Any plumbers in the house?

Looking for info on opening my own plumbing company.

To be clear, I will say I am several years out on this, however, I would like to know what I'm up against.

I am in Texas, I have my apprentice registration. I've been doing plumbing for just about 7 years in the military (we aren't required licenses to work on base) but I don't have a master plumber to work under for the state requirements...I'll be looking into find a company to work for until I'm in the spot to get my master license.

Trying to see if there is anyone here that owns their own plumbing business in Texas.

 

@Darkness ?

 

Are you talking about service plumbing or production (construction)?

When I worked at Rescue Rooter they had a program where once a year you could apply for masters certification, if you got it they paid you an extra 2%.

 

I would do either honestly.

2% seems rather low...

 

The max cap was 29% there, the extra 2% helps long run but I never went for it. I was doing about 30k straight revenew a month and getting 27% of that, an extra 2% would have been nice. Especially when you hit those occasional 20k sewer replacement jobs that take 3 days to pull off.

 

I suppose when you put it like that. Did you make commission based on the job?

 

Yeah, at any big service shop I've worked at the basic breakdown was job price minus marked up parts, minus any added labor(in house helper or labor ready), minus a small trip fee. Whatever is left from there is straight revenue and you'd get between 22-27% of it. If you split a job with another tech you'd be splitting the revenue. You could earn an extra percent if you either had 5 years seniority or if you were a trainer. I had the 5 year perk.

The basic bar for me was to make a thousand revenue a day, if I went much more than that Uncle Sam would be brutal. This was back in 2006 right before the recession slammed all the big shops.

I only did production work for 2 weeks, the outfit I was with was horrible so I quit. They paid piece work which was good if you hustled.