About Shaun
I'm Shaun. I started SD Plumbing & Heating in 2015 and I never stopped.
I'm not looking back at the trades from a distance. I am still inside the diary, the team, the pricing, the awkward customer calls, and the decisions that decide whether a business actually works.
SD
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The story
How the business was built.
I started SD Plumbing & Heating in Edinburgh in 2015 with a van, a phone, and the usual belief that being good on the tools would be enough. It was not. I had to learn the hard way that a trades business is not just jobs, quotes, and graft. It is people, margins, cash, expectations, and repeatable standards.
The early mistakes were not glamorous. I priced jobs too thin, held on to the wrong work for too long, and carried too much in my own head. The turning point came when I stopped treating every problem like a one-off and started building the systems that a team could actually use.
Today SD Plumbing & Heating is a team of eight, turning over more than £1m a year and still growing. I am still involved in the operating detail, because that is where the useful lessons are. The mentorship comes from what is working in my business now, not what looked good on a slide years ago.
11 years operating
8 engineers managed
£1m+ revenue tier
5.0 on Trustpilot
Gas Safe registered
Why mentorship now
Still in the business. Still learning.
I started having conversations with other trade owners who were stuck on the same things I had already been through. Good firms, busy teams, plenty of demand, but too much stress sitting on the owner. The patterns were familiar: pricing without confidence, engineers without enough structure, customers setting the pace, and no clear rhythm for making decisions.
I am keeping SD Plumbing & Heating alongside Dunn Right Trades because that is the point. The value is not that I used to run a trades business. The value is that I still do. If something stops working in the real world, I know quickly, and the advice changes with it.
What I believe
Plain rules beat clever theory.
These are the sorts of principles I come back to when I am helping an owner make a hard decision.
Engineers leave bad managers, not bad jobs.
If you cannot price it properly, do not quote it.
A full diary means nothing if the jobs are losing money.
The boring systems are usually what buy you back your evenings.
You cannot lead a team from guesswork.
Free intro call
If this sounds familiar, start with the short call.
A 15-minute conversation. No slides, no pitch. We'll see if there's something here, or there isn't.
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