What motivates you when things get tough? Please be detailed and explain why.
Honestly, I think about the people on the other end of the phone call.
When someone rings us at 11pm because their hot water system has packed it in, or they’ve got sewage backing up into the house, they’re not having a good night. They’re stressed, they might have kids trying to get ready for school in the morning, and that pressure is real. I feel it every time we pick up.
And look, running a business is hard. There are days where the scheduling falls apart, a job takes twice as long as it should, and you’re dealing with supplier issues while three customers are waiting on you. Those days grind you down.
But that’s exactly when I think about what it looks like on the other side. When a plumber shows up fast and fixes the problem properly the first time, the relief in someone’s voice when they call back to say thank you, that sticks with you. You can’t manufacture that feeling, and it keeps me honest about why we do this.
For me, it also comes back to what this business stands for. Steve Bennett Plumbing has been around for over 40 years, and I didn’t take over just to coast on that. I feel a real responsibility to protect it and keep building on it, because every job we do either adds to that reputation or chips away at it.
So when things get hard, I come back to the next customer who needs us to show up and get it right. That’s enough.
How is AI changing your business? What changes are you making to adapt?
The trade hasn’t changed. The business around it has.
Five years ago, a missed call meant a missed job. Now, if someone doesn’t get a response within minutes, they’ve already moved on to the next plumber on Google. That shift happened fast, and AI tools are actually helping us keep pace with it without hiring three extra people just to answer phones and send follow-ups.
But here’s where it gets interesting for me. The scheduling side is where I think the real opportunity sits. Running same-day callouts across St George and Sutherland Shire means you’re constantly making decisions about who goes where and when. Get that wrong and you’re burning time, burning fuel and leaving a customer waiting longer than they should. Smarter dispatch tools are starting to take some of that guesswork out, and I’ve seen the difference it makes on the ground.
Now, I’ll be straight about what AI can’t do. It can’t look at a drain and tell you whether it’s a root intrusion or a collapsed pipe. It can’t hear a hot water system making a noise and know what’s about to fail. That judgment comes from years on the tools, and no software is replacing it anytime soon.
So the way I see it, AI handles the repetitive operational load and the team focuses on the actual plumbing. That’s a trade-off I’m happy to make. The businesses that figure out that balance early are probably the ones that are still standing in ten years.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
The first one is solving problems that actually matter to people.
Plumbing isn’t like buying a new couch. When something goes wrong with your pipes or your hot water system, it’s not a nice-to-have fix. People need it sorted, and they need it sorted now. I genuinely get a lot of satisfaction from walking into a stressful situation and walking out having fixed it properly. That feeling doesn’t get old, even after 40 years in the trade.
The second one is the team.
I took over Steve Bennett Plumbing in 2021 and inherited a group of guys who really care about doing good work. That’s not something you can train into people overnight. Over 100 years of combined experience sitting across our team, and the standard they hold themselves to on every job is something I’m proud of. Watching that culture stay strong as we’ve grown, including through our 2025 expansion, that’s been one of the more rewarding parts of this role for me.
The third one is building something that lasts.
You know, 198 five-star Google reviews and over 5,000 completed jobs don’t happen by accident. They happen because someone showed up on time, did the work right and treated the customer with respect. Every job we do is basically a vote for or against the reputation we’ve spent 40 years building. I find that motivating in a way that’s hard to explain, but I think most people who run a family business would understand it.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
The first one is reading a situation fast.
In emergency plumbing, you don’t always get the full picture before you walk through the door. Someone calls saying they’ve got a blocked drain, and you show up to find the whole sewer line has collapsed under the house. You need to assess quickly, communicate clearly and make a plan without rattling the customer. That ability to cut through the noise and figure out what’s actually going on has saved us a lot of wasted time and a lot of stressed-out homeowners over the years.
The second one is knowing how to build trust quickly.
People let us into their homes, often on their worst days. And I’ve learned that the way you carry yourself in those first few minutes sets the tone for everything that follows. You explain what you’re seeing, you’re upfront about what it’s going to cost, and you don’t oversell the problem just to pad the invoice. That’s why the $0 call out fee and free upfront quotes matter to me personally. They remove the suspicion before it even starts.
The third one is knowing when to step back and let the team lead.
Honestly, this one took me the longest to get right. When I first took over as Director in 2021, my instinct was to be across everything. But the reality is, we’ve got plumbers on this team with decades of experience and they don’t need me looking over their shoulder. So yeah, learning to trust the people around me and focus on the bigger picture, that’s probably the skill that’s had the most impact on how far we’ve come.
Tell us about a time where you saw a surprising outcome that you did not expect.
This one still comes to mind pretty regularly.
Back when I took over in 2021, we had a job come in that looked straightforward on paper. Blocked drain, residential property in Peakhurst, the kind of thing we handle every other day. The customer had actually called two other plumbers before us and both of them had quoted to dig up a section of the yard because they were convinced the pipe had collapsed.
So we sent the team out with the CCTV drain camera, which is just standard practice for us before we start making assumptions. And what we found was a severe tree root intrusion sitting about four metres down, but the pipe itself was completely intact. No collapse. The fix was high-pressure hydro jetting and a root treatment, not a full excavation.
The customer was expecting a bill in the thousands and a torn-up garden. She got neither.
That outcome surprised me more than I expected it to, not because of the technical side, but because of what it showed me about how much unnecessary work gets done in this industry when people skip the diagnostic step and go straight to the solution they already had in mind.
And honestly, that job changed how I talk about CCTV inspections internally. I stopped treating them as just a tool we offer and started treating them as the first conversation we have with every blocked drain job. The surprising part wasn’t finding the root intrusion. It was realising how many people were getting the wrong answer simply because nobody bothered to look properly first.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
Honestly, it’s managing expectations in real time.
Not the technical stuff. The technical side is something our team handles well and has for a long time. The harder thing is what happens between the moment a customer calls and the moment the job is done, because that gap is where trust either gets built or gets broken.
Here’s a good example. Same-day service sounds simple until you’ve got four emergency callouts land before 9am on a Monday and your team is already committed across three different suburbs. Someone is going to wait longer than they wanted to. And how you handle that phone call, the one where you have to tell a customer their appointment is pushed back, that’s actually harder than fixing the pipe.
So the way I handle it is pretty straightforward. We communicate early, we communicate honestly and we never overpromise just to keep someone calm in the moment. Because a customer who gets a realistic update and a plumber who shows up when we said they would is always going to feel better than one who was told “we’ll be there in an hour” and waited three.
For me, that discipline around honesty in the hard moments is what separates businesses that keep customers from businesses that just get customers. And after 40 years and 198 five-star reviews, I’d say the approach is working. But I don’t take that for granted, because the expectation resets with every single job. That keeps me sharp, and I think that’s actually a good thing.
What do you value most and why?
Reliability. And I mean that in the most unglamorous way possible.
It’s not the exciting answer. But after 40 years in this trade, I’ve watched businesses with better marketing, fancier equipment and slicker websites come and go. The ones that stick around are the ones that just keep showing up and doing what they said they would do. Every time. Without needing a pat on the back for it.
For me, reliability isn’t just a business value. It’s personal. When I took over Steve Bennett Plumbing in 2021, I made a commitment to the customers who had trusted this company for decades before I got here. People in Hurstville, Kogarah, Sans Souci, all through the Sutherland Shire, they weren’t just hiring a plumber. They were relying on a name they already trusted. That’s not something I take lightly.
And the thing is, reliability is actually hard to fake. You can write it in your about page and put it in your tagline, but customers figure out pretty quickly whether it’s real. Our Lifetime Labour Warranty exists because I believe in it, not because it sounds good in an ad. If something we did fails, we come back and fix it at no cost. Full stop.
At the end of the day, what I value most is being the kind of business and the kind of person that people can count on when things go wrong. Because that’s usually when it matters most. And if we get that right consistently, everything else tends to follow.
What are you doing that is difficult? Please explain.
Running a team through growth without losing what made us good in the first place.
That’s the real one. And it sounds simple until you’re actually in it.
When we expanded our emergency response operations in 2025, adding staff and upgrading our dispatch systems, the logistics side was manageable. You hire, you train, you adjust. But the harder part was making sure the new people coming into the team understood what this business actually stands for. Not just the technical standards, but the way we treat people at the door, the way we communicate a problem to a homeowner who’s already stressed, the honesty around pricing before we start a job.
That culture doesn’t live in a manual. It gets passed down through the way experienced people behave on the job every day, and when you’re scaling fast, that transfer gets harder to control.
I’ve had jobs come back to me where the work was fine but the customer felt rushed or didn’t fully understand what was done and why. Technically compliant, but not up to the standard I hold for this business. And those ones bother me more than a callback on a repair, if I’m being real, because they’re harder to fix.
So right now, the difficult thing is building systems and habits that protect the customer experience as the team gets bigger. Getting the plumbing right is the baseline. Making sure every single customer feels like they were treated well, heard and given a straight answer, that’s the part that keeps me up at night. And I don’t think that pressure ever fully goes away, nor should it.
What is your favorite movie and why?
It’s The Shawshank Redemption.
Most people expect me to pick something with more action in it, and I get that. But that film does something I haven’t seen many others pull off. It takes an incredibly bleak situation and makes you feel the weight of every single year passing, without ever letting you lose the thread of hope running underneath it all.
What gets me is Andy Dufresne’s patience. The man spends two decades doing the right things quietly, building something real inside a place designed to break people. No grand speeches. No dramatic turning point. Just consistent, deliberate effort over a long stretch of time.
I find that more compelling than any action sequence, if I’m being real. Slow, steady and impossible to stop.
If you do charity or volunteer work, what is it and why do you do it?
We do a bit here and there, nothing that comes with a press release attached. Honestly, that’s kind of how I prefer it.
The main thing I’ve been involved in over the years is supporting local sporting clubs in the St George area. Junior rugby league mostly. Whether that’s a discounted job for the clubhouse or just showing up when someone needs a hand sorting out a plumbing issue before a big weekend, I’m pretty easy to call. Those clubs run on volunteers and I know how hard it is to keep the lights on when you’re relying on sausage sizzles and raffle tickets.
I’ve also done work at no cost for a couple of elderly residents who genuinely couldn’t afford a repair but were living with a serious problem. A woman in Peakhurst a few years back had no hot water for weeks because she couldn’t cover the bill. We sorted it out and didn’t charge her. You just do it. You don’t need a policy around it.
For me, it comes back to the fact that I work in people’s homes every day. You see pretty quickly who’s doing it tough and who isn’t. And if I’m in a position to help and it costs me a few hours and some parts, that feels like an easy decision. I’m not looking for recognition out of it. The Sutherland Shire and St George community has supported this business for over 40 years and giving a bit of that back just feels like the right thing to do.
Are you willing to be a mentor? If yes, what is the best way to reach you?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s something I feel pretty strongly about actually.
The trades are struggling to attract young people and I think part of that is because there aren’t enough experienced people willing to sit down and share what they’ve learned. Not just the technical side, but the business stuff. How to deal with a difficult customer, how to price a job properly, how to build a reputation that outlasts any single project. That knowledge doesn’t come from a textbook and it doesn’t come from watching YouTube videos either.
I went through my own learning curve when I took over Steve Bennett Plumbing in 2021 and I made mistakes I could have avoided if someone had just been straight with me earlier. So if I can shortcut that process for someone coming up, I’m genuinely happy to do it.
If you’re a young tradie, an apprentice or even someone thinking about starting their own plumbing business and you want to have a conversation, the best way to reach me is through the Steve Bennett Plumbing website at stevebennettplumbing.com.au. You can also find us through our Google listing under Steve Bennett Plumbing in the St George and Sutherland Shire area.
I’m not promising a formal program or a scheduled curriculum. But I am promising a straight conversation with someone who has been around long enough to have made most of the mistakes worth avoiding. Sometimes that’s the most useful thing you can get.
Just for fun, what is your favorite food?
Honestly, a really good meat pie.
Not the servo stuff. I mean a proper bakery pie with thick gravy, good quality meat and pastry that actually holds together when you bite into it. There’s a place in the St George area that does one I’ve been going back to for years and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
I think it’s one of those foods that just makes sense for the kind of work I do. You’re on the tools, you’ve got a half hour break and you want something that fills you up without a lot of fuss. A good pie does exactly that.
Simple, reliable and does what it’s supposed to do. I guess maybe that says something about me.