We get our job right so that you can keep going with yours
And money isn't the only thing it costs you. A day off work. Another four hour window. More damage. A Saturday you had plans for. And the drama of having to find someone else.
Here's where the story began.
The house in Langwarrin to four regions
- The 90s
The house build
Helping Dad build the family home. Where Dad's rule came from.
- 2000
Gary
Eighteen months under Gary.
- 2002
Mick
Two and a half years at Cadbury, where nearly right got ripped out.
- 2008
Mary
The toilet in Seaford. Four visits, four nuts. Fixed once, for good.
- 2010
Bath night
Fixed the hot water, missed a hidden flexi hose. It flooded that night. Every job gets a whole-house check.
- 2013
Charlie
Training with Charlie. Learned to run the whole call at the customer's pace, and got held to it afterwards.
- 2014
Fix-It Right
Your Friendly Plumber was a promise about how we'd turn up. Fix-It Right is about what you're left with.
- 2017 to today
Four regions
Melbourne, then Geelong, Canberra and Ballarat. The same job in every town.
Watch
The story in 90 seconds
We're better with a wrench than a camera, but we're giving it a crack.
Film coming soon
A little film about Richie's dad and the shed in Langwarrin where it all started. Coming soon.
Film coming soon1 / 4
The 90s
The house build
My dad Paul is a diesel mechanic. He's not a builder, but he built our family home in Langwarrin from scratch. He could turn his hand to just about anything, and whatever he turned it to he did well.
He did it on a shoestring budget, but he wasn't short of money. He just can't stand waste, and he still can't. Wasted materials, wasted money, wasted afternoons pulling something apart because it wasn't right the first time.
That's where Dad's rule came from. He would say it to me over and over, take your time and do it properly, and you'll save yourself doing it again later. That's how he worked and I was there for all of it, handing him tools, holding the other end and getting the same lesson on repeat.
It takes you twice as long to do it again and you've still only got one verandah.
Do it once, do it right.
2000
Gary
Until I was sixteen, doing it properly was just how we did things at home. For all I knew it was my dad being fussy. Then I started my apprenticeship, four years across new homes, maintenance, commercial and industrial work, watching a lot of different tradesmen do the same job a lot of different ways. Plenty did the quick version. Two didn't.
Gary. had me for the first eighteen months and he was strict. I'd think a job was finished and he'd find the bit I'd hurried, and I'd do it again. He hated going back. We were building new homes, so it meant fronting the site foreman and admitting we'd got it wrong. The company knew it, and when another plumber's work failed under warranty Gary was the one they sent.
In building it's rush rush rush, go go go. Gary didn't dawdle. But he knew that if a job got rushed, he'd be back to do it again. More delays, which was precisely what the builders didn't want. So he stuck to his guns and did it the right way, and the builders kept moving even when they were trying to rush him. Everyone won. His reputation with them, one he cared a lot about. And he got home on time.
The story of Gary's part in it all. Film on the way.
Film coming soon1 / 3
2002
Mick
Mick. had my last two and a half years, and he was renowned for one thing. If your work didn't meet standard he made you take it out. Not patch it. Remove it and do it again. It was the Cadbury factory in Ringwood. Food went through those pipes. Almost right could have cost an international food company the trust of everyone who ever bought their chocolate.
Mick had the reputation of an international food company on his watch. Getting it right meant the place kept running, and everyone got their chocolate.
Between them, Dad's rule stopped being something I believed and became something I'd watched other men insist on.
Mick's chapter, coming to the screen soon.
Film coming soon2008
Mary
In 2007 I went out on my own, working from home in Seaford. One of the first jobs I did was for a neighbour of mine, Mary. Her toilet had been leaking for months. A local plumber had already been out to the same toilet four times. Each time he dropped a nut into the cistern to weigh the valve down, charged a small fee and left. Three months later it would start leaking again. Four visits. Four nuts. Four invoices.
He probably thought he was keeping it cheap. But it's the exact thing Dad warned me about, and by the time I got the call the money was the least of it. My customer was worn out. Sick of booking it in, sick of waiting around, sick of it coming back, and no longer believing a plumber could fix anything properly.
The nut was never going to fix it. It was a 30-year-old valve that couldn't cope, hammered by water pressure that was too high. I replaced the valve, regulated the pressure, and it stopped leaking. Not for three months. For good.
That's when I realised what people were paying for wasn't plumbing. It was not having to call again.
The Seaford story that kicked off the whole 'fix it right' thing, told to camera. Coming soon.
Film coming soon2010
Bath night
Then I did the same thing myself. Late on a Saturday afternoon I got called out to Edithvale. A young family, and their old hot water system had split. I had a new one on the van, so we agreed on the job and I put it in. The kids got their baths and went to bed on time.
The next morning the parents rang. The house had flooded overnight and they'd had to shut the water off at the meter.
A flexi hose in the bathroom had rusted through. It had been failing for years and it let go that night. It had nothing to do with the hot water, or anything else I'd touched.
It was still my fault. I should have found it.
The hot water was done properly. What I rushed was the visit. I didn't walk the house, because we all wanted those kids bathed and in bed. That's about as good a reason to hurry as you'll ever get, and it still cost that family a flooded house. It cost me their trust.
That's when I worked out that the job isn't the job. The job is the whole visit. You can do the plumbing perfectly and still let someone down.
Every job we've done since includes a check of the full system, not just the thing you rang about.
Charlie's part of the story. Film landing soon.
Film coming soon1 / 2
2013
Charlie
In 2013 I did a training course with Charlie. It was about how to run a service call properly, from knocking on the door to walking back out to the van.
I passed it easily enough. But Charlie didn't stop there. He kept following up with me for months afterwards.
I wrote out my option sheets by hand on every job. Charlie would sit down and go through them with me, and he could tell from the paperwork alone whether I'd run the call properly. He wasn't talking about the plumbing. He wanted to know whether the customer had been looked after, and he pulled me up every time.
What mattered to him was that every single customer got the whole call, not just the ones I had time for. After a while I ran every call like he was sitting on my shoulder.
He taught me that you have to understand the customer as well as you understand the problem. We're there to serve the customer first and fix the plumbing second.
The business was called Your Friendly Plumber then, which was a promise about how we'd turn up. The next year I changed it to Fix-It Right, because by then I knew friendliness wasn't the thing that mattered most.
2014
Fix-It Right
The name had to say what people were paying for. Your Friendly Plumber described the visit. Fix-It Right described what was left behind after we drove off.
Seaford and Edithvale had already shown me the difference. A customer can be happy with the plumber who came out and still be left with a job that comes back months later.
Fix-It Right was a harder name to live up to, and I picked it for that reason. Once there was a second van on the road, the name had to hold up when I wasn't there. Another plumber was doing the work, and the customer still had to get the same job I would have done.
So I started teaching the way I worked instead of just doing it. That's where the training started.
1 / 2
Behind the scenes on a training day with Richie and the team. Coming soon.
Film coming soon2017 to today
Four regions
Growing was never the hard part. We started in Melbourne, then went into Geelong, then Canberra, then Ballarat, and the work was there every time.
The problem with four regions is that I can't be at the jobs. Nearly every call we run now is done by a plumber I'm not standing next to, for a customer I'll never meet. How that plumber runs the call has to be how I would have run it, every time.
That's why we built FiveStarPro™, our own online training. What it teaches is the FixItRightServiceCall™, which is the call Charlie taught me written down so it doesn't depend on me. Every plumber goes through it when they start, and the whole team trains on it together every week through the same system.
Every job gets checked, whether I'm in the van or not. If something we've done comes back, we go back and put it right, and the customer doesn't pay a second time.
Why we train
A rushed visit. A job that doesn't hold. Most people have met that plumber: it's how Mary's toilet got fixed four times before it got fixed once.
Behind it, almost every time: the training stopped the day the apprenticeship ended. Nobody checks the work anymore, nobody teaches the next thing, and the job turns into a grind. No plan for the day. The part you need not on the van. Broken tools that never get repaired. Sent to a job nobody's shown you how to do, left to work it out alone in someone's roof. Redoing yesterday's rushed work for free. Enough of that and the joy goes out of the trade, and that's who turns up at your door.
So training is the one thing we specialise in. The joy is in the small things, and the small things come from being prepared. A plan before the van leaves. Parts organised. Tools repaired the week they break. Nobody sent to a job they haven't been shown. I train to each plumber, where they're at. Work checked the first time. Prepared people do work they're proud of, get home on time, and stay, which is what a 10-year guarantee is actually made of: someone still standing behind it in year seven.
I was given that my whole working life: Dad, Gary, Mick, Charlie. Everything on this page is a training story. Passing it on is how we make the trades more enjoyable, and your job is where it shows.
We get our job right so that you can keep going with yours.
The promise
How "Fixed For Good" came about
From the house build with Dad all the way to four regions, one thing has rung true the whole time.
Do it once, do it right. That way it's Fixed For Good.
The proof
Don't take my word for it
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What every job comes with
$0 call-out. We come out and look things over. If you don't go ahead, you don't pay.
Three repair options. The first gets you out of trouble, the last takes care of everything the whole-home check found, and there's one in between. All of them are proper fixes.
Fixed For Good. Done properly the first time, triple tested before we leave, and backed by a 10-year workmanship warranty.
Fix-It Now - Pay Later
12 months, no interest, nothing to pay
Get it fixed today, on any job, and make your first payment in a year. It's there because a burst pipe doesn't wait for payday, and neither should the repair.
See how it works*Eligible jobs. Terms, conditions and credit approval apply.
The same plumber, start to finish
The plumber who comes out and works out what's wrong is the one who fixes it, and they stay with your job from start to finish until it's done properly, top to bottom. We don't send one person to look and another to do the work, and we never pull your plumber off your job to chase the next call. Not many plumbing companies anywhere are that strict about it, and it's why the job gets done right the first time.
