Interview
By Kelly Dolan, Editor
llins: ipe dream
O
nce considered ‘The Piccadilly Circus of South London,’ you can be forgiven for entering Elephant and Castle in 2012 and feeling that you’re stuck in a time warp. The town is as dismal as the post-war grey concrete architecture, with council estates flaking away at the very seams in gaudy shades of yellow and green that have turned pasty with age. So how is it that a nine year old boy, who lived in
one of many poverty-stricken council homes in the city during the sixties, went from displaying an interest in being a handyman to gaining the status of Britain’s richest plumber, with the largest independent plumbing company in London and a turnover last year of £17million? I speak to Charlie Mullins, who went from owning a second hand bag of tools and a basement office to running his very own empire, Pimlico Plumbers.
Our interview begins when Charlie calls me in my London office at 6pm. He is away on business in America and the time zone difference means his working day has just begun. As we start to speak, I am welcomed by a strong, husky cockney accent that makes me feel right at home with the multi-millionaire who, in his fifties, was never going to forget his humble beginnings. When I ask him to describe his upbringing, he tells me that growing up on a council estate was a ‘leave in your box situation’ and that the only source of motivation was a local plumber. “He was my inspiration. He had loads of money, a nice motorbike, nice home, and he told me I’d earn loads and always be in work if I became a plumber like him. I didn’t wanna be poor, and I was desperate to improve my life and not just go along with the flow, so I started bunking off school and helping him on his jobs.”
Ditching school for the working world, Charlie tells me he left school at 15 with no qualifications (“I should have left at 14 because I knew I wanted to be a plumber so the other year was a waste of time.”) Immediately, Charlie enrolled on a four year apprenticeship and soon became a self-employed, qualified plumber. Before long, his impeccable service and hard work built customer demand, quickly discovering he had more clients than he could service. By this point, Charlie started to recruit fellow plumbers and worked on a USP based on his own services at the initial stages of his business. “You can be a successful plumber if you conduct yourself in the right way but unfortunately most plumbers still don’t act professionally. Back then, plumbers had this stigma of not wearing the right uniform, turning up late in a rusty old van and ripping off the customer. I wanted to change all of that, so I produced this book called ‘The Pimlico Bible.’ It had rules on work ethics, addressing the customer correctly and how to train others to become plumbers.”
With a business concept in mind that would overturn an existing industry rapidly losing public confidence, Charlie set to work, renting the basement of an estate agents in Pimlico to begin formulating a plumbing service chain. Soon after the company successfully covered all aspects of the domestic services sector, including electrical wiring, heating and roofing to their offering. With a celebrity client base and his highest earning plumbers raking in £100,000 a year, Charlie says “Pimlico Plumbers has been built on hard work and quality service - the customers pay for a prestige service and I pay my plumbers accordingly.” Not only do his employees
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