A Winding Career and a Culture of Care: Steve Grohn of AJ Alberts

Ask Steve Grohn who he is and he grins. "I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up." He is 59, he owns AJ Alberts Plumbing and Water Conditioning in Woodbury, and he was the very first guest on East Side Enterprise. He is also proof that a straight line is not the only way to build something people trust.

Steve grew up watching a work ethic more than hearing about one. Both his parents were raised on dairy farms. His dad was, by his own telling, a D-minus high school student who farmed for four years, then went to college while married and working part time and graduated with a 4.0 in three years. "It wasn't what he said. It was what he did. I observed it." That do-the-hard-thing-without-complaint wiring shows up in everything Steve builds.

The winding path to AJ Alberts

The resume reads like a tour of the last forty years of American work. Steve managed at UPS. He sold for Gateway Computers back when it was still Gateway 2000. He went through three dot-coms, then ran sales and marketing for a heating and air conditioning company, then spent a decade with a plumbing outfit, then a stretch at a commercial mechanical company. Along the way he picked up an English degree with a writing emphasis and an MBA from the University of St. Thomas.

His first ownership came five years ago, buying into a waterproofing and radon company. Then a Woodbury opportunity he could not pass up: Jim Alberts, who had started AJ Alberts with his wife Sue, called out of the blue to say the business was SBA approved and asked if Steve was interested. He was. "I love Woodbury. I love the east side," he says. He lived there from 1996, raised two kids through its schools, and now runs the company across the seven-county metro and into western Wisconsin, with roughly 80 percent of the work in Woodbury or a city that touches it.

A culture with no commissioned salespeople

AJ Alberts has over 800 five-star Google reviews and not a single commissioned salesperson. That is not an accident, it is a hiring rule. "If someone's not a fit, I remove them, or I don't let them in," Steve says. He wants people who care about customers and each other, net-givers rather than takers, because he believes the math of the business only works one way.

"The only path to real success is repeat and referrals. That is the only path."

A new customer from a paid lead, he points out, can cost well over a hundred dollars by the time it becomes a booked appointment. The way you win is to make the customers you already have so happy they call you back, and happy enough to send their neighbors.

The bag of salt

Ask him how you actually earn that, and he does not reach for a script. He reaches for a water softener. If a plumber notices a customer's brine tank is low, he throws a bag of salt in. Nobody likes hauling that bag, opening it, pouring it, or throwing the old one away.

"It's just these little things like that that can sometimes make the difference. But if you don't care, you're not going to do that, and you're certainly not going to be memorable."

One percent better

The other engine that runs Steve is a near-compulsive urge to improve things. He calls it a treasure hunt. He tells the story of the British national cycling program under Dave Brailsford, which found 200 variables and improved each one by a single percent, from the weight of the seat to the pillows the riders slept on, and went from also-rans to dominant. Steve runs his company the same way, always editing, always tightening, whether it is a smarter kind of pipe tape or the route his trucks take.

He is just as quick with the hard-won stuff. On happiness: "the formula for happiness is expectations minus reality, so if you want to be happier, just lower those expectations." On effort: "there's no substitute for hard work." And on surrounding yourself well, because "you have to at least surround yourself with people that don't suck the energy out of you."

Listen to the full conversation

This is a slice of a wide-ranging first episode that also gets into the death of a parent, the birth of a child, the rise of AI, and why Steve maps his entire customer base with pins on a physical wall.

Listen to the full episode of East Side Enterprise with Steve Grohn at mckinneycv.com/podcast, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about AJ Alberts, or claim a free water test, at ajalberts.com.