Podcast: How Amy Longspaugh Built Clearwater Plumbing on Culture, Education, and Authentic Growth
During a recent Texas cold snap, a Clearwater Plumbing technician went on a service call and someone hit record. The resulting TikTok was not polished. The plumber was not in uniform. There were no professional graphics, no scripted talking points, no production budget. It hit roughly one million views.
Amy Longspaugh, who owns Clearwater Plumbing in Northwest Fort Worth, tells the story with characteristic directness: “I think that’s what happens with social media is you put too much pressure on what the production is supposed to be instead of just hopping out there and throwing the TikTok on there.” The imperfect video hit something real. And it catapulted.
That moment is a useful lens for understanding how Amy thinks about almost everything: culture, team structure, marketing, and the kind of growth she is actually chasing after 22 years in the plumbing business. On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, Todd Baldwin sat down with Amy for a conversation that covers how she rebuilt Clearwater’s culture, why she rejected the standard service manager model, what she wants the company to be known for in three years, and why authentic beats polished every time.
22 Years and the Pivot That Kept the Company Alive
Clearwater Plumbing has been in business for 22 years. For most of that time, the company operated as a construction-oriented plumbing contractor. When the 2008-2009 financial crisis hit and new construction dried up, Amy made a decisive pivot to the residential and commercial service and repair side.
The pivot was not just operational. It was personal. Amy found in service work something she had not found in construction: direct relationships with homeowners, the chance to educate clients about their own homes, and what she describes as a servant’s heart orientation that aligns with how she wants to run a business. The culture that would eventually define Clearwater Plumbing was taking its first shape in that transition.
Today Clearwater serves the Northwest Tarrant County area of Fort Worth and surrounding communities within roughly a 45-minute radius. The team has grown to 34 employees. The company specializes in residential and commercial plumbing service and repair, with a particular focus on drain renovation for older homes with cast iron piping, and runs an annual membership program that includes a comprehensive home plumbing inspection every year.
What They Tried: Service Managers, EOS, and an Agency That Shared Leads
As Clearwater grew, Amy tried the structures that most plumbing companies eventually try. A service manager role: a single leader responsible for holding the whole team accountable to KPIs and keeping operations on track. It never worked. The model produced friction rather than cohesion, and the company kept returning to the same operational bottleneck: the absence of genuine leadership that fit the culture.
She also tried EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which Todd’s own agency uses. EOS provided useful frameworks, but the square-round-hole fit problem was real. The service plumbing model operates in the field, on variable schedules, with rhythms that do not map cleanly onto office-based accountability systems. She kept some pieces of it but moved to SOS, the Service Operating System, which was built specifically for the trades.
On the marketing side, Clearwater’s most significant setback came when the agency they had been working with changed its model. The agency began distributing leads across multiple companies, including private equity-backed operators who could afford to compete more aggressively for each opportunity. The result was a degraded LSA campaign and a lead flow problem that took two years to fully repair. The lesson from that experience lives with Amy now: the quality of the leads you generate is inseparable from the integrity of how they are sourced.
What’s Working Now: Peer-Led Teams, SOS, and Authentic Marketing
The leadership structure that replaced the service manager model came from inside the company. Amy opened the nomination process to the entire team, including part-time staff and the high school students who work for Clearwater. Each person nominated up to three colleagues for a team lead role, with the requirement that each nomination be tied to a specific core value and include an explanation of why that value fit that person. The nominations were voted on and the new team leads were chosen by the people they would lead.
The transition was not seamless. “We had this new team that was supposed to be leading and everybody was like, well, what do we do now?” But the process produced something the service manager model never did: leaders who carried genuine respect from the people around them because the team itself had named them.
SOS gave the operational structure to support those team leads. Weekly meetings. Quarterly goals, what SOS calls rocks, to keep the team oriented beyond the day-to-day. An issues and accountability process that requires everyone to leave the ego at the door. And a mantra visible on every office door in the building: outside each one is a sign that reads, don’t just bring the problem, bring the solution.
On the marketing front, the best lead source remains existing clients. The annual membership program creates a recurring touchpoint with homeowners, and Amy is still working on how to build a stronger digital drip strategy to stay in front of those clients consistently. TikTok has become a growing channel: the viral freeze video was evidence that authentic, unscripted content reaches people in ways that polished production often cannot. Google remains the primary platform for new client acquisition, with organic search as the stated goal and LSA ads being rebuilt after the two-year recovery period.
The Lesson: Authenticity, the Gray Zone, and Growing the Right Way
When Todd asked Amy what frustrates her most about working with digital agencies, her answer was precise: authenticity. Stock content. Generic language. The tendency to make plumbing companies sound interchangeable. The second frustration was adjacent: writing that dumps down the language of the trade rather than using the precision that makes a company sound genuinely expert.
These are not small complaints. They describe a pattern that damages real businesses. When an agency’s content could belong to any plumbing company in any city, it does not build the brand of the specific company paying for it. It builds a generic version of that brand, and a generic version does not earn trust.
Amy’s marketing instincts have sharpened considerably in the three years she has been actively learning the space. She knows organic is the lead source worth building. She knows that existing clients are her highest-value audience. She knows that the million-view TikTok happened because the moment was real. What she is still working on is how to systematize those instincts into a marketing infrastructure that does not require her personal intervention to function.
Her advice to anyone starting a plumbing company today carries the same sensibility: “Look inside the gray. Because inside the gray is where you’re going to find what makes you different from the companies next to you that you’re trying to compete with.” The books and the coaches and the accountability charts all live in the black and white. The thing that actually builds a 22-year business lives in the spaces in between.
At Everyday Media Group, Todd Baldwin and the team work with plumbing and home service businesses to build the organic SEO, authentic content, and lead-tracking infrastructure that Amy is describing: marketing that sounds like the actual company, reaches the right buyers, and does not require the owner to manage it themselves.
Key Takeaways
- “Don’t just bring the problem, bring the solution.” Posted outside every office door at Clearwater Plumbing. Accountability is not just following rules. It is the discipline of thinking through a problem far enough to offer a way forward. For team culture, for client relationships, and for how a company approaches its own challenges, this standard separates reactive teams from high-functioning ones.
- “Look inside the gray.” Every plumbing company has the same books available, the same coaches, the same frameworks. What differentiates a 22-year business from the competition is the decisions made in the spaces the playbook does not cover. The gray is where genuine strategy lives.
- Authentic content beats polished content. A million-view TikTok during a Texas freeze, shot without uniform, without shoe covers, without a production budget. The content resonated because it was real. The lesson applies to all of digital marketing: the audience responds to genuine, not perfect. Agencies that replace the real brand with stock content are building nothing.
About Amy Longspaugh
Amy Longspaugh is the owner of Clearwater Plumbing, a family-owned residential and commercial plumbing company serving Northwest Fort Worth and the greater Tarrant County area of North Texas. She has led the company for 22 years, pivoting from construction plumbing to the service side in 2008, rebuilding the culture several years ago, and developing an apprenticeship-focused approach to bringing new talent into the trades. Clearwater Plumbing runs an annual membership inspection program and specializes in drain renovation for homes with aging cast iron piping.
Find Clearwater Plumbing at clearwaterplumber.com or on TikTok for a look at the team and the work.
Is Your Plumbing Company’s Digital Marketing Actually Sounding Like You?
Amy Longspaugh’s biggest frustration with digital agencies is authenticity. Content that could belong to any plumbing company. Language that is dumbed down when precise language would build more trust. Everyday Media Group works with plumbing and home service businesses in North Texas and across the country to build SEO and content programs that sound like the actual company, reach the right buyers, and compound over time. Schedule a conversation with Todd Baldwin and the team.
