I was raised in this trade. My dad Charles started Carter Plumbing in Fort Worth in 1953, and I was on jobs with him by the time I could carry a toolbox. By 17 I had my journeyman license. By 20 I had my master’s. I’ve never had another career — just this one, three different decades, in two states.
In 1982 I took over the family shop and ran it for twenty years. In the mid-2000s my wife Kimberly and I moved to Hawai’i, where I worked on multi-family and custom homes for nearly three years. We came home in 2008 to be near my aging parents, and that’s the year I joined Tioga. At the time it was a site-excavation contractor. We added plumbing, underground utilities, and a glass division, and over the next decade built it into one of the highest-rated plumbing companies in DFW.
That same year changed more than my business card. In April 2008 I went on a Quest retreat, and it reset what the work — and everything else — is really for:
“It was no longer about me, but about my relationship with my Heavenly Father.”
What I tell every new tech who joins us is the same thing my dad told me: the customer’s house is not your job site, it’s their home. Be clean. Be honest. Tell them the price first. Don’t leave until it’s right. That’s the whole playbook.
Outside of work I’m happiest with Kimberly, our three kids, and our five grandchildren. I work in men’s ministries and I cook a lot of BBQ. If you call Tioga, you’re not getting a call center. You’re getting my family — and we mean it when we say family comes first.
— Jerry Carter
