Fix the Drain, Feed a Dog

I want to tell you about a client of ours, but I have to start with the part where I cried in a parking lot.

We will get there. First the setup.

Five pounds. Every job. No exceptions.

Most companies handle giving back with whatever is left at the end of the year. Good year, write a check. Slow year, we will get them next time. It is nobody's fault. It is just what happens when generosity has to survive a budget meeting.

Paws Plumbing built theirs so that conversation never happens.

The program is called Paws for a Cause. Every completed service call, five pounds of dog food goes to San Diego rescues. Their line for it is fix the drain, feed a dog, which I am a little jealous of because I could not have written it better.

Here is why the structure is so smart. A percentage of profit can quietly round down to nothing in a bad quarter. An annual fundraiser lives or dies on somebody remembering to plan it. This one is tied to the one thing a plumbing company does every day, which is finish a job.

Busy week? More dog food. They have been running calls in San Diego County since 2006, so the giving scales with the work on its own. Nobody has to decide again. It already decided.

Then I went along for a drop-off

A truck bed packed with dog food does not really register as a number until you are standing behind it, actually unloading the thing.

We took it to the San Diego Humane Society. I was not prepared for that place. It is enormous. It is beautiful. It is so far past whatever picture comes to mind when somebody says the word shelter that I kept saying wait, this is the shelter?

And then you walk past the animals who are waiting there.

That is where it stopped being a donation total for me. I cried. Out loud, in public, in front of people. I wanted to take every single one of them home.

Somewhere in San Diego, a water heater went out last week. A truck showed up. Because of how one company chose to build itself, a dog ate. That is the whole chain and I think about it constantly now.

What I tell clients about this

We work with a lot of owners on how their business shows up in the world, and every so often somebody asks how to do a giving program without it feeling like a stunt. Three things, every time.

Tie it to something you already do daily. Paws tied it to completed jobs. You could tie it to new clients signed, units shipped, appointments booked, whatever your version of a finished job is. The point is that it runs whether or not anyone is thinking about it.

Be specific. It is the same discipline behind the nonprofit work we do. "We support local charities" tells me nothing and I forget it in four seconds. "Five pounds of dog food per job to San Diego rescues" is something a customer can picture, remember, and repeat to a friend at dinner. Specific travels. Vague dies.

Let people see it. Not as a brag. Somebody choosing a plumber deserves to know their service call also fills a bowl. True things do not need spin. They just need to be said out loud.

The honest part

Does this help their brand? Obviously. A dog on the truck with a real reason behind it is a marketer's dream and I am not going to sit here and pretend otherwise. Noticing that is literally my job.

But I have now carried the food in myself. Nobody builds twenty years of a company around a photo op. The program came first. The story is just what happens when you do something worth talking about.

So. If you are in San Diego County and something is leaking, you already know who I would call.