HOW TO GROW YOUR PLUMBING BUSINESS. I've got Martin Jones here and Martin had a business, P.H. Jones, they sold to British Gas for quite a lot of money. So they scaled it from a small business to a massive business. So Martin's going to go through some of the things that you can do with your business to scale your business. So, Martin, could you tell us a little bit about where you started from and how you scaled up to a massive business? Yeah, so in terms of where we started from, I joined my dad's business in sort of the late 80s. And at that time, it was my dad.
I think he had three or four engineers. And I think my granddad and my mum were in the office. So it was a really small operation and it was a porta gaben in his garden.(...) So I come back from university and my dad said, look, can you give me a little bit of time while you're looking for a different job to try and sort out our purchasing? I don't think we're buying very well. So off I went and I spent a couple of months talking to Plum Center at the time and other local merchants. And yeah, I got him some better deals just through asking the question, will you give me a better deal? And the answer was often yes.
So after that couple of months, I said, actually, I'm quite enjoying this dad. And he said, well, I'd love to have you join the business. And do you think we can grow from where we are? And what do you think we can do? And I was talking to Alan about this earlier and, you know, I took a bit of a gamble and said, well, I think we can grow. And I think we can go from this size to something bigger. I didn't actually know how we're going to do it at the time.
But I thought, you know what, you know, it must be achievable because other businesses have done it. So I spent a couple of months trying to work out how we could grow our business from three or four engineers to something a little bit bigger.
And the first thing I identified was that actually, if you're going to grow your business, you need some recurring revenue within your business. So you need money coming in that isn't just relying on someone saying, I want a new boiler, I want a new bathroom, I want a new whatever when they need it. So I thought, right, the first thing I would do is set up a service plan operation within the business. So I spent ages kind of looking at different terms and conditions of British gas at the time. And writing a contract, printed and working out how I was going to price it and all the rest of it. And in the end, it took me a couple of months. I got something set up where people would send some information out about how they can have a service only or have a service and boiler parts, warranty, extended warranty type arrangement. And I send that out and people would sign up and send me a check. And we put that check in the bank and that was the start of our service plan operation. And that grew quite quickly over the next six to 12 months. And that was the starting point of growing our business.
So it was really interesting actually. And what I found out quite quickly was once you have a customer who is signed up to that sort of plan and has a contract with you, whatever they need in their business, be it a new boiler, be it a bathroom, they're going to come to you first. They are your customer. Yeah. So it was really important that we took that step.(...) And that was really the first sort of step to going from, you know, four people to then 10 people to 20 people. And in the end, when we sold the business, we had 1200 people within our business and we had sales of 90 million pounds. And that was over 25 years. So it was a long period of time. But that was the very start of that journey. And service plans, is that the main thing that helped you grow our business? So the main thing was taking that principle and say, right, if we do it for our private customers, can we do it for social housing? And it's the same principle, really. So, you know, you take on a social housing contract and you work out what the risk is and you work out how much you're going to charge and from what you're going to charge and what it costs. Hopefully you'll make a profit. And so what that did was that helped solidify in my mind how we need to approach that to make it grow. And then you said that you had many offices then throughout all the country. Yes. So we started with offices in Malpass Cheshire where we started. Then we opened an office in Canuck, I think was the first one. And then it was, I think, Warwickshire. And as we grew, as we won a contract, we put a manager in there, a team of staff and we grew to 28 offices. So we have offices in Scotland, in London and the Southwest.
I think we even had one in Northern Ireland at one point.(...) And so we had a whole team of people who were helping sell both private service plans, social housing, contracts, installations. So, yeah, it was really fun and an interesting journey. So that just

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