We Had a Check. We No Longer Had a Legacy.

This is the real story of building a field service business from one truck to ten crews, what it actually takes to step back from the day-to-day, and what the exit cost us that no check could cover.

In early 2021, while the world was waking up from a COVID hangover and supply chains were a mess, I was taking a lot of secret phone calls. The plumbing company that I owned with my parents had been approached about a private equity buyout, and we were deep in negotiations.

It started eight years earlier, when my dad became so frustrated trying to find an employer who aligned with his values that he decided to go out on his own. For the first year or so it was just him doing the labor. My Mom pulled double-duty with her day-job, invoicing and bookkeeping on nights and weekends. And I used my graphic design and business degrees to help with branding and marketing in my free time.

So many service businesses start this way - someone gets fed up, bets on themselves, and suddenly the people who love them are along for the ride. We happened to be lucky in our lineup: a master plumber, a banking executive, and a business major with a marketing background - we made a great team.

From Code to Clogs

Before any of that, I was working at a tech startup where I quadrupled the revenue in a matter of months, eventually running day-to-day operations while the owner stepped back. I learned more in those three years than I could have in a decade elsewhere.

I’d just been laid off from that startup (a story for another day) when my parents approached me about joining the company full time.

They wanted to grow the plumbing business into something bigger than my dad.

One Truck Becomes Ten

That one-truck operation grew into the largest service plumbing company in our area. Ten crews doing nothing but service plumbing in a mid-size market.

My dad deserves so much credit. He is the kind of man who bends steel with his bare hands - I’ve watched him do it. He is big and strong and not overly patient, because when you have that kind of physical ability, brute force is usually the fastest path forward.

For most of his career, that strength served him well. Until one winter, while he was still working for someone else, he got called out on an emergency during an ice storm. He was hauling an old water heater out of a house when he hit a patch of ice. The compound fracture to his ankle was about as bad as they get. Recovery was long and things were never quite the same after that. That injury seemed to pull out every ache his body had been quietly holding.

He kept working in the field, but it cost him something. To this day he still works with his hands, his back, and his body - helping anyone who needs it. But watching him live in constant pain is hard.

I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I could have shown him earlier that his physical strength was just the surface. His mind is the strongest part of him - my dad finds the root cause of a problem when everyone else is still guessing at symptoms, and always faster than anyone around him thinks is possible.

It’s why we specialized in service plumbing rather than new construction. New construction follows blueprints. There’s a right answer and it’s on the plans. But service plumbing means crawling under houses, opening up walls, and solving problems that were installed wrong years ago in places you can barely reach. That requires real creative thinking - and a mind like a steel trap.

The Really Long Vacation

My Mom and Dad had been self-employed off and on my entire life. They were really good at it, but the business was always dependent on them.

I break business ownership into three stages. Self-Employed: the business can’t run without the owner doing the labor. Owner-Operated: there are systems or employees helping with the labor. The owner can step away for stretches and the business still makes money. Owner-Optional: the owner doesn’t have to be in the day-to-day at all - just the highest-level decisions and strategy.

These stages are often a progression. My dad started self-employed, grew into an owner-operator, and was getting close to owned & managed when we sold. He wasn’t in the field as often because his body needed rest. We all held management roles in the business, but the work didn’t stop when we did.

The uninitiated might think the movement between stages has to do with revenue. It doesn’t. There are businesses doing millions a year whose owners can’t take a day off without their phone ringing every twenty minutes. Money can’t buy peace of mind if your operations are a mess. If your team can’t make decisions or find answers without interrupting you, no amount of revenue changes that.

While our reputation was largely due to my dad’s standards of quality, the scaling of the company was thanks to my mom’s organization and my eye for operations. Together, we built systems into every corner of the business.

We were all really proud when we reached the point where we could each take extended vacations. Have you ever taken a 21-day vacation? Because I highly recommend it.

There’s a lot I’m proud of from my time at the plumbing company, but my biggest flex is the vacations I took while the business kept going. It’s those three-week vacations roaming the western United States. The ten days spent bike-packing from Pittsburgh to D.C. The two weeks in Ireland on honeymoon. The freedom to travel is our real testament to success.

The Check

The months after we sold are some of the darkest in our family history. You’d think it would be a time for celebration. It wasn’t.

First, we were exhausted. Running an essential business during a pandemic, navigating regulations while trying to keep our team safe and employed, watching supply chains destabilize in real time - it had taken everything we had. We were thrilled to have an out.

Then came the team announcement. Reactions ranged from genuine congratulations to being accused of “selling them like cattle.” I still think about that. These were people who had worked alongside us for five or more years. People we knew well. In the end, we made a decision about our own lives that changed theirs in ways we couldn’t control. There’s no clean version of that story.

What happened next was something we hadn’t prepared for. When someone buys your business, they can do whatever they want with it - including shut it down. What we were told would happen after the sale is not what happened. What we built over eight years of our lives was gone in a matter of hours. We had a check. We no longer had a legacy.

And then came the part nobody talks about: figuring out who you are when the thing that defined you is gone. My parents were theoretically retiring. (We should have known better. In what world were these people built for retirement?)

I was mid-career, burned out, and without a plan. The depression was real and took a long time to recover from.

If I could do it again, I’m not sure how much I would change. What I do know is that I wanted to sell because I knew what I didn’t want - but I had almost no idea what I did want. Those aren’t the same thing, and it took a while to learn the difference.

What I eventually figured out is that the part I was most proud of had nothing to do with the exit. It was the years before it. The quality standards that led to hundreds of five-star reviews. The systems that created solid employment for a talented team. The graduates of our apprenticeship program who carry those skills for the rest of their careers. The decisions that got made without us so that we could explore the world. The proof that it was possible to build something that didn’t need you every minute of every day.

I spent a long time trying to understand what made that possible - and why so few owner-operators ever get there. What I found is worth talking about. That’s what this blog is for.