Latest / Scaling Up with Fexingo: How Small Businesses Become Mid-Market Companies / How a Plumber Scaled to 100 Million by Fixing Billing
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a plumbing company in the Chicago suburbs that most people have never heard of. It's called Apex Service Partners — not to be confused with the private equity roll-up of the same name — and last year they crossed a hundred million dollars in revenue. Luna: A hundred million from plumbing? That's not just fixing toilets. Lucas: No, and here's the thing: they didn't buy a single competitor to get there. No roll-up strategy, no acquisition game. They grew organically, from a single van operation in 2005 to a hundred million in 2025. Luna: Okay, so what was the secret sauce? New customer acquisition? Aggressive marketing? Lucas: No, and that's what makes this interesting. Their marketing spend as a percentage of revenue actually went down over time. The lever wasn't getting more calls. It was fixing what happened after the call came in. Luna: The operational side. Lucas: Exactly. Specifically, billing and dispatch. The owner, a guy named Mark, realized early that his biggest bottleneck wasn't demand — it was cash flow and technician utilization. His technicians were spending maybe 60 percent of their day actually working on jobs. The rest was driving, waiting for parts, or sitting around because dispatch didn't know where they were. Luna: So how did he fix it? Lucas: He invested in a technology stack that linked his scheduling software, his inventory system, and his payment processing into one real-time dashboard. Sounds boring, but the numbers are wild. Days sales outstanding dropped from 45 days to 12. That means instead of waiting a month and a half to get paid, they were getting cash in under two weeks. Luna: Twelve days is pretty tight for a service business. Most plumbers I know are still mailing invoices. Lucas: Right, and that's the gap. Mark pushed for same-day billing — the invoice was generated and sent before the technician left the driveway. And he made it so customers could pay by card or digital wallet right there. No checks, no net-30 terms. That alone cut DSO by about 20 days. Luna: Did customers push back? I mean, some people like to pay later. Lucas: A few did, but Mark had data. He found that customers who paid on site had a 15 percent higher net promoter score than those who got a bill later. The convenience of being done with it actually improved satisfaction. Plus, it eliminated the collections headache entirely. Luna: So that's the billing part. What about dispatch? Lucas: That's where the utilization gains came from. He implemented a dynamic routing system that accounted for traffic, job duration, and parts availability in real time. Technicians got their next job before they finished the current one, and the system automatically adjusted for delays. Utilization went from 62 percent to 89 percent. Luna: That's a massive jump. What does that look like in revenue per technician? Lucas: Mark calculated that each technician was producing about $180,000 in annual revenue before the changes. After, it was over $250,000. And he didn't add any new vans for the first three years. He just got more out of the existing fleet. Luna: So growth came from efficiency, not just volume. Lucas: Exactly. And that allowed him to reinvest in better pay for technicians, which reduced turnover. Turnover in the trades is brutal — often 30 to 40 percent annually. Mark got his below 10 percent. Luna: Okay, but this sounds like a lot of upfront investment in software and change management. How did he afford it as a small operation? Lucas: He started small. He didn't buy an enterprise system. He used off-the-shelf tools — things like Jobber for scheduling, Stripe for payments, and a simple GPS fleet tracking app. The total monthly cost when he began was under $500. The key was that he automated the handoffs between systems. He wrote a few scripts himself to connect them. Luna: So he's a plumber who codes? Lucas: He learned enough to get by. But later, he hired a part-time developer to maintain the integrations. That person cost $30,000 a year and saved at least $200,000 in lost billing and routing inefficiencies. Luna: That's a 6x return. So the lesson seems to be: look at the boring parts of your business — billing, scheduling, payment terms — because that's often where the big leverage is hiding. Lucas: Exactly. And the plumbing industry is a perfect example because margins are actually decent — material markup is around 40 percent, labor is high — but cash flow kills small operators. If you can get paid faster and keep your techs busy, you can grow without needing a ton of capital. Luna: That reminds me of something I read about a landscaping company that did something similar. They switched to gps based billing and cut their invoice time from two weeks to same-day. Their revenue doubled in 18 months without adding a single new client. Lucas: Right, it's a pattern we're seeing across field services. The companies that treat their back office like a technology problem — not just an administrative chore — are the ones that break through the small-business ceiling. Luna: And speaking of which, this exact kind of conversation — where we dig into the operational nuts and bolts that actually move the needle — is exactly why we keep this show ad-free. We want to be able to talk about specific tools and strategies without any sponsor pressure. Lucas: Totally. And if these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, you can support that choice at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a simple way to keep the show independent. Luna: Yeah, and it really does help. Now, back to Mark's story — after he got billing and dispatch locked in, his next move was to standardize the customer experience across all 15 trucks. That's when things really took off. Lucas: Right. He created a uniform service protocol — every technician followed the same steps for diagnosis, quoting, and follow-up. That consistency built trust, and trust led to referrals. Within two years, referral business accounted for over half of new customers. Luna: So the operational improvements also drove organic marketing. That's a nice flywheel. Lucas: Exactly. The cleaner the operation, the more customers bring you more customers. And that's how you go from a single van to a hundred million without ever buying a competitor.