After eight years as a residential drain cleaner and plumber in Washington, D.C., Frankey Grayton came to a realization: While Grayton Plumbing was profitable, his job satisfaction was running in the red.
“The average plumbing company is three trucks or smaller, and I had three trucks at the time,” Grayton says. “I was working a minimum of 60 hours and up to 75 hours a week. I wasn’t very happy. I thought that owning a business should be better than this.
“I didn’t know what I was doing. It became apparent that I was a heck of a master plumber, but a lousy businessman. Whether you run a barbershop, a restaurant or a bakery, there are lots of guys who know their craft, but not necessarily how to run a business. You have to work on your business. If you never work on your business, you’ll always work in your business.”
Today, Grayton runs six trucks – Dodge Sprinter 3500s with box bodies made by VT Hackney – and a spare cargo van. And thanks to innovative marketing practices, Grayton Plumbing enjoys great name recognition in the D.C. metro area.
Starting small
Grayton knew back in high school that he wanted to be a plumber. “I wanted to work outside, work on different projects and work with my hands,” he recalls. He apprenticed for two plumbing companies, then got laid off by the second in 1992, several years after completing his apprenticeship. That spurred him to strike out on his own.
“I printed up some business cards and started passing them out,” he says. “I started out with a decommissioned FedEx delivery truck, a RIDGID K-750 drum drain-cleaning machine, and a RIDGID K-50 sectional machine. By the time I got a callback from the place where I used to work, I was too busy to go back.”
In the early years, Grayton says, he was too naive to fear starting a company. He was 25 years old with a family to feed, and he had nothing to lose. “I owned a job – that’s how I like to put it,” he says. “Today I own a business. If I didn’t come to work back then, there was no business. Today, if I go away, the business keeps going.”
Important postcard
Things turned for the better after Grayton received a postcard solicitation from Plumbers’ Success International, a professional organization for independent contractors. Joining in 2000 jump-started the business.
“I went to a meeting and found answers to all the questions I ever had,” he recalls. “I learned things like how to make plumbers want to come to work for you, how to properly price jobs, how to write a Yellow Pages ad, and how to properly stock trucks. It was a revelation.
“I started attending PSI events every four months, and that led to combing the Internet and reading books for any information that could help me run my business more effectively. I doubled my revenue during my first year as a member, while still running the same three trucks. The biggest compliment I ever received was years later, when a sales rep asked me where I got my MBA degree. I told him I never went to college – just the school of hard knocks.”
