MARIETTA DAILY JOURNAL
SUNDAY, JULY 25, 2010
Sundial Continued from Page 29 on strategy and learn how to be significant. When I look at last year’s application and compare it to this year’s, there are so many strides we’ve made. It really makes you figure out what you want to do and ways you can just do it, and when you’re looking at moving in a certain direction, it makes you think, ‘what direction do we want to go in?’ It also helped us to evaluate our business from different vantage points, such as community service, employees, industry importance, etc. so just applying was a really great exercise.” Smith said her employees have dedicated more than 1,000 hours in community service to Cobb County and tens of thousands of dollars in donations and services to organizations in need, all in 2009 alone. In addition, she made a promise to her employees when the recession hit that no one would be laid off despite financial difficulties the company would likely face, and Smith has kept that promise by maintaining everyone on her staff. “We just had to start thinking outside of the box and come up with new ideas, because that was really important to me. We have wonderful employees, and we wanted to let them know that we’ll do what it takes to keep them,” Smith said.
Smith opened Sundial off Old Highway 41 near Kennesaw Mountain in 1999 with her father, Jack Smith, who had opened Sundance Plumbing in Marietta in 1971. Smith’s family history in plumbing dates back even further than her father, as Smith said her great grandfather was a cotton farmer in Haralson County during the 1920’s when he decided to move to Atlanta to learn plumbing. Two of her great uncles followed suit, and they started Smith Plumbing. Smith’s involvement in the family trade came in 1991, when she found herself a divorced mother of a newborn and toddler and was a quarter away from getting her masters degree in middle childhood education from Kennesaw State University. “I found myself just broke, so I came to work for dad and realized I just loved it. So I just joined the company and after five years I had received my license, along with my masters class one and masters class two, which are both more in-depth classifications that require you to know how to specialize in plumbing, not just know how to do it,” Smith said. The highlight of her job with Sundance came in 1996, when the company was chosen by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games as the official plumber for the homes of visiting dignitaries and athletes. “They chose four heating and
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FACTBOOK 2010 cooling companies and us, thinking that 80 percent of the need would be HVAC and 20 percent would be plumbing. But it actually ended up being 20/80, mainly because many people weren’t sure how to use garbage disposals or handle clogs. We had 1200 homes we had to keep watch over and had strict guidelines to respond quickly and accurately, so it was challenging, but one of the best experiences I’ve ever had,” Smith said. But Smith didn’t start at the top automatically. For years, she was a plumber, going into people’s homes to fix whatever plumbing issues they needed resolved. “There’s no way of telling, but
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there are probably four or five female plumbers in the state. So the reactions varied when I came from literally laughing at me when I walked through the door, to some people questioning if I was seriously going to fix their sinks, to people asking me a lot of questions. But everyone reacted in some sort of way,” Smith said, with a smile. “Sometimes, when I’d fix something, the men would say, ‘Well, you know, that didn’t look very hard to fix.’ But still, they had to call a plumber to fix it. I’d just smile and not take the comments personally, because in the end, I’d fix it and move on.” In 1997, her father decided to retire and sold Sundance to
American Resource Services. At the time, the company had 145 employees and Smith said her children were young and she was a single mother, so she really hoped to just be given a good job. “I was a little concerned about running the whole thing and really didn’t want to be in charge, but low and behold they put me in charge of operations,” Smith said. After two years of realizing she really could run her own company, Smith worked out a deal with ARS and started Sundial in 1999. Today, the company has 43 employees and generates more than $4 million in revenue each year.