At 19 years old, Steve Akian did not have a carefully planned career in the trades. He was working part time at a car wash, going to the gym, spending time with friends and trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He knew he liked working with his hands and was willing to work hard, but he needed a direction.
A plumber named Joe Piccolo lived near Steve's grandparents, and Steve had watched him build what looked like a solid life through the trade. Joe had raised a family, done well for himself, and seemed to have found a career that actually worked. When Steve asked what kind of path might suit him, Joe suggested plumbing.
Steve went home and posted an ad on Craigslist describing himself as young, hardworking and willing to learn. The next day, someone called him, and that simple post became his first step into the plumbing industry.
Seventeen years later, the Craigslist apprentice had become the owner of Akian Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electric, a home service company outside Boston that had grown to roughly 50 employees. By the end of 2025, the business was reportedly producing just under $12 million in annual revenue.
The path between those two points was anything but straightforward. Steve worked in residential construction, moved into commercial projects, attended night school, got fired after clashing with a project manager, learned estimating, and eventually used those experiences to shape the kind of company he wanted to build.
The First Plumbing Job Showed Him Why the Trade Mattered
Steve's first plumbing job was not some massive construction project. It was a three-family home that had been without water.
As an apprentice, he helped repair the pipe feeding the property and restore the water. When the system came back on, Steve saw how relieved the homeowner was after going without running water for roughly a day or two.
That reaction stayed with him.
The work had an obvious purpose. Something important was broken, he helped fix it, and the customer immediately understood the value of what had been done. For someone trying to decide what kind of career to pursue, plumbing suddenly offered an appealing combination of technical work, problem solving and good earning potential.
Steve was hooked, and he stayed in the trade. The years that followed would expose him to several very different sides of the industry and eventually give him a much broader understanding of what a professional home service business could look like.
Residential Construction Was Only the Beginning
Steve's first employer was a master plumber who had moved from the United Kingdom and started a business in the Boston area. Steve spent roughly a year and a half working in residential new construction, learning the trade in the field and gaining experience on real projects.
Eventually, the relationship with that employer deteriorated. Steve later described showing up for work only to be told repeatedly that there was nothing for him to do that day. After enough of those mornings, he understood that it was time to move on.
His next opportunity took him into commercial installation and service while he continued attending night classes to work toward becoming a licensed plumber. Steve was advancing quickly and taking on more responsibility, but he has also described himself as intense, particularly earlier in his career.
That intensity eventually caused a problem. After losing his temper with a project manager, Steve was fired.
At the time, it could easily have looked like a setback. Instead, getting fired pushed him into a different part of the industry and ultimately exposed him to the kind of business discipline that would later influence Akian.
Getting Fired Put Him Behind a Desk
After leaving the commercial field job, Steve accepted an entry-level position as a piping estimator for a large mechanical contractor around Boston. He was supposed to be starting near the bottom, but he says that changed quickly.
Within roughly three months, Steve says he sold a plumbing project worth around $3.5 million for a Massachusetts middle and high school. About a week later, he says he sold another roughly $3 million pharmaceutical build-out in Cambridge.
He remained with the company for around five years, and the experience exposed him to a completely different standard of construction and business operations. Akian's own company history says Steve's commercial work included projects involving organizations such as Harvard University, Boston University, Boston College, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, pharmaceutical companies and Google.
Large commercial projects required far more than technical skill. They demanded planning, coordination, documentation, design, scheduling and professional communication across large teams. Steve began noticing how organized the strongest commercial operations were and how seriously they treated the entire process around the work.
That observation planted an idea.
What would happen if the same level of professionalism was brought into residential home services?
His Family Had Already Shown Him What Residential Service Could Get Wrong
Steve also had a personal reason for caring about the homeowner experience.
When he was younger, the heat had gone out at his family's home. He remembers his mother calling multiple contractors, collecting quotes and struggling through a frustrating process before finally getting someone to solve the problem.
Years later, after seeing how major commercial clients were treated, the contrast became difficult to ignore.
Homeowners dealing with no heat, broken plumbing, no hot water or failed equipment were often under real stress. They were letting strangers into their homes and trusting them to solve problems they usually did not understand themselves.
Steve began asking why residential service should feel less professional than the experience provided to a university, hospital or large corporate client.
That question became one of the ideas behind Akian.
Akian Started With Three Roommates
When Steve eventually left the commercial side and started his own company, there was no polished headquarters, large fleet or executive team waiting for him.
The original operation was three people: Steve, his apprentice and Steve's brother, who Steve says dropped out of Northeastern University to join him. The three were also roommates.
Another account of the company's early days describes Steve having the original truck lettered by a friend in a backyard over a weekend. Years later, Steve kept that original lettering in his office as a reminder of how the company started.
At that point there was no 50-person workforce or eight-figure home service brand. It was simply a small crew trying to turn Steve's experience and ideas into a viable company.
Plumbing and heating formed the core of the business because that was Steve's trade. Air conditioning was added soon afterward, and electrical came several years later.
Adding Trades Changed the Business
Expanding from plumbing into HVAC and electrical sounds simple when it is reduced to a company name, but operationally it adds a tremendous amount of complexity.
Each trade brings different technical specialties, licensing requirements, technicians, equipment, training, inventory and service calls. Dispatch becomes more complicated, managers need broader visibility, and the company has to maintain a consistent customer experience across completely different types of work.
The upside is powerful.
A homeowner who already trusts the company with plumbing may later need heating service, air conditioning or electrical work. Instead of the company constantly searching for another stranger to become a customer, an existing relationship can expand across several home-service categories.
That changes the economics of the business. The company is no longer selling only one repair or installation. It is trying to become the household's trusted service provider across multiple systems.
Steve Wanted Professionalism to Be Part of the Product
Steve's original idea was not simply that Akian could install plumbing better than everyone else.
He wanted the entire experience to feel professional.
That meant showing up properly, communicating clearly, explaining options, helping the homeowner understand what would happen next, doing the technical work correctly and following through afterward.
Over time, Steve acknowledged that many excellent residential companies were already doing this well. That realization did not weaken the idea. It raised the standard he believed Akian had to meet.
The product in home services is not just the furnace, electrical panel, drain repair or water heater. The customer experiences the entire process as one service.
How quickly the phone is answered matters. The booking experience matters. Whether the technician arrives when expected matters. The way the technician presents themselves, communicates with the homeowner, respects the property and explains the options all become part of how the customer judges the company.
For most homeowners, those visible details are some of the only things they can confidently evaluate.
They may not know whether one technical solution is superior to another, but they know whether the company feels trustworthy and organized.
Three People Eventually Became Roughly 50
By April 2026, Steve said Akian had around 50 employees, and the BBB business profile also listed roughly 50 employees.
That kind of growth forced a major change in how the company operated.
With three people, communication is almost automatic. Everyone knows what is happening, the owner sees most jobs, problems can be solved through a quick conversation, and training often happens directly beside the truck.
At 50 people, none of that happens naturally.
The company needs managers, training, standards, communication systems, defined roles and accountability. The owner can no longer personally stand beside every technician or installer and make sure the experience matches the standard in his head.
The company has to learn how to reproduce that standard without Steve physically being present.
That is one of the biggest transitions in any growing home service company. The business has to turn what the founder knows into something the organization knows.
Communication Became Part of the Operating System
Steve places a lot of emphasis on communication inside Akian.
He has described managers working closely together instead of operating from isolated departments. Installation management, operations, general management, service and sales all need enough visibility into one another's work to solve problems before they become larger.
Steve also does not believe disagreement is necessarily a bad sign.
One of the phrases he uses is that the best teams argue.
His point is not that employees should constantly fight. It is that strong teams should be comfortable challenging ideas, surfacing problems and disagreeing when necessary, provided the conversation remains respectful and focused on finding a better answer.
A company where nobody disagrees can appear peaceful while problems quietly grow underneath the surface.
Steve wants the opposite: a culture where people are comfortable speaking up and where communication is treated as part of how the business improves.
Negative Reviews Became More Than a Marketing Problem
The same philosophy extends to customer feedback.
When Akian receives a negative review, Steve says the goal is not to immediately assume the customer is wrong. Instead, the company tries to understand what happened, whether the relationship can be repaired and whether the complaint exposed a weakness in the process.
Not every unhappy customer can be satisfied, and Steve acknowledges that. But even an unfair or difficult review can contain useful information.
That changes the role of reputation management.
Most contractors think of reviews primarily as marketing because five-star ratings help future customers trust the company. Steve also looks at them as operational feedback.
If the same complaint keeps appearing, it may not simply be a reputation issue.
It may be evidence that something inside the company needs to change.
The Business Broke Eight Figures
The three-person operation continued growing.
In an April 2026 interview, Steve said Akian had surpassed eight figures in annual revenue in less than eight years. A later 2026 podcast description gave a more specific number, saying the company finished 2025 at just under $12 million in revenue with approximately 50 employees and was targeting $13.5 million for 2026.
Another 2026 interview later described Akian as having grown to around $14 million in revenue, suggesting the business continued expanding. These numbers are company-reported rather than independently audited financial statements, but they give a useful sense of the scale Steve had reached.
The revenue is impressive, but the more interesting question is what had to change between three roommates and 50 employees.
The skills required at those two stages are completely different.
Steve could personally carry a huge amount of the operation when the company was small. As it grew, the challenge became building managers, systems and a culture capable of maintaining the company's standard without requiring him to control every detail.
Core Values Had to Affect Real Decisions
Steve is skeptical of companies that print a few values on a wall and assume they have created a culture.
At Akian, he says values are incorporated into training, service meetings and installation meetings so they actually influence behavior.
Teamwork and communication are part of that system, while Steve describes his own personal operating principle as "always find a way."
The idea is that when something goes wrong, the first response should not automatically be that the problem cannot be solved. The team should look for another route, whether that requires creativity, collaboration, better communication or simply persistence.
A value only matters if it changes what people do when the business becomes difficult.
It is easy to claim teamwork when everything is going smoothly. The real test comes when a technician makes a mistake, a customer complains, a job goes sideways or managers strongly disagree about what should happen next.
Steve Eventually Started Looking Beyond the Service Company
As Akian matured, Steve became increasingly interested in technology.
He and a partner began developing an AI-based product called Fix to Finish. The idea originated from a problem Steve and his management team had discussed during an off-site meeting, and years later his accountant encouraged him to revisit it.
Steve initially began searching for a developer. Instead, he met someone who wanted to become a partner in the project.
By the 2026 interview, they had reportedly been working on the early-stage product for roughly six months. Details remained limited because the software was still being developed, but the project represented another shift in Steve's career.
He had started by learning plumbing in the field. Over time, he moved through estimating, commercial operations, management, residential service, hiring and culture. Now he was looking at problems affecting the wider industry and asking whether software could solve them.
That is a very different perspective from the 19-year-old who simply wanted someone on Craigslist to give him a chance.
AI Also Changed How He Thought About Marketing
Steve's interest in artificial intelligence extended into the way customers find contractors.
He has discussed how search behavior is shifting as consumers increasingly use tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini to ask detailed questions rather than simply typing a few keywords into Google.
That change matters for contractors because online visibility may increasingly depend on whether search and AI systems can understand the information a company has published.
Steve said his team had begun using tools that helped them see where Akian appeared relative to competitors and uncover information buried on their own website.
One of the examples was surprisingly basic.
The system discovered old promotions that were still buried on pages Steve believed had already been cleaned up.
The lesson was larger than a few outdated coupons.
Even an eight-figure company can accumulate forgotten pages, old offers, outdated information and marketing assets that nobody remembers still exist. The larger a company becomes, the more complexity it creates, and that complexity gives inefficiency more places to hide.
Growth Changed the Weight of Leadership
By the time Akian had roughly 50 employees, Steve was no longer making decisions that affected only himself.
A company that size represents dozens of households depending on the business for income. Steve has discussed the pressure of knowing that roughly 50 families depend on payroll and has spoken publicly about anxiety, meditation and the personal weight that comes with leading a growing company.
That side of contractor growth rarely appears in the revenue headlines.
People see trucks, employees, buildings, awards and expansion, but every additional employee creates another responsibility. Payroll needs to clear. The schedule needs enough work. Marketing needs to continue producing. Technicians need support, managers need direction and customers still need to be taken care of.
Growth can make a company more valuable, but it also makes mistakes more expensive.
Finding Enough Good People Became Another Constraint
Steve has also talked about how competitive recruiting has become in the skilled trades.
Large employers can offer compensation packages that independent home-service companies may struggle to match, particularly in trades such as electrical where experienced technicians are already difficult to find.
That changes the bottleneck of the company.
Early in the business, the owner may be the best technician and simply needs enough customers to stay busy. As the company grows, the limiting factor can shift from demand to people.
The company has to learn how to recruit, train and retain good technicians while charging enough to compensate them competitively.
Culture starts sounding much less like soft business language when turnover becomes expensive.
Recruiting costs money. Training replacements costs money. Poor workmanship creates callbacks. Bad customer experiences damage the brand, and managers who are constantly replacing employees lose time that could have been spent improving the operation.
That is why Steve's emphasis on communication, respect and teamwork is not separate from the growth strategy.
It is part of the economics of the business.
The Craigslist Post Was Only the Beginning
It would be easy to summarize Steve Akian's story by saying he answered a Craigslist opportunity, became a plumber, started a company and eventually reached roughly $12 million in revenue.
That version leaves out almost everything useful.
The Craigslist post only opened the first door.
Steve still had to learn residential construction, commercial work and estimating. He attended night school, lost jobs, got fired, worked on large projects and studied how professional commercial operations were run. He eventually left that world to build a residential company with his brother and apprentice, then expanded the business from plumbing into HVAC and electrical.
As Akian grew from three people to roughly 50, Steve's role changed with it.
The company no longer depended primarily on his ability to perform plumbing work. His job became building an organization capable of delivering a consistent experience through dozens of other people.
That transition is one of the hardest parts of growing a trade business.
The founder has to move from being the person who solves the problem to the person who builds the system that allows other people to solve it correctly.
Technical Skill Gets a Contractor Started, but It Does Not Finish the Job
Technical skill still matters.
Without it, there is no foundation.
But technical skill alone does not explain why Akian became an eight-figure company.
An apprentice needs to learn how to perform the work. A strong technician also has to diagnose problems and communicate clearly with customers. An owner eventually has to figure out how dozens of people can deliver that same standard without the founder personally standing beside them.
That question forces the business into hiring, training, pricing, marketing, dispatch, leadership, customer experience, culture and technology.
The trade does not disappear as the company grows.
It becomes the center of a much larger operating system.
His Definition of Success Changed Too
Near the end of one interview, Steve was asked what kind of legacy he wanted the company to leave.
He did not respond with another revenue target.
Instead, he referred to Stephen Covey's idea of beginning with the end in mind and said he wanted Akian to be remembered as a company that did good.
There is evidence that idea extends beyond the service calls themselves.
In Watertown, Steve and Alex Akian began donating Thanksgiving meals through a local community effort. What started with 10 meals grew into a broader initiative that provided 85 meals to local families in 2024.
That brings the story back to where it began.
Steve's first memorable plumbing job was not meaningful because of the size of the invoice. What stayed with him was seeing the relief on a homeowner's face when the water came back on.
Nearly two decades later, the scale is completely different.
The young Craigslist apprentice became the owner of a multi-trade home service company. The original three-person operation became roughly 50 employees, and a business that started with plumbing eventually expanded into heating, cooling and electrical while reaching eight figures in annual revenue.
The underlying idea, however, is still surprisingly similar.
Solve real problems for people, create an experience they can trust, and build the company well enough that it can continue delivering that standard even when the founder is no longer the person doing the work.
That is the real transformation behind Akian Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electric.
Steve did not simply go from apprentice to owner.
He learned how to turn the standards of one tradesperson into an organization capable of reproducing them at scale.
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