A Conversation With ... J.W. DeLong

What’s your mix of commercial and residential work and where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth?
We are mainly a new construction company. We don’t do new home construction, but we do service, and that’s a big part of our business. We see a lot of service right now going on in the residential world. It’s slowed down a little bit with the school starting and the upcoming election. But for the past four years we have just been nonstop busy. As we looked back into our historical records, that was the trend. We’ve also seen a little bit of a lull in the amount of commercial work that has been out to bid, but we have a lot of work on the books, a lot of things that people were just putting off.

Workforce has been a challenge for all the trades. A McKinsey & Co. study says over the next 10 years, annual hiring in the U.S. for skilled roles could be more than 20 times the annual increase in net new jobs. So, lots of turnover and retirements. What are you seeing?
My dad started this company in 1991. It was him and one other guy that was his apprentice. They grew and there was about 15 employees in 2003. In 2009, as the economy was dipping down, we doubled in size to over 30 employees. In the last 10 years, we’ve doubled in size. We’re usually right around 57 to 65 employees. In the last three years, we have retired more people than we have ever retired since we started. We’ve got a lot of younger people right now. But what we are lacking more than anything in our industry is that middle-aged group. We’ve had some of the older generations stick around a lot longer than they needed to help train that younger generation. We are in a constant need for new people, but our biggest search now is someone that’s got skills already and is willing to help train. With pretty much every trade, they’ve had that period of time where people were like: You need to go to college. Don’t go into the trades. I’m not saying college is a bad thing. OTC, they have a great program for their HVAC. They’ve got a brand-new plumbing program. We’re a union shop, so we have a lot of guys that can be trained through that union. I’ve met people with doctorates that answer the phones at some places because they couldn’t find a job. If you’re a plumber, you can do plumbing anywhere in the world. It’s really one of those things that opens up a lot of possibilities for travel, as well as for financial. Our guys are well-trained, make a very good wage and they continue to get raises every year. We do a lot of in-house training and continuing education, especially with our service plumbers, since there are so many different types of water heaters, tankless water heaters, furnaces, air conditioners.

What trends are you seeing in your industry in terms of plumbing systems or materials?
When my dad first started in this industry, we used galvanized steel piping. They used lead and oakum and cast iron piping, clay tile piping. Now we’ve transitioned into PVC. We had soldering with metal copper pipes for a while. Even those are starting to, on the residential side, go by the wayside. We see a lot more of the PEX piping coming in. With some of those things, they’ve really kind of taken the craftsmanship out of our craft. They sell it at Lowe’s. They’ve made it a lot easier for people to do. But that being said, it’s also something that makes it not as difficult of a backbreaking job. We have a pro-press system for our copper piping, so if you’re in a spot where you can’t have fire heating up to solder, we can now compress that fitting in with a mechanical joint that crimps around an O-ring system. Those truly save time. The fittings are more expensive, but you don’t have the risk of a fire burning. A lot of those things that have changed to make that material safer. We rarely hand dig ditches anymore. Even inside buildings, we have mini excavators. We have all the way up to multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment that these people will go and dig in the dirt with. They’re air-conditioned cabs. When we have to go rod a sewer for the service, yes, it is a dirty, nasty job, but we get paid well. It’s one of those things that I see, in the future, rates will go up because we will have to pay our guys accordingly for that service.

You’re in a competitive industry. I was reading about Google Ads campaigns and how the cost per click is going up substantially, almost $40 per click for a phrase like emergency plumbing service. What is your strategy around marketing?
Our marketing has always been a lot of organic word of mouth, and unfortunately with this day and age, with so many outlets for people to get information, we started in 2008 advertising on the radio. We continue to do that. Our big yellow trucks, which is our big thing, we went with yellow with black writing because my mom worked for Southwestern Bell at the time and they had done millions of dollars in research in the ’80s to figure out that black on white was the easiest thing to read and the second thing was black on yellow. We have grown our Google pretty organically, as well as our Facebook. We recently met with an advertising company to help us figure out more of our Google Ads words. As we’ve opened our second location in Lebanon, Missouri, we have tried to figure out how to get our Google Ads to really saturate that market. Google has been very great for a lot of businesses, but just like anything, as it’s started to become more and more popular, the price goes up. We do see that pay per click cost a little bit more. We also believe at our company, community events are one of the biggest, best ways to show your advertising and show your support. We are a small family business. We know that supporting our community is going to help us. All of our money tries to stay right here in this community.

When did you open your second location in Lebanon, and do you have any other plans on expanding your market reach?
We opened our Lebanon office in August. We do hope to grow that area. It’s already starting to take off. We have always serviced the Branson area. We used to have an office down there, but we’ve since gotten rid of the office. The person that we had that lived down there retired, so it wasn’t really a viable option to continue to have an office there and have somebody run service 24/7. Right now, we don’t plan on growing to any other cities. We service about a 100-mile radius of Springfield.