When construction-industry veteran Rick Fender was thinking about what to name his new plumbing and utility company back in 2001, he set the bar high and chose Cloud 9 Services, an aspirational name if there ever was one.
“I was looking for a catchy name,” he says. “I’d visited Singapore at the time and had Buddhist friends, plus I was reading a book about the Dalai Lama. I figured we wanted happy customers who’d feel like they were on cloud nine [a stage of enlightenment in Buddhism].
“It seems to be working for us.”
Creating happy customers doesn’t happen overnight, however. Building a
