Career Market Smart start to a lifelong career
AWARD-WINNING plumber Peter Jackson is first to admit that sometimes parents really do know best.
‘‘I wanted to be a builder when I left school but Dad suggested to go and be a plumber.’’
Now, nearly three decades on, Jackson is pleased he listened to his father’s advice. For the past 19 years, in partnership with his wife Sonya, he has run his own business, Peter Jackson Plumbing, offering plumbing, gasfitting, drainage, roofing and solar water heating services to homeowners on the Kapiti Coast.
With support from three office staff, the Master Plumber has a team of eight tradespeople, including three apprentices.
‘‘My apprenticeship has been an absolute blessing for my life. It’s done a lot for me, so I’ve wanted to ‘pay it forward’ and give some young guys a good start too.’’
On a daily basis Jackson and his team do everything from a blocked drain to replacing a ballcock or installing roof flashing, through to installing a pressure-reducing valve or a new instantaneous hot water system.
‘‘I started out working mostly on new housing but after the sharemarket crash work dried up, I acted on some advice to get back to the grassroots of plumbing, working for the homeowner, and we’ve gone from strength to strength.
‘‘These days we might be working on a new bathroom, a new roof, spouting, digging and replacing drains, putting in a new hot water cylinder or a new gas heater.’’
Jackson’s usually the first one in at work each morning, concentrating on quoting jobs for homeowners. In the afternoons he’ll visit clients and check on the sites his boys are working on.
Though the father of three is mostly pricing jobs these days, he is hands-on during the week.
‘‘Our customers appreciate we’re a 24-7 company, the boys are rostered on the weekends and I do callouts on week nights.
‘‘I remember one Christmas Day, standing on a customer’s dining room table having to fix a leak in their ceiling – they were very grateful!
‘‘And the other night for example, I had to go out at 10pm to a flood after a hot water cylinder burst and there was water everywhere. I had to mop up and get the water back on.’’ Then there are the messier jobs. ‘‘One of my workers was plunging a drain, a big lump of ‘you know what’ flew up in the air and went down his shirt,’’ he laughs.
‘‘In another case one of my guys was replacing a pump in a sewer pump station – one of our best practices is that we must get the pump station cleaned out so the new pump can start afresh, but we couldn’t get the guy to pump the last bits of it out so we sent an apprentice in to bucket it out and he slipped over and got covered in it!’’
Those jobs don’t faze him in the slightest, and it’s that can-do attitude and dogged determination that recently earned Jackson and his team their biggest accolade yet – the supreme Master Plumber of the Year Award at the 2016 New Zealand Plumbing Awards.
‘‘That was a very proud moment, a massive privilege and also a responsibility for us to represent Master Plumbers and the industry through this award,’’ he says.
Jackson is equally as proud of his very first apprentice.
‘‘He came to me as a young 18-year-old in the early days up here, he qualified and started his own business, he’s now in his late 20s, and doing really well for himself.’’
He looks back at his own apprenticeship and says becoming qualified himself was another proud moment.
‘‘I didn’t rate myself as an academic, but I passed my exams and having those qualifications, once you’ve got them you’ve always got them – they’re a lifetime achievement and you can take them anywhere.’’
He says his Mum pushed him into sitting all his exams and he’s glad she did.
‘‘I was one of the first groups through an 8000-hour apprenticeship. At the end of that you’d do Trade Cert but you had to do another two years and pass what they called Craftsman exams to be able to work for yourself.
‘‘A lot of guys shied away from it because it was plumbing A and B and gasfitting, but I thought what the heck, I’ll go for the lot and I passed!’’
Jackson did his apprenticeship through Aquaheat.
‘‘I was one of those kids that worked hard – at the local garage; I had a list of my parents’ cars to wash; I mowed lawns, including the boss of Aquaheat’s lawns.
‘‘I asked him if I could work for him during the school holidays for nothing and that resulted in my apprenticeship.’’
At that time he worked on many high rise buildings in the Wellington CBD, mainly creating copper pipe branches, running wastewater or sewerage stacks, drilling holes into concrete, and screwing on brackets to hold the pipes in place.
He moved to another plumbing outfit to gain some residential experience before heading to Australia and then the United States to play rugby.
‘‘Overseas teams would advertise for players so I applied. I had a season of rugby in Surfers and in between I worked on the high rises there. Then I played for a San Francisco club in Oakland and did a fair bit of building and plumbing work.’’
From there he went to England, picked up some plumbing work on the new stock exchange being built in London at the time, and later obtained contracts through recruitment firms.
‘‘One of neat things I got to do was work as a painter’s hand at Abbey Road Studios, I got to see quite a few famous people, David Bowie stood out for me being that musician who’s had a career that spans so many generations.’’
On his return to New Zealand he took on a few plumbing contracts but left the tools to go into the retail industry with his wife.
For almost eight years they ran a gym shop in the Wellington CBD, their first real foray into business.
‘‘It was back in the days when there were more people doing aerobics than any other sport or fitness, so we sold gym gear, aerobic and swimwear and a lot of lycra!’’
Eventually they sold up and moved to the Kapiti Coast and they haven’t looked back since.
‘‘I would to go into people’s houses and see my flyer stuck to the fridge, the flyer would have been months old but people had held onto it, and I’m pleased to say I’ve still got customers from those days.
‘‘I take a real interest in our customers as people, not just as clients, so it’s important to listen to them, get to know them and always be available for them.
‘‘They’re letting you into their homes. There’s a certain graciousness from their side of it – ‘come into my home and I’ll show you what I need fixing’ sort of thing. There’s a lot of trust happening there, so I always try to make them feel at ease.’’