Charlie Mullins is back on Pimlico Plumbers’ home turf
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The office of WeFix London, a new plumbing and home repairs service, sits on Newport Street in Vauxhall, opposite a line of railway arches. Blue-painted vans with personalised number plates such as WEF 7X wait there, ready to be dispatched to homes in affluent districts such as Chelsea and Fulham.
Three generations of the Mullins family — the patriarch Charlie, his son Scott and his grandson Ashley — were at WeFix last week, preparing for its launch. Charlie plans to sell his £10mn penthouse flat in London and take up residence in Spain and Dubai to escape likely tax rises under a Labour government but the Mullins family business has hardly shifted.
WeFix is a stone’s throw from Pimlico Plumbers, the company he founded in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher was elected UK prime minister. Charlie, now 71, sold Pimlico to Neighborly, the US home services platform owned by the private equity group KKR for about £140mn three years ago. The non-compete deal expires next month and the family is going back into business.
It is a quixotic challenge to the power of private equity and the billions being poured into acquiring family-owned plumbing, electrical and home services businesses in the US and UK. But Mullins was always a maverick: Pimlico was a pioneer of charging well-off customers a higher hourly rate for reliability.
Instead of plumbers who turned up late if at all, and exploited their customers’ ignorance of home piping to overcharge, Pimlico offered a consistent service from uniformed engineers who were polite and cleaned up their mess afterwards. It was a simple formula, but someone had to reform a fragmented, opaque cottage industry and Mullins was the innovator.
Private equity has now seen its own opportunity, having rolled up family-owned veterinary and dental practices. Brookfield Asset Management struck a £4bn deal in 2022 to acquire HomeServe, the UK home repairs cover group. As family founders of home services companies approach retirement, investors want to increase the scale of the industry, while maintaining quality.
Although he profited from it, Charlie Mullins does not think that this will work. “A family business is more personal, more caring, we put more into it,” he said to me. WeFix bears all the hallmarks of his formula for Pimlico: a call centre on the premises, vans waiting to be cleaned and valeted, a space for apprentice training. It will squarely target the same group of customers.
If anything, it will be more elite: the new business plans to charge £180 an hour for daytime jobs, compared with Pimlico’s £125 hourly minimum for plumbing. This will enable its top engineers, classed as self-employed with some workers’ rights after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling involving Pimlico, to earn between £150,000 and £200,000 per year, according to Scott.
The family has become a dynasty, with 15 members, including partners, now involved in WeFix. Scott is chief executive and Ashley managing director; Charlie has no stake, but the company is infused with his philosophy. Scott compared its approach to personal service with the luxury department store Harrods: “You know the prices, you know the quality, you know you’ll be looked after.”
But while they have high ambitions for quality, they are modest about WeFix’s potential size. They are keener to replicate and refine the old Pimlico model than to extend it further. Charlie said that Pimlico had about 250 engineers when he sold it — many more than the average home services business — but standards had been slipping.
“We took on some people who were not up to our standards. We fell into the trap of growing too fast because demand was so high,” he said. They intend to proceed more slowly this time, aiming ultimately to reach about the same size as Pimlico. WeFix London will not expand beyond the city: the family feels most comfortable on its home turf.
This leaves plenty of space for private equity-backed platforms such as Neighborly, which says it has invested in technology since the Pimlico acquisition and reduced turnover among engineers. They lack the personal touch of a family outfit such as WeFix but they can offer a reliable enough service at greater scale. There will still be opportunities to roll up family firms.
Charlie Mullins will himself be spending more time abroad: “They’re penalising successful people. It will be harder in London,” he said of the new government. But the family’s business still has a point to prove there.