For the past 36 years, we have proudly served the Denver Metro area to meet their underground water and sewer service needs. But we did not always do underground plumbing. Rewind the clocks to the early 1980s and our owner and CEO, Brian, was working 100-hour weeks being on-call 24/7 for Drain Master doing traditional plumbing and sewer scoping. After a fortuitous opportunity arose, he borrowed money from a family member to buy out Drain Master in 1985. Shortly after, he noticed a serious need in the underground plumbing business. Several companies offered traditional plumbing services to work on indoor pipes. However, very few offered to work on the sewer and water lines under the ground. With a background in sewer repair, he quickly purchased a backhoe and learned to operate it on a friend’s property. He then began offering both traditional and underground plumbing with his own new company, Apex Plumbing. Two years later, he obtained his Master Plumber’s License, which he holds in good standing to this day. Along the way, Brian found that trying to accommodate the work from all the customers for both types of plumbing made for long days and weeks. So as to better serve the customers, he chose to meet what he saw as the greater need, wet utilities repair.
Having two employees at the time, he slowly began to build the brand in a few distinct ways. First, Apex grew by offering an (at the time) industry leading 5-year transferable warranty. Others in the business have since begun to offer it, though our warranty comes with 36 years of backing. Second, Brian decided to work with realtors by offering to be paid at closing. No company at the time (and very few even today) were willing to work with the real estate industry like this. We still have realtor clients who have worked with us for decades. Third, we built our company on referral basis alone. Up until recently, Apex has spent virtually $0 on any sort of marketing over the last 30+ years. We have grown to be one of the biggest names in the underground plumbing service industry in Denver, all on the word of happy customers. Fourth and finally, Brian chose to become a turnkey service. Quality control has always been one of our top priorities, but we simply could not control the quality of other companies’ concrete and landscape work early on in our existence. This soon changed so we could control the quality of the work from start to finish. We remove most landscaping, excavate, replace/repair the pipe, bed it, replace and compact the dirt, try to put the sod back to the best of our ability, do the flow fill and concrete, and more all on our own. When you hire us for your underground plumbing needs, you are hiring one company to start and finish your job, not three.
These decisions we made early on, along with others, helped define the standard for this line of work in the Denver Metro area. As time has gone on, we have grown to over 50 employees and have moved into a brand-new state-of-the-art facility. Our 5-acre lot also houses our new concrete plant, another way we are looking to control the quality of concrete we put in the ground. Needless to say, we have come a long way from the three-man company we were in the late ‘80s. Who knows what will come next!
