utility lines and pipes on private property for commercial, industrial, and municipal clients.”
The company uses leak detection equipment from Goldak Inc. “Recently, we bought utility locating equipment from Metrotech Corp. The unit hooks onto a pipe and sends out an electronic signal that helps us locate all the buried utilities. Two of our trucks carry Goldak and Metrotech equipment at all times.
“Recently we used that equipment at a shopping center in San Diego. A fire line under five tenant spaces broke, and the water raised the concrete pad four feet and broke it underneath a Mexican restaurant. Two of our employees spent two days locating the electric, gas, telephone, and water lines and cables. We made sure the lines were clear and free of mud and debris, and we capped off all the water lines before the fire-line repair crew started to work.”
Factory training
When taking on new equipment, Carver prefers to buy the newest available and obtain factory training. “Rather than hire subcontractors, we purchase and learn to use new special-purpose equipment,” he says.
“Our first step is to ask manufacturer representatives to bring their equipment to a job and show us how it works. That way we can make sure their equipment will do the job. Once we purchase a piece of equipment, the manufacturer trains all of us thoroughly in how to use it.”
In 2006, Carver saw a new pipe-patching system from Fernco Inc. “It allows us to patch sanitary sewers without having to dig up the line,” he says. “When necessary, we hire a local backhoe operator or use one of our plumber clients to dig, but we prefer to make repairs without digging.”
Diverse services have enabled the company to expand into muni-cipal contracting. Several smaller municipalities in the area do not own inspection systems or storm sewer cleaning equipment and so delegate that work to Southern California Jetting.
In addition, the company serves several older mobile home parks. To keep the sewer lines root-free, technicians use a Warthog rotary nozzle from StoneAge Inc. “For one trailer park in San Juan Capistrano, we provide quarterly maintenance and do all of their repairs, including broken pipes,” Carver says.
Southern California Jetting is quick to accept challenges, helping clients find creative and economical solutions to difficult problems. It’s a formula the helps clients avoid future problems and keeps the company on a strong growth curve.
