{"id":6143,"date":"2019-10-02T02:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-01T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nuflow.net\/partner-profile-nuflow-north-brisbane\/"},"modified":"2019-10-02T02:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T16:00:00","slug":"partner-profile-nuflow-north-brisbane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuflow.net\/partner-profile-nuflow-north-brisbane\/","title":{"rendered":"Partner Profile – Nuflow North Brisbane"},"content":{"rendered":"
Fixing blocked and broken drains was what John Farrugia liked to do, but he didn’t like destroying people’s homes to do it. When he discovered relining, he knew he’d found the answer, but finding an all-Australian relining company to team with proved challenging until he got a call from Nuflow and from there, Nuflow North Brisbane evolved.<\/p>\n
Business name: Nuflow North Brisbane and Clearflow Specialised Services<\/strong><\/p>\n Owner: John Farrugia<\/strong><\/p>\n Location: Brisbane’s northern suburbs<\/strong><\/p>\n Joined Nuflow: 2005<\/strong><\/p>\n Size of business: owner\/operator plus eight full-time staff<\/strong><\/p>\n Like many of the very passionate Nuflow franchisees, John Farrugia knew he wanted to be a plumber before he hit his teens.<\/p>\n Growing up on farms firstly in Mallala near Gawler, South Australia and then at Burpengary in Brisbane’s north, he says he was always mucking around with irrigation and often did work experience in school holidays with relatives who were plumbers.<\/p>\n “I just really enjoyed pretty much everything about it,”\u009d he said.<\/p>\n “I’d always known I wanted to do a trade, and doing the work experience in my spare time convinced me plumbing was it.”\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He started Clearflow Specialised Services about twenty years ago, focussing on drain camera inspections, pipe repairs and drain cleaning in Brisbane. Concerned at the destruction traditional dig and replace methods of repair caused, however, he began looking into alternatives and in late 2005 signed a license to use Nulfow’s relining systems. With Nuflow moving to a franchise model in 2018, Farrugia was keen to continue the partnership and now operates Nuflow North Brisbane alongside Clearflow.<\/p>\n “I’ve just built these businesses from scratch with my wife, Ainsley, and we now have eight full time staff working for us,”\u009d he said.<\/p>\n “We do have a fair bit of competition in Brisbane, and as more and more people find out about relining more operators try to get into the market but it’s not as easy as it might look.<\/p>\n “There are probably more relining companies in Sydney, but then again they’ve got greater population density and a lot more aging infrastructure, so I guess the level of competition for available jobs is about the same.”\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n With his football-playing son and two daughters now nearing the end of their school years, Farrugia is finding more time to indulge in his love of travel, good food and a quiet beer, but says he’s not looking at slowing down on pipe relining any time soon.<\/p>\n Clearflow was built around diagnosing and resolving issues with blocked or broken drain pipes. Many could be cleared out to get a few more years of use, but for those that were broken or leaking and in need of repair, excavation was often the only way. With the same sorts of problems appearing time and again under people’s driveways, gardens, paving and floors, Farrugia decided to look for alternatives.<\/p>\n “I was regularly unblocking drains, doing a lot of CCTV camera inspections and high pressure drain cleaning and we were sort of seeing the same faults in drains all the time,”\u009d he said.<\/p>\n “A lot of the drains in Brisbane we were working on were the old terracotta pipes so the rubber rings had perished and the tree roots had entered and cracked the pipes.<\/p>\n “There were also lots of breaks in PVC lines with any number of things going wrong with them, and I really hated seeing the heartache and disruption caused when we’d have to dig up people’s kitchen floors, or tear apart commercial kitchens people relied on, or put amenities blocks out of service.<\/p>\n “We were doing a fair bit of excavation and digging up and I got to the point where I felt like there just had to be an easier and better way.<\/p>\n “I started researching alternatives and I saw there was a pretty big market overseas in something called relining.<\/p>\n “It looked to me to be just what I wanted to do, but the only problem was no-one was really doing it in Australia.<\/p>\n “And frankly, I just couldn’t understand why.<\/p>\n “Eventually I found a couple of small operations, including one lot in Victoria that I visited and was considering signing with, but then out of the blue a guy from Nuflow rang me and things went from there.”\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Farrugia’s early internet research threw up plenty of American and European sites offering relining but relying so heavily on an off-shore manufacturer didn’t fit with what he was trying to achieve. He told the Nuflow representative who contacted him he was familiar with the product and that he’d read about its popularity overseas but that he wanted to deal with a company based in Australia.<\/p>\n “Just before I was about to join the Victorian company I got the call from Nuflow and I really liked everything he told me about what they were trying to achieve,”\u009d he said.<\/p>\n “They were located just down at the Gold Coast, so the day after I spoke to them I was there having a look at what they were doing and I was sold on it.<\/p>\n “I signed as a licensee a few weeks later and have been growing with them ever since.<\/p>\n “The other company’s not even around anymore, to be honest, so it was a really lucky coincidence because Nuflow’s just getting bigger and bigger and the product and the network are getting stronger, so to me it’s ticking a lot of boxes.”\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nTell us a bit about your background<\/h2>\n
What was it that prompted you to move into relining?<\/h2>\n
Why did you choose to team with Nuflow?<\/h2>\n