Podcast: How Jeremy and Joy Griffin Grew Griffin Plumbing Into a 23-Year Central Coast Success Story
Jeremy Griffin describes himself as the quiet guy in the back of the class who does not like to raise his hand. Doing a podcast, he says, pushes him out of his comfort zone. Getting out of his comfort zone is the entire story of Griffin Plumbing.
The company has been running on California’s Central Coast for 23 years. Jeremy and Joy Griffin bought it from his uncle with an SBA loan, pivoted it entirely from new construction to residential service, built it around a culture where people genuinely want to show up in the morning, grew their review profile ahead of every competitor in the market before LSA even launched, and are now targeting a 3x growth plan with two sons working in the company and Joy ready to go all-in.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, Todd Baldwin sat down with Jeremy and Joy for a conversation about the business education that changed everything, the NuFlow Central Coast pipe lining company they launched three years ago as a second venture, and the marketing philosophy that has kept Griffin Plumbing ahead of the curve in a market shifting faster than most operators can track.
Two Companies, One Family, and Eighty Years of Plumbing
Griffin Plumbing traces its roots back to the 1940s through Jeremy’s family. Jeremy came into the business through his uncle, sweeping the shop in grade school, running with technicians in junior high and high school, and planning, at one point, to become an x-ray technician before his uncle made a simple offer: I’ll teach you this trade if you want to learn it. Jeremy said yes.
When his uncle was ready to retire, he gave Jeremy three options. Jeremy chose to buy the business, secured the SBA loan, and started running. The company had 20 years of customer relationships and goodwill behind it; Jeremy had the contractor relationships from the new construction side. Neither of them had much in the way of business education, but they had enough momentum to get started.
Joy, who describes her background as an Ag Science major, handled everything that Jeremy was not in the truck doing: answering phones, figuring out QuickBooks, managing two kids, and trying to understand what a P&L actually meant. The phrase she and Jeremy both use to describe that period is the same one most early-stage business owners reach for: they had no idea what they were doing. Which is precisely why the next phase of the story matters.
NuFlow Central Coast, their second company, has been operating for three years. But Griffin Plumbing has been a certified NuFlow installer for about 12 years: Jeremy first heard about the cure-in-place pipelining technology through a CertainPath network connection, went to visit their operation, and immediately knew it was something he wanted to get into. NuFlow Central Coast was created to expand the service territory beyond Griffin Plumbing’s footprint and stand as its own brand in the market.
The Course That Was the Real Education
About eight years into running the business, Jeremy was chasing contractor money on new construction and had had enough. The relationships were unreliable. The quality standard he had grown up around in the trades was being replaced by fast and cheap. He and Joy were running the company without any real understanding of the business side.
They found Success Group International, now called CertainPath. Jeremy is direct about what it produced: “That was really my college education on how to run a residential service company.” It showed them what KPIs to watch, how to read a P&L, what good margins looked like, and that they were not alone in the questions they were struggling to answer.
They jumped in with both feet, followed the CertainPath business model, and within six months had completely eliminated all new construction work. The community of other operators across the country, sharing what was working and what was not, became a resource they still rely on today. Twenty-three years into the business, Jeremy still talks to peers from that network from all over the country.
What’s Working Now: Culture Index, LSA, and AI Search
Griffin Plumbing runs 18 people total, with 10 in the field. The company acknowledges being slightly office-heavy at the moment, and does not apologize for it: that staffing weight is deliberate positioning to facilitate growth. When the hiring ramp happens, the infrastructure to support it is already in place.
Culture is assessed and built using Culture Index, a behavioral profiling tool the team fills out every six months. The tool tells Jeremy and Joy where each team member is in their personality and work style, where the team as a whole has gaps, and whether people are in the right seats. For hiring, it helps them define what the ideal profile looks like for each specific role, from service technicians who need detail orientation, speed, and customer communication skills, to CSRs who need to slow down, listen deeply, and create value through empathy.
On the marketing side, Local Service Ads is the primary channel and has been the most consistent lead source. Griffin Plumbing was ahead of the review curve before LSA even launched, and that head start translated directly into early dominance in the platform. The company now focuses on what comes next: as PPC costs climb and lead quality in that channel fluctuates, the energy is shifting toward AI search visibility and answer engine optimization.
The specific challenge Joy names is local pricing versus national AI averages. When a homeowner on the Central Coast asks a chatbot what a water heater should cost, the AI pulls national figures that do not account for California’s emission requirements, ultra-low NOx water heaters, or the higher cost of living in the area. The content strategy is to build the local context into the site so that AI platforms can surface the real answer for that specific market.
One practical tension the Griffins are navigating is the conflict between call tracking numbers and NAP consistency for AI search. Call tracking uses different phone numbers on different channels to attribute leads. AI search platforms, however, reward consistent name-address-phone information across all sources. The team is moving toward their main number as the primary, consistent contact point to satisfy the NAP requirement, even as they maintain attribution tracking.
The Lesson: Delegate to Elevate, Control What You Can, and Be Ready for the 3x
Jeremy’s earliest management mistakes came from his own emotionality. He wears his emotions on his sleeve, gets heated quickly, and has had to develop the discipline of removing himself from tense situations, walking around the block, cooling down, and returning with a different mindset. He is direct about the cost: he has probably lost good employees because he hadn’t learned that skill earlier. Learning it has been among the most valuable things he has done for the business.
Delegation is the growth lever both Jeremy and Joy are actively working on. Jeremy’s nature is to juggle eight things and rarely finish one. Joy’s is to pick a task, see it through to completion, and then move to the next. That dynamic, recognized clearly in the Rocket Fuel visionary/integrator model, has been the operational engine of the company. Jeremy generates the ideas and pushes toward new territory. Joy builds the systems, manages the finances, runs the marketing, and holds the organization together.
The one-liner Jeremy shares for the culture he is trying to build: “An excuse is the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.” Not a phrase to post on a wall and forget. A daily standard for how problems are handled, how accountability is held, and how the company responds when something goes wrong.
The 3x growth target is not a wish. It is a plan. With their youngest now in high school, with Jake at 25 taking on business development and Caleb at 18 learning the NuFlow trade, and with Joy having more bandwidth to focus on the company’s growth, the conditions are aligned. The question is execution.
At Everyday Media Group, Todd Baldwin and the team work with residential plumbing and home service companies at exactly this inflection point: established reputation, the right culture foundation in place, and ready to scale. The organic SEO, AI search content, and lead tracking infrastructure that Griffin Plumbing is building toward is exactly the marketing foundation EMG builds.
Key Takeaways
- Get the business education before you need it. Jeremy and Joy ran for eight years without fully understanding the business they were running. CertainPath gave them the framework, the KPIs, and the community they needed. For anyone starting in the trades, Jeremy’s advice is the same: find an organization, learn the business side before you launch, and spend the time doing it right from the beginning.
- “An excuse is the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.” This is the accountability standard that runs through how the Griffin team approaches every problem. It is not a decoration. It is the daily expectation that when something goes wrong, the answer is a plan, not a reason. A company of 18 people operating on that standard is a company where things actually get fixed.
- Build the review profile before you need it. Griffin Plumbing had more five-star reviews than any competitor in their market before LSA launched. When the platform went live, they already owned the credibility advantage. That head start is why they dominated LSA early. The time to build the review foundation is before the platform that requires it exists, not after.
About Jeremy and Joy Griffin
Jeremy and Joy Griffin are the owners of Griffin Plumbing, a residential service plumbing company on California’s Central Coast, and NuFlow Central Coast, a small diameter cure-in-place pipe lining company serving a broader regional market. Griffin Plumbing has been in operation for 23 years and employs 18 people, with 10 in the field. NuFlow Central Coast is three years old and operates as a licensed contractor for NuFlow’s pipelining products. Jeremy is a second-generation plumbing operator; Joy serves as the company’s CFO and marketing lead. Their sons Jake and Caleb both work in the business.
Find Griffin Plumbing at griffin-plumbing.com and NuFlow Central Coast at newflowcentralcoast.com.
Is Your Plumbing Company Ready to Scale?
Griffin Plumbing has the review profile, the culture foundation, and the AI content strategy in place to support its 3x growth plan. Everyday Media Group works with residential plumbing and home service companies that are at the same inflection point: ready to grow, with the reputation to back it up, and needing the digital infrastructure to match. Schedule a conversation with Todd Baldwin and the team.
