It is not enough for a company to do good work. People must know about the good work if the company is to stay in business.
Daniels Plumbing and Heating in Philadelphia does good work, but owner Daniel Gallagher works hard to spread the word, too. He has spent his life in the city, so he knows people.
“This is a city of neighborhoods, often centered around the Catholic church — people asked what parish you were from — and every neighborhood had a plumber,” Gallagher says. “Communication was really intimate.”
He’s spent most of two decades working with and around plumbing peers and has built professional networks.
“Networking is a contact sport. I talk to groups, including working across other trades,” Gallagher says.
But this being the 21st century, he also reaches out through technology. The company “does a lot of radio stuff and Facebook stuff and other social media. Mom (who’s active in the company) and I are working up a podcast.”
And then there’s YouTube. Some of the company’s videos are instructional in a casual way. Some are just for fun. For example, its Easter message from last year fell into the latter category.
In it, a 6-foot Easter bunny is shown hopping around a home hiding plastic eggs, each of which is decorated with a Daniels Plumbing logo. When discovered by an arriving family, the bunny panics and tries to flush the remaining eggs down a toilet.
The toilet plugs, of course, and a Daniels plumber is called to unclog it. The embarrassed and grateful Easter bunny pays the bill with a fistful of carrots. As credits roll at the end of the video, candid snippets from the videotaping are shown.
“We try to keep it light,” Gallagher says of his YouTube fare. “We do some fun stuff.”
Fun sells, too.
Read more about Daniels Plumbing and Heating in the September 2023 issue of Cleaner magazine.
