A short profile of Marco at Aurora Plumbing.
Marco Antoniou has run Aurora Plumbing & Heating for twenty-two years from a small shop on Eastern Avenue in Leslieville. He has three apprentices on the road, a van he's owned for nine years, and a flip phone he uses for everything that isn't a quote. He answers on the second ring most of the time, the first ring sometimes, and almost never goes to voicemail. He is the most important person on our trade bench, and the version of trade-bench-management we run starts and ends with how we work with him.
Marco does the plumbing on eight of the twelve portfolios we manage. He does the heating on five. He's been the lead plumber on three of those portfolios for longer than we have — he was on the bench of the previous PM, and the landlords specifically asked us to keep him. The first thing we do when we onboard a new portfolio is inherit the bench, then strengthen the parts that are weak and replace the parts that aren't there. Inheriting Marco was the easiest version of that.
There is no portal, no app, no marketplace, no dispatch software, and no SaaS subscription between us and Marco. There is a phone number we dial, a quote he sends back by email (sometimes a photo of a handwritten note, when the job is small enough), and a cheque we send when the work is done. The whole arrangement runs on one rule, and the rule is the entire memo: we pay on the day Marco invoices. Not at month-end. Not on net-thirty. Not when the landlord's reimbursement clears. The day the invoice arrives, the cheque goes out.
The reason that rule matters is structural. A plumber is a small business. A small business runs on cash flow, and a plumber's cash flow is hostage to whoever pays slowest. If we are the customer that pays on the day Marco invoices, we are the customer he prioritizes when his Tuesday is full and three other customers are calling about emergencies. The second ring isn't a feature of Marco's personality; it's the rational response of a small business to the customer who keeps the cash flow honest.
We've experimented, in earlier portfolios I ran for myself, with two alternatives.
Marketplaces. I tried two of them. The basic pitch is the same: post your job, get three quotes, pick the cheapest, the marketplace takes a margin and pays the trade on its own schedule. The first job I posted got four quotes inside an hour. I picked the cheapest. The trade showed up two days late, did the work in ninety minutes, and the bill on my side included a marketplace fee of $86 on a job that should have cost $240. The trade was paid less, the landlord paid more, the marketplace took the difference, and nobody answered on the second ring when the same unit had a different problem three months later. The marketplace had moved the trade off the platform by then.
SaaS dispatch with a managed bench. A larger PM I'd inherited a portfolio from ran a SaaS where the trade got dispatched by an algorithm. Quotes came back through the platform; payment went through the platform on net-thirty. The trades on the platform were, on average, fine. The trades on the platform were not Marco. Marco wouldn't have used the platform if we'd asked him to. The platform's selection effect is to replace the trades who run a real small business with the trades who will accept slower payment in exchange for routed work. Both kinds of trades exist. The first kind is the one that answers on the second ring on a Tuesday afternoon.
A few operating details about how the Marco arrangement actually runs.
The invoice format is whatever Marco prefers. Some of his invoices come on Aurora letterhead. Some come as a photo of a handwritten receipt. One came on the back of a Tim Hortons paper bag. We do not require a specific format. The accounting team enters the line item, reconciles against the unit and the job, and processes the cheque. The format-flexibility is the cost of doing business with the part of the bench that runs on relationships rather than on workflow tools. It's a cheap cost; the workflow tool that would standardize the invoice format would also lose us Marco.
We do not negotiate Marco's rates. Marco quotes a number. We pay the number. If the number is too high for the work, we ask him to walk us through it, and 80% of the time we learn something about the job that we hadn't known. The other 20% of the time, Marco lowers the number on his own. Negotiating downward on the bench is the cheapest short-term margin and the most expensive long-term cost on any trade-bench operation. The trades who get squeezed leave. The trades who get paid fairly stay, and over time the quotes get more accurate because the trust gets thicker.
Marco knows two of the landlords by name. This is unusual; it happened because the landlords were on-site the day Marco was doing a major repair, and Marco, in his way, made conversation. The landlords like that Marco knows them by name. The landlords like even more that Marco is doing the plumbing on their buildings. Neither of those facts was on the spreadsheet when we inherited the portfolio, but both of them are why the renewal rates on those buildings are above the average.
The trade bench, in five years, will look mostly like Marco's bench does today: five or six core people who do most of the work on most of the units, and a longer tail of specialists we call once a year. Building it is slow. Maintaining it is fast. The hardest part isn't the recruiting; it's the payment discipline that keeps everyone on it.
The next memo, ahead of the May letter, will be on the N4 template — why ours is a half-page note and not the LTB form, and why we send both.