The episode in detail
Louis de Liedekerke is 33, he came out of a business school, and he runs a plumbing company that works by bike. PipeCare operates by cargo bike across the 19 local councils of Brussels, from a base in Ixelles for now, on three services: drain unblocking, emergency plumbing and non-destructive leak detection. The company has been going for a year.
From business school to unblocking drains
Nothing in his background pointed to plumbing. Five years of business school in Louvain-la-Neuve, out around 2017, then four and a half years of commercial strategy consulting at PwC. He then steered every choice towards one aim, running his own company one day: a firm focused on small and medium businesses, then a year and a half in South Africa, in Cape Town, through the Prince Albert Fund, to build up a company there and above all to learn how to sell.
Back in Brussels, he set up a small consultancy and started looking for a company to buy with a friend. It was that friend who told him about his father, 64, who had just left a large company in the plumbing sector with an idea in mind: to start a plumbing business that moves by bike.
“We are not exactly reinventing the wheel, but we are trying to revolutionise the way a fairly traditional business is run.”
The test that proved the idea
Before starting, Louis de Liedekerke and his partner Xavier did two things. They looked at the figures of all their competitors, then rang them one by one with a simple drain unblocking request.
“Not one of them was able to give us a really transparent price for a simple job.”
What they saw in those figures was a transparency problem, in a sector where quite a few people get swindled. Margins are high, he states it as a fact. The customer experience is not exceptional, and he almost apologises for saying so: a plumber is a very good technician, rarely a good business manager, and ends up doing everything at once, the site work, the calls and the sales. Xavier brings credibility and experience, Louis the organisation. They started with a single bike and three months of testing.
Why plumbing by bike works in Brussels
The first argument is logistical. In a congested city, the time goes on the journey and on finding a parking space. The bike makes the duration predictable: from Ixelles to Evere he counts thirteen minutes, and those thirteen minutes do not move from one day to the next. Planning the jobs gets simpler as a result. Then comes the economics. A cargo bike costs less to buy than a van, the Brussels Region pays subsidies, there is no fuel and no parking space to pay for, and servicing costs less.
“Economically, it makes sense. Logistically, it makes sense. And ecologically, it makes sense.”
Bikes fitted out trade by trade
The space available dictated the service list. Xavier knows plumbing tools, whose devices are getting smaller and smaller, and the business has concentrated on three trades, each with its own fitted-out bikes.
The unblocking bikes carry a mechanical drain snake and a small jetting unit that sends water into the pipe at high pressure. The emergency bikes carry mixer taps, fittings and toolboxes. The leak detection ones carry endoscopic cameras, dye and hygrometers. Everything fits into one or two bikes, and on a big unblocking job two colleagues go out together.
What plumbing by bike does not do
The load limit rules out big jobs: no full bathroom refit, because the materials cannot be carried by bike. The emergency service, for its part, is limited to jobs of under three hours. The bike also imposes a discipline that a van spares you. “The advantage of having a van is that you carry your house with you, so you have everything you need,” says Louis de Liedekerke. At PipeCare, one person arrives earlier every morning and loads all the bikes with what the day will need. When a part turns out to be missing on site, the return trip is lost, which happens to vans too; he says the process is now settled enough for it to be rare.
Finding a leak without breaking the walls
Two situations bring in a customer: water overconsumption, or visible damage, a damp patch spreading across a wall. Louis de Liedekerke sorts leaks into three families, the waste pipe, the water supply and outside infiltration, and each family has its own set of tools. For a pipe buried in a wall, an endoscopic camera goes in through a sink trap or a toilet and looks for a joint that has come apart.
Leak detection is an insurance market. Insurers who cover water damage need an expert to establish the cause, and the job ends with a report carrying photographs, explanations and hypotheses. He trained for two weeks in the south of France, for want of an equivalent course in Belgium, and has run about a hundred leak searches in a year with his partner.
Water going to waste, and the toilet paper test
The subject opens onto a wider project. PipeCare is talking to insurers, whom he declines to name, about a preventive offer: audit a house, certify it sound for the next five years, and bring the premium down in exchange. He notes that many people treat water as free and endless, and he mentions two companies working on this, Shayp, which fits sensors onto meters to track consumption live and spot leaks, and Revalio, a young Brussels start-up that helps industrial users manage theirs. Revalio runs into the same wall: as long as water costs very little, nobody moves.
The best-known leak is also the most ordinary, the one in the cistern, that trickle running down the back of the bowl.
“Check your toilet with a simple test. Just put a small piece of toilet paper at the bottom of the bowl. You see whether it gets wet, and if it is wet, that means you have a leak.”
Managing agents, search ranking and word of mouth
A statistic he read has it that a blocked toilet happens two or three times in a lifetime, so private customers do not come back often. PipeCare bet from the start on managing agents and property managers, who account for half of turnover. Some of them run 2,000 buildings in Brussels and have problems every day. Louis de Liedekerke thought a better customer experience would be enough to win them over. It is more complicated than that: managing agents stay with the contractors they know, and you have to catch the right moment, when one of them retires or a client is unhappy.
On the private side, everything turns on local search ranking and on word of mouth, which accounts for 18 to 20% of turnover. The prices displayed on the website do part of the work, which he says no competitor does. He tells the story of a job at the home of a European Commission official: many of those officials are not Belgian, have no contact locally and land on sponsored ads that are sometimes dishonest. A clean job at an announced price gets told at lunch the next day.
What comes next runs through two acquisitions under review, then a choice to settle within a year and a half to two years: expanding into Flanders, where Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp combine flat ground with large pedestrian zones, widening the range with pipe relining, that sock pushed through a damaged pipe to create a new one inside it, or both.
“Our idea is pretty simple. We are just putting an old trade on a bike.”
