Two trucks, and a camera on both of them

Why the camera is on every truck and not in the workshop

A camera that lives at the yard gets brought out when somebody decides the job is worth it, and “worth it” ends up meaning worth it to the company. A camera that rides on the truck can go in on the second visit to the same address without anybody having to be sold on the idea, which is exactly when it is useful and exactly when it costs the company the recurring work.

That is the whole difference between this company and the one a lot of our customers called last time. It is not skill and it is not equipment anybody else lacks. It is whether somebody looked.

What we publish

Every run sheet carries distances, depths, the pipe material and the point where it changes, where water stood, how much of the run was submerged and therefore not really seen, and every line of work we were asked for and declined, at $0.00, with the reason beside it. You keep a copy of the recording.

What we do not publish

No star rating. No review count. No number of jobs completed, no years-of-combined-experience figure, no awards. Those are the easiest things in this industry to invent and the hardest for a customer to check, and a company arguing that measurements should be written down has no business decorating its own front page with numbers nobody can verify.

What we will do instead is hand you a document with distances on it that the next contractor can disagree with.

The part of the trade we are arguing with

Drain work has an unusually easy way to make money badly. The customer is in distress, the fix is dramatic and immediate, and nobody ever finds out what was actually wrong — so a line that backs up twice a year can be sold twice a year, for decades, entirely honestly-looking. Nobody has to lie. All that has to happen is that nobody looks.

We are not claiming to be better people. We are claiming that a written run sheet makes that particular way of earning impossible to do quietly, which is the only reliable kind of honesty there is.