Family Company Valley Plumbing And Septic Serves A Rugged Arizona Border Region

Working the rugged border regions of Arizona, Valley Plumbing and Septic Service stresses hometown service, family company values and environmental stewardship
Family Company Valley Plumbing And Septic Serves A Rugged Arizona Border Region
Ruben de la Rosa III hoists an Infiltrator chamber during an installation project. The rugged Arizona countryside is in the background.

Interested in Pumps?

Get Pumps articles, news and videos right in your inbox! Sign up now.

Pumps + Get Alerts

The sun is bright in southern Arizona, and it shines on a bright future for Valley Plumbing and Septic Service. This is border country. Mexico is only a few minutes down the road, and Valley Plumbing has capitalized on a wide variety of opportunities by building a diversified business.

Owner Ruben “Sonny” de la Rosa III doesn’t stop there. For his family and for the future, he is looking at how to expand to serve new areas, broaden his service menu and maybe even leverage his wastewater expertise to start a completely new business.

ON THE BORDER

Valley Plumbing is based in Rio Rico, Arizona, an unincorporated community of about 19,000 people about 15 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. About 20 percent of Rio Rico is served by municipal sewer, and that’s only the lower elevations, de la Rosa says. Climb the mountains that sprawl across the countryside and everyone utilizes septic systems.

De la Rosa’s father, Ruben de la Rosa II, started the company in 1997. He had owned a mechanics shop and towing business, sold out, grew bored in early retirement and took up pumping. At first the company was Valley Septic and Handyman Service because Ruben II did other work, such as changing out water heaters and laying tile.

De la Rosa worked for his father after high school, left Rio Rico for a while to train in computers and then returned. After working in various jobs in the company, he took operating control in 2013 when his dad stepped down. The company became Valley Plumbing and Septic Service to reflect the direction de la Rosa wanted. Since taking over, he has followed his father’s advice and kept the company small while learning what it’s like to be in charge.

About half of Valley Plumbing’s business comes from septic pumping and portable restroom rentals. The other half comes from onsite installations and repairs, plus some design work and plumbing. These halves complement each other. Pumping and portable restrooms provide a steady income, while all the other services provide revenue boosts throughout the year.

Installation work comes in spurts, de la Rosa says. Arizona developers built heavily during the last housing boom, and there is a glut of homes on the market, making it much more affordable to buy rather than build.

“Right now I’m gaining more repairs instead of orders for installations at new homes. And all these repairs come from somebody calling and saying, ‘Hey come pump my tank,’” de la Rosa says.

THE LOCAL GUY

De la Rosa grew up in this community, so he positions the company as the local guys who can be counted on and aren’t too busy or “too corporate” to help others.

“When people call me, it’s not necessarily to have me do work. They may call for a chat and refer a job to me in the process,” de la Rosa says. “We’re a mom-and-pop operation, and my customers know me by name. They even know where I live. They can call me. They know the owner of the company is on top of things.”

While personal service is good, de la Rosa is looking for efficient ways to address frequently asked questions. A website currently under development will help in that regard. Valley Plumbing might look late to the Internet trend, but it really isn’t because local guys need to be known locally, and de la Rosa has a strategy for that.

When he offers a special service deal, de la Rosa will run a large ad in the local newspaper, but you won’t find him listed there all the time. He is in the phone book. When the next sports season comes along you’ll see Valley Plumbing’s name on team T-shirts, on a team banner or promoted on seat cushions. He gives money to school sports booster clubs. He does not do targeted mailings. “I can give money to marketing companies, or I can give money back to the community, and what I chose to do is give to the community.”

He is accredited with the Better Business Bureau and carries an A-plus rating there. It has helped him. People have called with jobs because they checked out the company on the BBB website.

The company started with social media less than a year ago, beginning with a Facebook presence. The company Facebook page isn’t updated as often as he would like. “Social media tends to take up more time than I want to invest in it. I could sit down and look at my phone or my computer for hours. When I was spending more time in the office, before I took over the whole operation, I had to consciously limit my exposure to computers because of the time they can consume.”

PURPOSE-BUILT RIGS

When it comes to his fleet, de la Rosa finds smaller equipment better suited to the varied terrain of his service territory. “Over here it’s not quite flat. Everywhere I go I’m going up a mountain, down a mountain and over bridges,” he says.

He prefers vacuum tanks on the smaller side for septic service. He is willing to make a second trip to pump a tank, but it usually is not necessary for his residential customers. And he doesn’t service commercial accounts that might require pumping bigger tanks.

For portable sanitation service, the crew uses an Isuzu truck with a platform behind the cab carrying a 300-gallon steel tank for waste and a 135-gallon plastic tank for freshwater. A 5 hp Honda engine drives the vacuum pump.

The septic pumping truck is also on the smaller side. It’s a 1996 Ford chassis with a 1,800-gallon steel tank. A 420cc Predator engine is connected with a belt to a PN58D Jurop/Chandler pump. 

Also in the inventory is an International with a 1,600-gallon steel tank.

The International was purchased already built with a PTO-driven pump, while de la Rosa and his crew built out the other trucks. He chooses steel tanks and prefers to drive the pumps with truck-mounted gasoline engines. This arrangement makes the equipment easier to maintain, he says. And because the trucks’ larger diesel engines are not running constantly, he saves money on fuel and reduces carbon emissions.

“And that’s kind of like what we are. We’re environmentalists. We’re trying to make this place safe for our children and their children to come. The water we drink is how many billions of years old? It’s our job to make sure it stays clean,” he says.

For the installation side of the business, he has a variety of excavators from Kubota, including a 008 and a U15 mini-excavator, and a Bobcat backhoe.

To serve portable sanitation customers, Valley Plumbing has 80 units from Satellite Industries, of which 50 to 60 are typically out on the job.

THE HARD-WORKING CREW

The attitude de la Rosa has toward his customers is one he extends to the people who work for him. “We’re all like family. That’s pretty much how we built the company,” he says.

De la Rosa’s wife, Jenny, oversees the office. The couple has two children, Ruben IV, 8, and Lily, 6. One of the full-time employees, Alonzo Medina, has been with the company for nine years and is a mentor for the younger workers. The other full-time employee, Andrew Bixler, had previously worked in an area mine. When that shut down he brought his knowledge of heavy equipment and ability to do minor mechanical repairs to Valley Plumbing. De la Rosa’s dad rounds out the crew.

De la Rosa’s role is to not act like a boss.

“I’m open to suggestions. I don’t believe in being a dictator. If they see something or have a good idea, I will listen to them and I will change my plans without hesitation. It’s more of an ‘us’ instead of a ‘me’ when it comes to our operations. My guys are important, and this way they feel like it because they’ve got a say,’’ he says.

FINDING NEW DIRECTIONS

One new component de la Rosa is considering for the business is adding a dewatering plant. The municipal sewer from the Ambos-Nogales runs north to Rio Rico and this is where wastewater is treated. This system also collects some wastewater from Nogales, Mexico, and the hours of peak flow from Mexico restrict dumping times for pumpers to one two-hour block in the morning and a two-and-a-half-hour block in the afternoon. Dewatering would get around this obstacle and trim his costs.

He intends to expand the business to the north. There’s a lot of open territory between Rio Rico and Tuscon about 50 miles farther north, and the region is dominated by decentralized wastewater systems. Every week he receives a few calls from people who are just outside his customary territory. What dissuades him is the amount of diesel he would have to burn to serve those customers. But his father’s home is in that area, and he could park a truck there and commute to it by car.

His other idea would employ his water knowledge for food production. He has become interested in aquaponics, a closed system in which fish are raised in a tank and the water from it is treated by a planting of greens or other edible plants. It creates a small, independent ecosystem involving waste and biology – exactly what pumpers are trained in and deal with all the time. “And that’s how I think I was so easily hooked, because I had the knowledge already and didn’t realize it.”

It also takes his environmental stewardship in a new direction. “Our food is dirty, and we’re feeding our families that. Aquaponics means raising your proteins and plants – your vegetables and fruits – by using wastewater in a different way, yet in the same way nature uses it.”

BUILDING A LEGACY

Everything that Valley Plumbing is, and everything de la Rosa wants it to be, can be distilled into a single word: legacy. That means creating a better and smarter world, and keeping in mind who this world is being passed down to.

“Family is important,” de la Rosa says. “I’ve learned a lot from my father and grandfather, and hope I can teach it to my son and my daughter. If this career path is one he or she wants to take, the company is theirs. Whatever they do, there are things I hope for them. I hope they have a broader life and see a few things I haven’t. And I hope to leave them the kind of legacy left to me – one built on hard work, honesty and family.” 



Discussion

Comments on this site are submitted by users and are not endorsed by nor do they reflect the views or opinions of COLE Publishing, Inc. Comments are moderated before being posted.