Keeping up with the work flow
DOING the maths has been a big part of Jeremy Mansfield’s successful plumbing business.
Straight Flush Plumbing has a staff of twelve, including seven on the tools.
When you’re paying 12 sets of wages of week, he says, the maths is pretty simple.
When he had four staff he had to find a week’s worth of work every day.
‘‘I needed a day’s worth of work for myself and another four days for the guys, Mansfield says. ‘‘When I thought about it that way I used to feel blown away. And now we’re doing almost two weeks’ worth of work in a day!’’
Things have come a long way from when he started out 20 years ago. At school in Auckland, he says, he was the hands-on type.
‘‘I went through the guidance counsellor, and they suggested plumbing. A local firm in the area was very proactive in hiring apprentices, so I tried it out and really took to it. My older brother was an electrician so my father was very happy about having both a plumber and an electrician in the family.’’
Mansfield stayed with Heron Plumbing for seven years, from starting on work experience, doing a pre-trade course and two years after finishing his apprenticeship. He left the firm only because his wife Ngaire had had a job transfer to Wellington.
‘‘We came down and I found a job with a company in Newtown that did a bit of commercial work for them and domestic work,’’ he says.
‘‘I’d had background in both from Auckland so I could turn my hand at both sides of the business.’’
Mansfield enjoyed his time with the family-run firm but there didn’t seem to be a chance for progressing his career.
‘‘There was no sort of next step for me,’’ he says. ‘‘And I wanted to move on. So we took on running our own business.’’
Going out on your own is a big step, but Mansfield had thought it through.
‘‘It’s always scary – one day you have a full wage in your back pocket and the next day you have the cost of a vehicle and tools and you’re literally sitting on your bum just waiting for a job to come in the door,’’ he says.
‘‘So we had made sure we had a little bit behind us – nothing huge – and knuckled down finding that work.’’
Finding the right name was also important.
‘‘It had to be a strong brand that stood on its own and was transferable and saleable,’’ Mansfield says.
‘‘We were living in Royal St and thought about Royal Flush Plumbing, but our lawyer said we’d have to ask the Queen’s permission to use the word Royal. So instead we became Straight Flush Plumbing: ‘‘the best hand in plumbing’’.
Finding business was a twopronged approach, says Mansfield.
‘‘From the start I made sure that we had good signwriting on the vehicle and a good uniform. And I aligned myself with a local merchant, and that allowed me access to their showroom and referral base.’’
Hanging out in the showroom helped.
‘‘The owner of the business was normally doing the weekend shift so I’d go down and keep him company – if he got two or three people in the showroom, I’d have a chat to one and in the course of the chat I’d ask if they needed a plumber – not a hard sell but just to say I was willing to come and have a look.’’
He ran the business from home in Berhampore, out of a spare bedroom and a ‘‘tiny wee garage next door’’ for a few years.
When he and Ngaire shifted to a new house, the business went too.
‘‘We moved to a house down the road which had a larger garage and had a place we could wall off from the rest of the house,’’ Mansfield says. ‘‘And we evolved – the business had one room and then two rooms of the house, and we formed a little area for the boys to have smoko.’’
Since setting up his business in 2007 Mansfield has always had staff.
‘‘I started off with a labourer and then I got an apprentice soon after that,’’ he says.
‘‘And that was the best thing I’ve done for the business – taking on someone that you can train in the same work ethic and values that you have yourself.
‘‘When you hire somebody that you haven’t trained, you’re hiring all their pluses but also all their minuses as well. Everything can be done two or three different ways, but it’s the way you want it to be done that’s important and it can be a bit hard for someone to change that, especially if they have been doing it for a few years.’’
Straight Flush has grown from one staffer to 12 in just 8 years. Mansfield thinks that makes the company one of the fastest growing startups in the plumbing industry and the marketplace, and his peers agree – Straight Flush was a finalist in the Emerging category in this year’s Gold Awards.
‘‘We’re moving out of the company of other small operators and are beginning to compete with companies much bigger than our own – companies that operate on a national scale,’’ he says.
The company works with property developers and property managers doing a wide range of commercial plumbing, gasfitting and drainlaying. On the domestic front, Mansfield handles a lot of housing renovations.
‘‘I really like that sort of work, the older houses, working on them, often doing a complete replumb. As a matter of course because we’ve done all the work for those people, then their friends and family want a plumber.’’
In the early days there wasn’t much money for advertising.
‘‘If we did any it would have just be a mail drop,’’ Mansfield says. Even now, he says, advertising doesn’t bring in the lion’s share of the work.
‘‘In our industry referrals are gold. There’s nothing else like it.
‘‘You can put ads on just about anything you want but it always come down to getting referred. Nowadays quite often we’re getting referred from maybe two or three sources – people ring up and say ‘My neighbour said to give you a call, and then somebody at work did too’.’’
‘‘And when referrals come at you from multiple angles, it really gives you that extra feeling that you must be doing something right out there, on the market.’’
In ten years’ time, Mansfield thinks he’ll have moved on from this company. He and Ngaire have a child with autism and that’s been the driver in how Straight Flush has been run.
‘‘He’s going to need us, or to rely on somebody, for the better part of his life,’’ Mansfield says.
‘‘Once we found out that, we realised we had to structure our business a bit differently to be able to spend some time with him, and the other children, and make sure we can provide a good sort of base. So the way we’re structuring this business is our test case.’’
‘‘Right from day one, we put a whole lot of emphasis on electronics and things like that to make the work flow better, and be more productive,’’ he says
There are iPads in each vehicle running a software package that handles job sheets, time sheets, quotes – in fact all aspects of the business.
‘‘It means we can operate the business from anywhere, and once we get this model at the right stage, we’ll look at applying that model to existing businesses that we can get our hands on, or replicating it in other spots.’’
‘‘A lot of people think that you can just start a business and have a good lifestyle moseying along on your own, and doing what you want, when you want. But that’s buying a job, not so much having a business.
‘‘What I want is a business; something that’s tangible, something that we’ve built, and that we can see.’’