What sparks a person to start a business? The notion is triggered in many ways — admiring a self-employed person and wanting to emulate it, perhaps, or finding yourself with a truckload of widgets and realizing there’s a market for them.

For Joe Fuentes, the desire to have his own plumbing company arose during a class several years into his plumbing apprenticeship. A business agent addressed a roomful of apprentice plumbers that evening and in the course of remarks said, “Some of you guys in this room will become contractors.”

“Becoming a plumbing contractor had never crossed my mind,” Fuentes says. “When he said that, it sort of awakened something inside me. He planted a seed in me personally and it took root and stayed in my mind that I should become a contractor.”

The seed didn’t bear fruit for eight years. In 2016, Fuentes finally walked away from a $120,000-a-year job as a union plumber, spent $10,000 on a used service truck, and set up shop in his garage as owner-operator of S&J Plumbing. 

STARTING YOUNG

Owning a business is not a new thing for the extended family of Joe Fuentes, who are immigrants from Argentina. They arrived in the U.S. when the now-41-year-old S&J Plumbing owner was an infant. His grandfather owned a dry-cleaning establishment in the Chicago area and his father had his own shoe repair shop. How Fuentes ended up plumbing is a story all by itself.

As a 20-year-old, Fuentes was looking for a career path in the trades and noticed that plumbers seemed to earn good wages. After thumbing through the Yellow Pages of a phone book and seeing dozens of listings for plumbers in the Chicago area, he started calling them and asking to become an apprentice. 

Fuentes was not immediately successful, so he called some more, and then some more. He made a list of the ones he called, to make sure he didn’t call any of them twice. In all, Fuentes reached out to 60 plumbing houses and only one offered him an opportunity. His plumbing career as a union apprentice began.

His first employer was the oldest plumbing house in the state of Illinois but went out of business after two years of Fuentes’ five-year apprenticeship. He got on with another plumber and continued to learn the trade. He says the ensuing years were a wonderful learning experience. 

“I worked with some great journeyman plumbers,” Fuentes says. “I was very fortunate to be paired up with those guys. I learned so many facets of plumbing as an apprentice.”

Fuentes is persistent — as demonstrated by his dogged calling of plumbers as a 20-year-old — as well as entrepreneurial. These attributes serve him well as a business owner.

“I like working for myself because I like the freedom of making my own decisions and controlling my future,” he says. “I don’t like things coming to me. Instead, I like to go out and get them.”

Fuentes named his business S&J Plumbing to acknowledge his daughter Sarah and son Joseph. Besides being represented in the company name, they were part of the reason Fuentes was driven to establish himself as a young man in the plumbing trade: He was a single parent raising two children and needed a steady income. 

“I don’t want to get mushy here, but everything I did I did for them,” Fuentes says. “That’s why when I named the company, I decided to honor them.” 

SMALL BUT BUSY

Fuentes’ 3,000-square-foot shop is in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago. Yet company crews serve customers across a 20-mile radius of the shop, covering the whole region north and west of the Windy City that includes about 80 suburban communities. That’s a large residential customer base for a plumbing business, and S&J does, in fact, exclusively serve homeowners and renters. It has no commercial or industrial customers. 

“When I started the business after working in commercial and in new construction settings, I knew I wanted just to offer service to residential customers,” Fuentes says. “I love this so much more. It’s something new every day, rather than traveling to the same old job site. I get to meet new people, which is always enjoyable for me. I never get bored.” 

His crews head out from the shop each morning in seven service trucks. The chassis of the trucks are from various manufacturers, but each carries a full-fledged enclosed utility body with side compartments, rear access to interior space and rooftop carrying framework. 

In the trucks are Milwaukee power tools and RIDGID drain cleaning equipment. Video inspection of pipe interiors is accomplished with RIDGID SeeSnake cameras. Though Fuentes swears by Kohler fixtures because of their reliability, he carries a variety of fixture options for customers.

“I’m proud of our trucks and they are fully stocked with quality products, 99% of them American-made,” Fuentes says.

Drain cleaning is a more recent service addition and is a growing part of the business. Fuentes owns a trailered jetter — a Spartan 758 unit — that can infuse a line with water at 3,000 psi and a flow of 12 gpm.

“I don’t need the jetter often for our residential customers, but I’ve had some requests,” he says. 

On the occasions when clearing a residential drain leads to bigger problems — that is, to broken or clogged lines outside the house — Fuentes has the equipment to do the work, including a dump truck and Bobcat mini-excavator. The equipment is needed several times a month.

Chicago’s suburban service area contains some pretty old neighborhoods. Consequently, the company replaces quite a lot of pipe, such as waterlines that have aged out and drains constructed in an era of thin-copper material and worn through. Once a week at least, S&J is also called to fix old, leaking natural gas lines. S&J crews stay busy.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

Early in his career, Fuentes chased the money, he says, bouncing among plumbing houses, growing both his skills and his income as a union apprentice. As an employer, he says he realizes now that companies retain good employees mostly through building relationships.

“I’ve learned that getting one on one with employees is how to keep them,” he says. “They are looking for someone they can trust to lead them. My philosophy is, I’m here to serve my employees, not them serve me.”

It seems to be a winning philosophy. Fuentes’ longest-tenured employee was his helper when he started the business.

“He was my first hire and, eight years later, he is a journeyman plumber,” Fuentes says. “He’s one of my top guys.”

All members of the crew are licensed journeymen or apprentices, except for a few plumber helpers on the path to an apprenticeship. One apprentice or helper goes out with all journeymen.

“It always is nice to have a second pair of hands on a job and it also is a great recruiting tool when I’m hiring other journeymen,” Fuentes says.

S&J’s skilled and contented plumbers are producing desired results — satisfied customers. The company does some marketing, but the biggest source of new jobs is the good reviews it has received. 

“We’re among the highest-rated companies in the area, both in the number of reviews and the scores we’re given,” Fuentes says. “It’s a testament to my employees, from the ones answering the phone in the office to the guys out in the field.”

Having quality employees is not by happenstance.

“When I hire, I am looking for good people, not just good plumbers,” Fuentes says. “After all, customers don’t know plumbers, but they know people. They’ve been interacting with them all their lives. Our customers sense right off the bat that our employees are good people.”

THE NEXT STEP

Good people. American-made products. Two decades of plumbing experience to lean on. These are the foundations of S&J Plumbing. What’s the next step for the company? The goal, in a word, is growth, Fuentes says.

Growing the fleet of service trucks to 20 from seven. Increasing the number of employees to a level that complements a fleet of that size and then reassessing from there, he adds. Other goals include tripling the size of the office, equipment yard and warehouse — and owning the property instead of leasing it. Perhaps the most aggressive plan is to begin to offer HVAC and electrical services alongside plumbing and drain cleaning, thereby becoming a full-service shop for residential customers.

This is ambitious, but Fuentes seems ready to undertake it. The journeyman plumber has freed himself from service work to oversee the growth. 

“For the last couple years, I have not touched a tool,” he says. “Managing full time is something new for me and I’m trying to get better at it. Sometimes I almost obsess over it. It’s such a challenge to balance making employees happy with getting the work done efficiently.”