What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
I grew up around tradespeople and there was something about the way a good plumber could walk into a stressful situation and just fix it that stayed with me from a young age. It was not glamorous work but it was real, it was needed and the people asking for help were genuinely relieved when it was done right.
I started as an apprentice and worked through every part of the trade, from small household repairs right through to large construction jobs spanning months at a time. Those early years were where I learned that the technical side is only half the job. The other half is how you treat people when you are standing in their home at 7am on a Tuesday because something has gone wrong overnight.
That combination of craft and communication is what I became genuinely attached to. You could see the impact of your work immediately and the person in front of you told you exactly how you did without needing a performance review to find out.
Building Hello Plumbing came from wanting to take that standard and build a team around it. Not just do good work myself but create a business where every person who showed up to a job carried the same approach. That is still the thing that drives it for me today.
Tell us 3 surprisingly easy and 3 surprisingly difficult things about your job.
3 Surprisingly Easy Things
1. Reading a property quickly is something that gets easier faster than people expect. After enough jobs, you walk into a home and within the first few minutes you have a pretty accurate picture of the pipe age, the likely pressure issues and where the problems are probably hiding. It sounds like intuition but it is just pattern recognition built up over years on the tools.
2. Talking to stressed homeowners is actually the part I find natural. When something has gone wrong with someone’s plumbing, they are anxious and they want to feel like the person in front of them knows what they are doing. Staying calm and explaining things clearly settles people down faster than any technical skill does.
3. Selling the right solution is easy when you genuinely believe in it. If the job calls for pipe relining over a full excavation, that recommendation practically makes itself because the numbers and the outcome speak clearly on their own.
3 Surprisingly Difficult Things
1. Managing the gap between what a job looks like on the surface and what it actually involves underneath is something that never fully gets easy. You can quote a job based on what is visible and then open a wall or camera a drain and find something completely different waiting for you.
2. Building a team that holds the same standard you hold yourself is genuinely the hardest ongoing part of running a trades business. Getting good people is one thing but getting them to care about the detail the same way you do takes time, repetition and a lot of honest conversations.
3. Switching off at the end of the day is harder than it sounds. When you run a business that handles emergency callouts, the phone does not observe business hours and training your brain to step away from problem-solving mode is something I am still working on.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
Honestly, the first one is the immediacy of it all. Most jobs have this long gap between the work you put in and seeing whether it actually worked. In plumbing, you fix something and the person standing next to you knows it is fixed within the hour. I never got tired of that, even after years on the tools.
The second one, and I think this is the one people outside the trade do not expect, is the problem solving. Walking into a situation that looks complicated and finding the clearest path through it is genuinely satisfying. A blocked drain or a failing pipe is a puzzle and the moment you figure out exactly what is going on, there is a kind of quiet relief that hits before you even pick up a tool.
And the third one is the repeat customer. When someone calls Hello Plumbing back for the third or fourth time because they trust that the work will be done properly, that means more to me than any five-star review. You cannot fake that kind of relationship and building a business on it is the part I am most proud of.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
The first one is reading people quickly. I figured out early on that the technical side of plumbing gets you in the door but how you make someone feel while you are in their home is what gets you called back. Being able to walk into a stressful situation and immediately pick up on what a customer actually needs, whether that is a fast answer, a clear explanation or just someone who stays calm, that skill has shaped everything about how Hello Plumbing operates today.
The second is knowing when something is wrong before it becomes a bigger problem. After years on the tools you develop a kind of instinct for it. A sound that is slightly off, a pressure reading that does not quite add up, a pipe that looks fine but is not. Catching those things early has saved our customers a lot of money over the years and it has built a reputation that is hard to earn any other way.
The third is being honest when the answer is not what someone wants to hear. I think a lot of tradies shy away from delivering news that might upset a customer but in my experience people respect you more for it. Telling someone their hot water system needs a full replacement instead of another patch job is not always a comfortable conversation but it is the right one and building a business on that honesty is what gets you to 6,000 customers and a 4.9-star rating.
Tell us about a time where you saw a surprising outcome that you did not expect.
Early on in Hello Plumbing, we got called out to what looked like a straightforward blocked drain at a residential property. The customer had been dealing with slow drainage for a few weeks and expected us to clear it and be gone within the hour.
We ran the camera down and found the drain was not blocked at all. The pipe had completely collapsed under the driveway, and the surrounding soil had been slowly filling the void for what looked like years. The customer had no idea and honestly neither did we when we first pulled up.
The part I did not expect was the customer’s reaction. I thought delivering that news was going to be a difficult conversation. Instead they were relieved. They had been chasing the problem with other plumbers for two years and nobody had bothered to camera the line. For them, finally having a clear answer was worth more than a quick fix.
What I learned from that job is that the diagnosis is the service, not just the repair. People do not always need the problem solved on the same day. They need to understand what is actually going on first and feel confident that the person in front of them has found the real answer. That job changed how we approach every camera inspection we run and it is a big part of why CCTV drain inspections became one of our core services.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
The honest answer is managing the gap between what the day is supposed to look like and what it actually becomes.
In a trades business, the schedule you build the night before can fall apart by 8am. A job that was quoted as two hours turns into a full day once the wall comes open. An emergency callout lands and the whole run of the day shifts around it. That is just the nature of the work and I accepted that a long time ago.
The harder part is making sure that unpredictability does not flow through to the customer. When a job runs long or a timeline moves, the customer on the other end of that change deserves a call before they are left wondering where the team is. I think that one habit, staying ahead of the communication rather than reacting to it, is what separates a business people trust from one they tolerate.
The way I handle it personally is by building more buffer into the day than feels comfortable. Not every job needs it but the ones that do need it badly, and having that room means the team can absorb the unexpected without it becoming a problem for everyone downstream.
The lesson I keep coming back to is that the challenge is never really the thing that went wrong. It is how quickly you get in front of it and how honestly you talk about it when you do.
What do you value most and why?
Honestly, it comes down to trust. Everything else I care about in business and in life sits underneath that one thing.
In the trades, trust is not something you can manufacture with good marketing or a polished website. It gets built job by job, conversation by conversation, and it gets lost the moment you cut a corner or go quiet when something goes wrong. I have watched businesses with more resources and bigger teams lose customers permanently over a single moment where they chose convenience over honesty. That never made sense to me.
The way I think about it is this. When someone lets a plumber into their home, they are extending a level of trust that most service industries never get. They are not watching over your shoulder the whole time. They are taking your word for what needs doing and what it is going to cost. That responsibility sits with me every single day and I think it should feel heavy because the moment it stops feeling that way is the moment standards start slipping.
Building Hello Plumbing on that foundation is why we are at a 4.9-star rating across more than 6,000 customers. Not because we are perfect but because when something does not go right, we show up for it. That is what trust actually looks like in practice and it is the thing I would never trade for a shortcut.
How do you celebrate your victories?
I will be honest, I am not naturally wired to stop and celebrate. The next job, the next problem, the next thing that needs attention tends to pull focus pretty quickly and I have had to consciously work against that over the years.
The way it usually looks for me is a conversation rather than an event. When the team hits something worth acknowledging, whether that is a particularly tough job handled well or a milestone for the business, I make a point of saying it out loud to the people who made it happen. Not in a formal way but in the way you would tell someone directly that they did something worth noticing. I think that kind of recognition lands harder than a dinner or a trophy because it is specific and it is personal.
The 6,000 customer milestone was one that actually made me pause. That number represents a lot of early mornings, a lot of emergency callouts and a lot of moments where the team had to deliver under pressure. We marked that one as a team and it felt right to do it that way because no single person gets a business to that point alone.
At the end of the day, the way I celebrate most honestly is by seeing the business grow in a way that creates more opportunity for the people in it. That outcome, watching someone on the team step up into a bigger role or take on more responsibility, that is the kind of victory I find most worth celebrating.
Who is your favorite motivational speaker and why?
Gary Vaynerchuk is the one I keep coming back to and I think it is because he talks about business in a way that actually matches how it feels from the inside rather than how it looks from the outside.
A lot of motivational content is built around the highlight reel. The big exit, the overnight success, the moment everything clicked. Gary’s content has always been more honest than that. He talks about the repetition, the ingratitude of early work and the reality that most meaningful things take longer than people are willing to admit publicly. That framing resonated with me early on when Hello Plumbing was still finding its feet and the gap between where we were and where I wanted it to be felt pretty wide.
The specific thing I took from him was the idea that attention is the actual currency and that the businesses winning long term are the ones showing up consistently rather than perfectly. I applied that to how we approach our reputation, our customer communication and the way we talk about our work publicly. Not trying to look bigger than we are but being genuinely present and honest about what we do and why we do it.
He is not for everyone and I get that. But for someone building a trades business from the ground up, the no-shortcut message hit differently than anything more polished ever did.
What advice would you give to your younger self and why?
Stop waiting until everything is ready before you make a move. I spent a lot of early time trying to get conditions perfect before committing to the next step and the reality is that conditions never get perfect. You learn by being in it, not by preparing to be in it.
The second thing is to hire for attitude earlier than feels necessary. I held off building a team until the pressure was already on and that meant the first few hires were rushed. Getting the right people around you before you desperately need them changes everything about how a business grows.
And trust the work. I think I underestimated early on how much a reputation builds on its own when the standard is consistently there. You do not need to chase every opportunity if the work keeps speaking for itself.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
The honest answer is my first boss in the trade. I will not name him but he was the kind of tradesperson who held a standard that felt unreasonably high when I was starting out and completely obvious in hindsight.
He had this rule that the job was not finished until the site was cleaner than you found it. Not just the work itself but everything around it. At the time I thought it was excessive. Looking back, that one standard shaped how I think about every job Hello Plumbing takes on today. The work is the visible part but how you leave a place tells you everything about how someone actually thinks about their customer.
The other thing he drilled into me was that your reputation in the trade travels faster than you do. Word gets around quickly about who shows up properly and who cuts corners, and in a local area that reputation is either your biggest asset or your biggest liability.
I did not fully appreciate either of those lessons until I was running my own team and watching newer tradespeople make the same mistakes I made early on. That is when it clicked that what he was really teaching me was not plumbing. It was how to be someone people could rely on, and that turns out to be the foundation everything else gets built on.
Just for fun, what is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Salted caramel and I will not apologise for it.
I know it is not the most adventurous answer but there is something about that specific combination of sweet and salty that just works every single time. No surprises, no disappointment, just consistently exactly what you wanted.
I have tried to branch out. Went through a pistachio phase for a while, had a brief and regrettable encounter with a lavender and honey option at a farmers market that I will not be revisiting. Every time I stray too far from salted caramel I end up standing there with something that sounds better than it tastes.