Contractors often ask us, “How do I expand my plumbing business?” They want to know how to get more leads, improve SEO, and maximize paid advertising. If you run your own business, you fully understand how difficult it can be to grow and succeed in a given industry.

After getting your business off the ground, finding a way to maintain growth is essential. If your company remains stagnant early on, it likely will not last all that much longer. Granted, your company does not have to become a national powerhouse, but it needs to grow its local presence to find continued success.

Plumbing Business Expansion 101

Expanding and growing your business can mean something different for each business owner. Maybe you are merely looking to expand by eventually adding employees. Perhaps you want to increase profitability and revenue. Or maybe you want to find a balance in your life that isn’t there.

Whatever the goal, it is essential to know what you want to achieve to grow your business to the level you want it to succeed. Don’t worry about becoming a giant; look for steady, reasonable growth that can positively affect your business.

But how to achieve this? Here are a few helpful tips to get your business on the right path toward growth and expansion heading into 2023.

Identify Growth Opportunity Areas

Stating that you “want to grow” is as vague as it gets. There are so many different areas that a company can grow and expand. You must identify what areas you want to grow in. Having clear, concise goals can make it easier to focus on them and put you on the exact path toward achieving them.

Don’t be afraid to be as specific as possible with your growth goals. Maybe you want to grow profit; perhaps you want to increase revenue. Or maybe you want to expand the number of trucks you deploy, the number of employees you have on the payroll, or the number of customers you have.

Narrow Down Your Objectives

Whatever the goal, make sure that you narrow it down to a few specific areas. The key here is to make reasonable goals for yourself and your business. You don’t want to get too carried away with this – trying to expand in too many areas will leave you unfocused and defeat the purpose – so make sure you limit it to just a couple of places at a time.

You can also attack this in a bit of a different way. Consider how each area impacts the other areas of your business. For instance, think about expanding the number of employees on your payroll instead of adding to the number of trucks that you deploy. This way, when you grow the number of employees you have, you are forced to increase the number of trucks you deploy.

This strategy can help you to determine where you want to see growth. If you feel like expanding in one area could trickle into others, you might prioritize those areas more. Ultimately, it is essential to know your goals and where you want to expand the most. And it is just as important to understand why you want to grow.

Setting these goals will help you get some focus involved and make those goals a reality.

Set Specific and Measurable Goals

Break down your goals into a bit more specific categories. Instead of saying, “I want more employees,” think about the result by the end of a year, two years, and five years. Much like creating these goals is to eliminate the vagueness of wanting to expand, envisioning what you want will help you determine the best way to get there.

Let’s take the “I want more employees” goal into account. Consider that not all employees are assets. Do you want to grow the number of employees that are on the payroll? Or do you want to find versatile and valuable employees you can delegate to and ultimately trust?

Knowing what you want from these goals helps refine the vision and gives you a more concrete focus. After all, you are trying to implement consistent growth area by area. Growth requires patience, which not every business owner possesses.

Maintain Patience

Speaking of, focusing on these goals can help you to develop patience as a business owner. Patience is essential to the success of your business. How can you grow your business if you don’t have patience?

It is essential to have the patience to work towards your goals and see them develop. By working steadily towards these goals, you will develop the patience you need as a business owner and will create invaluable skills along the way.

You can even take it one step further by writing out the details of each of your goals. Goal-setting will give you something concrete to focus on, and you can create a checklist to follow as you continue to work towards those goals.

Develop a Strategy to Execute Your Goals

Envisioning the goals that you want to achieve is undoubtedly a critical step in the process. Without this, you can’t begin creating the kind of progress your business craves. But how can you expand upon that vision and make your goals attainable? How can you start the work towards achieving those goals of growth?

The best way to do this is to create steps as you go. Change rarely happens in short order; it occurs over time and often slowly and steadily if you do it correctly. Without steps, you might lose sight of your goals because of the time it takes to develop those goals and achieve them.

Creating these steps gives you a growth path to walk down and see the results as you go. Let’s say that you have a goal of adding a dozen new employees over one year; this is, on average, one employee per month.

Knowing your goals here gives you an idea of what you should be averaging but keeps you on track if you have faster or slower months.

Goal Tracking in Realtime

For instance, if you hire two employees in one month and none in another, you know that it averages out and that you are on the way to achieving your goal. Tracking goals is a great way to keep yourself on track and prevent those highs and lows from throwing you off of your path.

It is also essential to consider the necessary actions to complete those steps. Perhaps you have to implement some plumbing marketing ideas into the mix. Knowing what you need to get to that next step can make it all the more realistic to achieve and help keep a progression towards that goal.

A ton of little actions and efforts go into completing a dream; the more you can implement, the better the chance you achieve that step or goal.

Create Metrics for Goal Tracking

Some goals are less tangible. For example, maybe you plan to increase the amount of revenue you accrue during a given year. That is a metric that you can calculate as you can track your numbers over a given period of days, weeks, or months and compare it to where you were the previous year.

But some goals don’t have those metrics to make it easy to see how your company is developing. You need to build a metric for those goals for yourself.

Determine how you can measure the progress you are making and know when you might be able to cross that goal off your list. Without these metrics, you might find yourself aimlessly and blindly searching for progress, unsure of when you achieve it.

Qualitative Goal Tracking

Find unique ways to track these goals that might not have concrete numbers to them. Maybe you want to improve the quality of your business work. You can achieve outreach by campaigning for customer reviews as you complete each job.

You can then compile the reviews left and determine how you are faring. Review monitoring will give you something tangible to work towards, even if there aren’t concrete numbers to go on.

The key here is to make any of your goals tangible, even if the numbers are not there to back it up. If you can do this, you can give your dreams a focus that will only benefit your company and the growth it hopes to achieve over a given period.

As you can see, the game’s name towards growth for your company is to set clear, concise goals that give you and your company purpose. When you don’t have those things, it can be easy to lose focus and stray away from what you need to do to make your business find continued growth over a given period.

Understanding analytics helps you gauge your plumbing business’s trajectory, particularly regarding online marketing.

Delegate Growth Tasks to Specialists

One major issue that business owners can run into is hero syndrome. Too many business owners want to do everything themselves and don’t ask for the help they need along the way. The simple fact of the matter is that if you’re going to run a successful business that seems proper growth, you have to know when to delegate and where to ask for help. It is the way of business whether you want to accept it or not.

Where and how you get that help can vary. Maybe you take the time to read something like a magazine article or a book on the topic at hand. Perhaps you end up watching a few educational videos on YouTube to help you along the way. Or maybe it means finding someone to lean on, a person or people you can depend on to help you achieve the goals you have set forth for yourself and your business.

Build a Team with Diverse Skillsets

Because most plumbers are hands-on kind of people, it cannot be comfortable to lean on others. But the fact is that you cannot expect to know everything, learn about everything, and handle all business areas yourself. You need dependable, reliable help, whether from other employees, consultants, or whoever is ultimately up to you.

Businesses that don’t look for help in the right ways often fail the quickest. Success does not mean doing so by yourself; it means knowing where and when to seek the necessary help to achieve a goal. And if you are achieving goals, your business is progressing and showing growth. And that’s the whole point of this article.

Put that pride aside and reach out for a little bit of help. You will find yourself and your company making the strides you desire because you weren’t afraid to ask for a helping hand. Businesses thrive when people work together, which shouldn’t be different for your business.

Adjust With Flexibility and Adaptability

One of the most important things about trying to attain a goal is to ensure that you are always trying to improve your chances of achieving that goal. Rarely does a plan gets put into place that doesn’t encounter some difficulties or issues; this will likely be true as you implement the program that you deem necessary to achieve the goals towards growth that you have set forth.

Re-assess the goals you have set forth and the progress you may or may not achieve. When you re-assess the steps you outlined, you can adequately identify where you are finding success and where your efforts need work. Not only that, you keep that focused eye toward your goal by looking at it to see where you are having success and where you need work.

Of course, re-assessing is all fine and good, but it won’t do a whole lot of positive things if you aren’t willing to make changes. If you find that one of your steps is not showing the progress you hoped for, don’t just put it out of your mind and hope it will improve.

Progressive Assessments

Determine where you can make the changes that will make it a successful step. Again, you aren’t likely to create universally successful actions; one or more of them will need tweaking issues. Be willing to look at that.

Ultimately, the biggest and most important thing you must remember along the way is to keep going. Growth and development rarely occur overnight; it is a marathon, not a sprint. It can be easy to lose focus and sight of those goals because you want to see substantial development in short order.

But being able to stay focused, keep your eyes on the prize, and continue working is what you will need to do to develop the amount of success and growth you hope to achieve.

Final Thoughts on Scaling Your Plumbing Business

Keeping these things in mind can be challenging, but it will also help with your overall patience toward your goal and retain what you want in your mind’s eye. Goals and progress require work; this is a universal truth.

Keep your head up and your eyes forward, and focus on what you can do to improve your chances of success. Ultimately, if you put in the work and remain patient, you will see the results.

Being a plumber or a plumbing contractor calls for the best plumbing tools on the market. Although our team talks a lot about plumbing advertising and other marketing tools, your physical tools are just as crucial to your success.

Customers have a wide variety of problems that they depend on you to address.

As a plumber or contractor, you must have all the necessary equipment at your disposal to ensure that you can get the job – any job – done with the utmost quality and efficiency.

An array of tools combine multiple operations to ensure that you get versatility and reliability without spending a ton or having a lot of storage space for separate tools.

No more having to carry a ton of tools with only one specific use again. No more having to sift and sort through those tools to find the right one for the job.

These are ten of the newest and must-have tools on the market today for plumbers and plumbing contractors, tools that no professional should be without.

1) Bosch 1/4” Hex Impact Driver

While several are currently on the market, the brushless impact driver is a must-have for anyone in the plumbing industry, with a torque of 975 in.-lbs. You can’t beat the level of power that comes out of such a small package and a weight of just under two pounds.

The customers have spoken: this is a must-have. Don’t ever leave home without an impact driver like this one. You will have most of the battle won with this hex impact driver and won’t need much else in your tool bag.

The hex impact driver delivers in all aspects with the ultimate versatility, reliability, and power. Make any job more accessible and more convenient than ever before.

2) Hilti Cordless Rotary Hammer

The hammer has been a staple of any handyman’s tool belt for the longest time. But as the times have changed, the hammer had to follow. The traditional hammer you held and swung at your target got the job done for a long time, but they have evolved.

The Hilti cordless rotary hammer can deliver even more power in tighter spaces than ever before. It is perfect for drilling into masonry, concrete, wood, and steel for removing and driving screws. It also has a specially designed mechanism for hammering that can reach up to 5200 impacts per minute.

Your old hammer can’t even begin to compete with the cordless rotary hammer. It provides far more power, range, and features than ever possible from a hammer. Make sure that you have one in your tool bag before you head out again, and you will never have to worry about having enough power for the job again.

3) Milwaukee LED Compact Site Light

The compact site light offers two lights for both tasking and area lighting. It has an output of 2,200 lumens while in area mode, which is made for illuminating larger work areas, and 1,000 lumens of floodlighting which are meant for task situations.

There is no instance that this compact site light cannot handle.

Best of all, it offers up to 18 hours of total runtime, so you can be confident that you are getting all the light you need for the most time possible. It is also constructed of high-impact polycarbonate so that it will stand up to the maximum amount of abuse without breaking down.

With unmatched reliability and capability, it is little wonder that this is such a popular option among contractors and plumbers. You will always have the compact site light to guide your way.

4) Bosch Self-Leveling Cross-Line Laser with Plumb Points

If you still have a traditional level in your tool bag, throw that thing in the garbage right now. It is outdated in general, but especially when you can have a Bosch Self-Leveling Cross-Line Laser at your disposal. There are no other leveling options out there with the capabilities that this tool has.

This self-leveling cross-line laser delivers the ultimate versatility by providing evident laser lines and points. Additionally, these lines and points can be turned on both singularly or together to provide a vertical level, horizontal level, and plumb transfer applications.

Make measuring and leveling far more manageable than ever before when you implement the highly popular Bosch self-leveling cross-line laser with plumb points. You can cut a few outdated tools out of your tool belt and add this do-it-all tool.

5) Milwaukee Cheater Adaptable Pipe Wrench

There was once a time when it was necessary to carry a whole kit of wrenches for every situation. Sure, you were prepared, but you had to dig through your tools to find the proper wrench for the job and then go through the hassle of finding the correct wrench.

The Cheater is an adjustable, adaptable pipe wrench that offers two interchangeable handles that are threaded; they offer 10” length when used with no handles for the tighter spaces, an 18” length with a smaller handle for your general-purpose usage, and a 24” length that has a longer handle for maximum reach and leverage.

There is quite literally nothing that you cannot do with the Cheater.

This is an absolute must-have for plumbers or contractors anywhere. It is incredibly versatile and can help you cut down on the number of tools that you need in your tool bag. What can be better than that?

6) DeWalt Press Tool

If you are in the plumbing industry, it goes without saying that fitting new pipes can be some of the most challenging work that you have to do. And like some of the other tools on this list that replace outdated tools, the DeWalt press tool will do the same.

This tool is capable of pressing pipe fittings from ½” to a whopping 4” in both stainless steel and copper piping. It can complete the full range of presses and a wide range of crimping heads and attachments for various applications and materials.

If you are a pipe fitter, this is a must-have for your toolbox. Don’t ever leave home without the press tool at your disposal again.

7) Rothenberger ROCAM Inspection Camera

You sometimes need to perform an inspection before you ever start work. This ensures that you are of the utmost certainty where the issue lies and to ensure that there are not any spreading issues to be aware of.

This can be highly difficult without the right tools at your disposal. With the Rothenberger ROCAM inspection camera, you can be certain that you will find the problem every single time with the least amount of difficulty involved.

Suitable for pipework from 40-300 mm in diameter and a 30 m x 7 mm pushrod that can be extended an additional 8 m, you can get to just about any area possible. Twenty-five waterproof LEDs ensure you can get all the lighting that you need along the way.

There is no better tool on the market today when it comes to pipe fitting. What used to be a difficult task has now been made easier than ever because of this reliable and versatile camera. Never let a problem escape unseen ever again when you can have this excellent camera in your employ.

8) Milwaukee Drain Snake Kit

This is a necessity for any plumbers out there. Clogged drains are one of the most common issues that customers call in professionals for. With this drain snake kit, you can make short work of any clogged drain at a moment’s notice.

Simply put, this is the ultimate service plumbing solution. With a weight of only 10 pounds, it is the lightest of any professional drain cleaner on the market today.

It has a hybrid, unique design that can provide both the benefits of a floor-based drain cleaner and a handheld into one machine.

Traditional, manual snakes are fine and well, but the Milwaukee drain snake kit provides versatility and quality that has yet to be matched. Add one of these to your tool bag, and you will have a vast variety of problems taken care of thanks to one tool.

9) RIGID Straplock Pipe Handle

One of the most significant issues in maintaining and installing those larger diameter metal and plastic pipes is not the weight itself. Instead, the grip turns out to be the biggest issue for users. When you can’t get the proper amount of grip and leverage, you can’t get the adequate amount of force applied in all directions.

Never struggle with larger-diameter pipes again when you can implement the pipe handle into your tool bag. It is a favorite among plumbers for a good reason and will likely remain that way for a long time to come.

10) Milwaukee Sawzall Reciprocating Saw

As much as the entire plumbing process has changed for the better, there will still come a time when you need to get down to the nitty-gritty and do some old-fashioned grunt work. Thankfully, thanks to tools like the Milwaukee Sawzall, you don’t have to grunt quite as much as you once did.

There is also a ONE-KEY component that lets users track and customize the tool’s performance for unmatched productivity. You can even track and manage the tool through the associated app as well. Many manufacturers wish they had that kind of versatility and convenience.

The customers have spoken and made this Sawzall a favorite among plumbers and plumbing contractors out there. Make sure that you add this one to your repertoire immediately.

Thankfully, times have changed, and technology has evolved to allow you to find the best job you possibly can with the most remarkable ease and convenience.

You don’t have to worry about lugging around a considerable amount of plumbing tools in some big, clustered van again; you can carry a handful of tools in your truck or car and have easy access to whatever job you might need.

Hopefully, this list of top-tier products inspires you to find powerful tools for your company’s arsenal. Our Plumbing Webmasters team would love to be your go-to solution for all things related SEO-related.

The Importance of New Plumbing Tools

Plumbing companies are competing in various ways, from marketing to customer service and equipment. Investing in the latest plumbing tools can be a major advantage for your plumbing business if you know where to look.

However, not all tools are going to be worth your money. As an expert in the industry, you already know how and when to use discretion when investing in plumbing tools.

Tag Archives: plumbing tools

How To Expand Your Plumbing Business in 2023 (w/New Tips)