spark360 Behind The Scenes: Dallas Drain Company

You can be forgiven if you think that Dallas Drain Company is just another plumbing outfit. After all, they deal with drainage issues for homes and offices, and that’s plumbing work, right?

Indeed, the company’s roots are in plumbing – the company’s founder worked 27 years for one of the bigger plumbing companies in Dallas. But after just one meeting with Kevin Travis, Dallas Drain’s president and CEO, you would come away thinking that his company is on the leading edge of technology and engineering, thanks to his knowledge of water and what it can do to structures and foundations.

And you would also hear the pride he has in his staff, which he consults with regularly for ideas on water drainage solutions. “These guys who work with us, they’re artisans, pure craftsmen,” Travis told me. “Everyone has been with me for a very long time. There’s very little turnover.”

Besides keeping the right personnel, Travis has also invested heavily in homegrown research and development, going so far as to build a golf course-style sand trap behind the Dallas Drain Company offices so he can study new ways of draining traps. His company is in the right part of the country for working on water drainage; one out of every five foundation failures occurs in Texas, according to Dallas Drain. That may be why he’s set up several testing areas around his offices, complete with cameras and monitoring equipment as he and his team try to design innovative ways of drawing water away from buildings, or keeping tree roots from wrapping around and through underground pipes.

“We’re doing stuff no one has even heard of before,” Travis said. “Most of it is learned from practical applications – just fixing problems. A lot of the stuff that we see is needed is not really available commercially, so we either modify it or make our own.”

The innovation gives Kevin a chance to use his engineering background, and his solutions and success are added to the long line of entrepreneurs who build businesses by identifying problems – and then go and fix them.

- Renay San Miguel