Welcome back to another episode of Freedom Blueprint Podcast. I am your host, Justin Deese, and today we are hanging out with Zach here in the studio. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see me and Zach getting a hang out here, and you brought the whole family to the farm. He even brought us side by side with him, just in case.

family.

I'm having too big fit in that side of the side.

Well, very cool. So Zach, appreciate you coming and hanging out, man. ⁓ tell us a little bit about the business that you own right now.

So we own what's called Easy Peazy Plumbing, is local home service company. ⁓ Fixing to open up another branch in Alabama, where we're at in Andalusia. So we service basically North Okaloosa, North Walton County, a little bit in the Holmes County too. So we do anything, plumbing and septic. So we also do septic installs, repairs, pumping, whatever. Pretty much.

which is a great name.

We do that. have several trucks on the road. know, obviously branding is a major thing. We do all branded vehicles. Yep. If you ain't branded, you're blended. And there's lots of blan- blended.

There is, yeah, there's a, so Zach is, how long did take you to get here? 45 minutes, an hour maybe? About an hour. Okay. So he's not too too far, just a rundown I-10. And you're in a market where there's not as much competition because you're in a little bit of a rural market. And obviously getting into Andalusia is a pretty, I think a wide open market. There's not so many competitors. There's not any big branded businesses. There's a lot of chucking the trucks.

There's not even any chuck in the trucks. We've our research, I think there's one or two plumbing companies. They're mainly construction.

It's mom and pop construction companies. There's a few electrical companies, a few AC companies. There's one septic service company that also says they do hydro jetting and snaking and other full service plumbing. But they just started very recent too.

Man, Andalusia, for anybody who is listening to this, Andalusia is a little bitty town in Alabama, South Alabama, so L.A., baby. But it is growing and there is, ⁓ financially it is a growing.

So the last market census I think they had 47,000 people. Really? It's what it was up to. It's growing rapidly.

Well, this whole area has really taken off of the last 15, 20 years. For a long time, we lived in Navarre. And when I was growing up, I'm getting up there in age, when I was growing up, Navarre had like 5, 6,000 people that lived in it. And now it's in that 40, getting into that 50,000.

I being a kid, like you wanted to go see a desolate beach and my parents tried to show me how it was when they was kids down in Destin. You went in a bar and broke the strip and there was nothing. I went through there, we went through there about a year ago coming back to Pensacola because I was going show my kids. There's houses everywhere. There's a little strip where it's just road and beach, but it's mainly houses.

Yeah, they've done a pretty good job of keeping the commercial, like there's only one hotel on the beach. So it's all, you know, residential, not a lot of commercial out there, which is nice. So anyways, so Andalusia is definitely growing, which is really cool to see that area, because we were talking about cybicides earlier and ⁓ we all go ride pretty close to that in between ⁓ Bruton and Andalusia is a place called Boggs and Boulders that we love to go ride.

You haven't been up there, we haven't been up there together, although there's no chance we haven't been up there at the same time before. next time we go, we'll have to all.

It's about 40 minutes there from us.

Yeah, we're about an hour and 15 from here. So not too too bad. ⁓ tell us a little bit about, so easy peasy plumbing. How did that even start? What gave you that itch to do it?

I was working for another company. was managing ⁓ construction, obviously, because everybody thought, construction, construction is where it's at. Big ticket items, construction. And managed that, construction is a rat chase. Found another company that was a ⁓ whole service company. So they did AC, plumbing, electrical, and built the homes. They were also a construction company. So ⁓ I put in an application there, got an offer. ⁓

It was significantly more than what I was making. I knew I was being underpaid for what I was managing and what I was doing. ⁓ So anyway, I left from company A that I was at and went to company B. And whenever we went there, was making more, stayed there for about a year, year and a half, and that company slowly started to tank off ⁓ due to the owner making some bad investments and ⁓ the owner.

not doing some right things. so anyway, we went from there and I had 17 employees. I was managing, doing two trades there, AC and plumbing. And I had all the clientele that was talking to me directly. Well, when all this work started getting out, the clientele wanted me and the employees wanted me. Matter of fact, they all showed up at my house. One afternoon, they're like, hey, we gotta do something. I looked at my wife and said, well, I guess we're starting a business. So I got licensed.

Anyway, started a business, started doing construction. We was booming, we was doing good, and then we realized that we weren't actually making for what we were doing.

Okay, you

started learning that busy is not profitable.

Busy

is not always profitable. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes you make more in the slow times. Yeah more efficient in the slow times Yeah, so anyway, we was doing that and we started slowly transitioning we phased out the name of that company and we switched to service and we started doing easy peasy plumbing we fully branded I come home one day and ⁓ My wife's a little bit more of the gunk hoe. I'm more of the reserved I got to look at all the numbers everything has to line up makes sense I come home one day and she said hey, I just paid kick-charge creative

We're getting a whole brand. I said, you did what? Yeah, no problem. We just we pay for it. So ⁓ I saw the bill. Had a mild stroke, but ⁓ by far that was the best move she's ever made for us. ⁓ that and she came up with the name herself. We had a list of names and at the last minute the name was almost a side knock. I think it was called. Miracle flow or something was going to be the name of it. I can't remember exactly.

an easy peasy partner had and at the last minute we changed the easy peasy pun.

That's

cool. So what's interesting is we all met at Jared's event here in Pensacola this year. yeah, yeah. Now the wahoo. But the hoorah he had and I was I was standing there talking to you and your wife and it was interesting because you guys are almost reversed in roles as far as who's typically the more aggressive person. Usually it's the guy who's like gung-ho. Let's go. Let's not worry about the details. And that's your wife. She's like, let's just go and figure it out. And you're like, wait a minute.

We gotta make a calculated decision. I think that's really cool that you guys.

And I think a little bit.

Because before I was managing construction and on my own construction, cause when we owned a construction company and was doing construction, my wife wasn't really in it. Yeah. She had a separate career she was chasing. And then we started switching service. She's like, all right, I'm going to get in. Like this is, this is it. We're going to do this together. And at that point I was not only being the visionary and the integrator, I had to pay the payroll, make sure the numbers worked and make sure there's going be enough in there to cover the account. Because this contractor wasn't going to pay for 90 days. I wasn't going to see this check for another

the 30, I had one really, really good contractor that would pay me every week. And to be honest, that's what kept us afloat a lot of weeks. It's cause, you know, for them to be able to buy more materials, keep going, I would have to keep paying these bills no matter if I got paid or not. So all I was doing is bankrolling. Bankroll this, bankroll that. You had no, there was very little profit. ⁓

Yeah.

And then you get into it and then you got all this overhead labor materials. ⁓ You'd have two to four guys on a job. They'd be there for two weeks. I'm thousands upon thousands of dollars in payroll per. Waiting on it, waiting on it, waiting on it, waiting on it. And then your bank account dropped way down and you'd be borderline heart attack. And then it'd come back up and then you'd be like, all right, we're good, we're good.

waiting on it to come back in.

But in the meantime, you just had to pay everything off. The guys still had to get paid. And for them to keep working, I had to keep material bills paid. And it's just a rat chase.

It's awesome that you made that shift from that new construction over to service. Now, most companies that I talk to, when they make that shift, it's very difficult for them to keep any employees from the residential. Was that the same experience you guys had?

Yes,

so we had 17 when I started making a shift when I announced the shift I had two. Yeah. Two that stayed. ⁓ We finished out, I had a few contracts left, it was already mid, we had to finish out, I wouldn't take on anything else. ⁓ Them two stayed and helped me finish. ⁓ They're dang good guys, I would do anything for them to this day. One of them started having some health problems and needed,

found a job that had really good benefits for him to get his healthcare. At that time, we couldn't do benefits because it wasn't in it for a construction company. Construction don't get benefits. And the other guy stayed with me all the way through service, switched with service, started doing service, was running service calls out of his truck, never ran service before. He was learning all this at the same time, basically, how to do service. And he just left about a month or two ago.

and he'd been with us whole time and so far we've been in service for a little over a year, full branded service. And we went from two to basically zero and we have three service trucks on the road and a septic truck on the road, installing septic tanks at this time too.

Okay. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, a lot of people when they think about, you know, plumbing is a trade and this applies to even the HVAC side and the electrical side too. They're like, well, plumbing is plumbing. What difference does it make? Well, it's a complete different thing when you're doing new construction. And I think about this and obviously you being from this area, you see this too. You know, you'll go through neighborhoods where they're doing new construction and these guys are in their work boots, these cutoff shorts, no shirt, cigarette hanging out of their mouth.

and they're probably phenomenal plumbers. But not customer facing plumbers.

Most of the ones that are

No, had something like that and matter of fact one of the best plumbers I ever had and even other companies around will try to get him from it when he was doing construction hair down to his back, rock band type beard all the way down here. Some days he'd show up and cut off blue jeans. You just never know. If he even had a shirt on that day, we was lucky. but a phenomenal plumber. Very hard worker, very humble, very polite.

Rockin'

It's a whole different caliber of people you deal with in service versus construction.

I mean, it is such a different skill set, right? So there's plumbing of the new construction and same with commercial too, right? There's a lot of plumbing guys that do commercial work that are fantastic plumbers. They're great at what they do, but in a commercial setting, you're typically not customer facing. And really the residential service side, that's the trick to it is you've got to be good at a lot of different facets. The most important one being

communicating with the customer and able to present different options to solve their problems.

Because

one thing we value on is sticking to traditionally sticking to residential service plumbing. There's people like, it's just plumbing. You're a plumber. Just go do it all. Right. It's a whole different plumber doing industrial versus commercial versus service, residential service versus construction.

It's not even the same people. It's not even the same trade, And people don't understand that.

It was,

we went through that phase where as we were growing, bringing people in from new construction, because obviously being in this area, there's a lot of new construction, even that's going on now ⁓ in our area. So a lot of times it's easy to get those guys in, but it is very, very difficult to get them to transition. Again, it's just a different skills.

Yeah, it's a different skill set, different mindset. It's a mindset thing that you can teach skills, you can't teach character. It's nearly impossible to teach character.

It is definitely a different mind.

So what does the future hold for EZPZ?

So the future holds very soon within the next few months, two locations. Very exciting. Second location. It holds lots of more growth over the next year. It holds lots more opportunities for the guys we currently have employed with us to be advanced into higher positions. Like many of them want, nobody wants to have a dead-end job. And that's, there's a lot.

Yeah, that's exciting.

There's a lot coming down the drain for Easy Peazy too. ⁓ There's a few things we can't exactly announce just yet that's coming down. ⁓

But I do like that coming down the drain thing. I like that. That was good tie in.

good time for a plumber. There's a few things that's going to be special whenever we announce them. They'll be really cool. There's just a couple tricks in the hat you like to keep.

Well, I don't want to expose any of the secrets, but I know you guys, know some of the guys in your team. You guys have a great team. Your brand is really cool looking. I think the markets that you guys serve is unique. I think there's a lot of people if you go south of those counties, it's bombarded with companies and you guys are in good spot.

That's one reason we kind of stayed where we were. We still have a high presence of other plumbers. There's a lot of other plumbers in the area, but the market is not flooded quote unquote like other areas of our region. Yeah, yeah for sure. There's plenty of options for people to choose from and we believe in there's a customer for us and there's a customer for them. And we pride ourselves on being the highest service company. We pride ourselves on providing the best service.

to our customer at all costs. We want them to have the best experience and the best service with us.

So I want to highlight something that you just said that I think a lot of people have a hard time grasping and it's that everybody's not your customer. And that's 100 % accurate. you said this even earlier than that, you talked about, well, if you're plumbing, why don't you do this? And once you do that and the new construction, and it's because you guys are serving a very specific client and you know what your avatar is for a customer. And that is going to help you guys succeed and grow. And that is awesome.

And I'm very glad that we got to meet. so yeah, thanks for coming and hanging out. Let's go play out on the farm.

Yeah, appreciate it man. Thank you very Appreciate you having us.

Appreciate you guys coming and hanging out.