We were lucky to catch up with Josh Pittam recently and have shared our conversation below.

Josh, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

So Pittam Heating is a family run business – we founded back in April 2014 – after our respective companies made us redundant during the UK recession. Not many places were taking on plumbing or heating engineers and cuts were being made. My Dad had been in the industry for over 25 years at that point, but always for a company. We made the decision to unite and build a partnership, honestly – at that point more so that we could survive the recession and not face financial difficulties. The first few years were difficult, we relied on word of mouth and the fortune of friends and family passing on our information and getting our name out there to grow. My mother does our networking in the BNI group and my wife does all of our admin, invoicing, appointments, keeping tabs on money and generally organising us.

Moving on to now, we are firmly established within the area and the partnership is working well – the business is thriving.
We are now looking toward the impending retirement of my Dad – he’s a couple of years away from retirement and we don’t really know what that would look like for the business yet. He says he wants to stay on and do smaller jobs such as servicing and quotations for clients. Another change that I’m sure we will discuss as a unit and overcome.

Overall, the benefits of a family run business are as follows: team work, reputation with public, trustworthiness and understanding.

Josh, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We are a family run business who work in and around Northampton. We have worked through reductions, medical issues, money worries, losses in apprentices etc. All of the joys that life throws at you.

We offer plumbing and heating services, project management for home refurbs, we look after several apartment blocks and do the yearly servicing and upkeep. Our 3 manual workers have recently qualified in the Air Source Heat Pump – this is the new government Eco Friendly initiative. This means we are working toward our Eco aims of reduction and recycling.

We now have a group of subcontractors who we work closely with and this means we can tackle and have been winning some larger jobs on new builds. We work closely with other independent companies within the area too.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Up to this current moment we do not have a website and our social media is fairly lacklustre. We have just began the process of using a local company to build us a custom website, our hopes with this is that we can grow and answer questions for customers.

As no-one within the business comes for a business background this is all a learning curve. The manual workers – are trained in plumbing and heating and have managed to successfully grow and maintain the business up to now. But the world is changing. My Mum attends a networking group and has made useful connections and has assisted with widening our demographic but she works another job too. My wife – the admin and all rounder – comes from a background of teaching and also works another job alongside this. The aim is to continue to grow to the point where we can employ them full time and allow the company to grow and expand alongside this too.

Essentially we are trying to grow our clientele and thus growing our company and thus growing our income and revenue too.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Resilience comes in all forms – this can be from the business and our family lives too. As a family run business we tackle both the industry and the ups and downs of family run too.

Let’s talk money wise – we have previously faced one recession – this was so hard. We didn’t have enough jobs coming in to cover our monthly payments – it was touch and go. Reducing our prices to the point of no profit but keeping it running meant we went without at home. The luxuries were cut and we scrimped and saved to get through successfully.

We know that currently the world is going mad and costs everywhere are sky rocketing – this has a direct link to site workers being ‘let off’ and them turning to private work – more competition with them often offering lower costs for guarantee of income, the costs of products have increased a lot and it is hard to price jobs to allow for products and profit and that clients still are getting the best option and the best price for them too.

It’s an uncertain journey but we will rough the storms too.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: PittamHeatingCompany
• Facebook: Pittam Heating Company
• Other: The website is currently being built so we will shortly have an update for this – we would happily pass this over once it has been completed.