How Mark Watkins helped grow Advanced Plumbing into one of the region’s leading trade businesses
More than sixty staff. Three of the biggest active construction projects in Hawke’s Bay. A TaupÅ branch, nationally award-winning tradespeople, and a project list that stretches from geothermal power stations to helicopter-access-only lodges deep in the back country.
Not bad for a business that started because a mortgage needed paying.
It was October 2009, the GFC had gutted the construction sector, and Mark Watkins could see the writing on the walls, so needed to secure his young family’s future.
With no one backing him and no safety net, he started Advanced Plumbing the only way available to him: get out there, turn every dollar, and don’t stop.
“There was no one giving me any money,” he says. “Every day I had to make the thing move ahead.”
That pressure forged something. A discipline around quality, a refusal to be ordinary, and a culture that still runs through the business today.
From residential roots to commercial force
In the early years, residential work made up around 80 percent of the business. That ratio has almost completely reversed. Today, roughly 60 to 65 percent of Advanced’s work is commercial, with the residential side focused firmly on the high end.
Technically complex heating systems, helicopter-access lodges, high-spec processing facilities for some of the region’s most discerning clients. Getting there required deliberate specialisation in underfloor heating, smart home integration, wastewater systems, and mechanical design.
“Any plumber can do PVC and polybutylene,” Mark says. “We’ve pushed into the areas where a lot of others just can’t play.”
Strategic acquisitions, investment in technology, and a genuine embrace of automation have driven that evolution. Many systems Advanced installs today run on SCADA platforms and can be monitored remotely. The TaupÅ branch, opened six years ago, was a natural extension of existing client relationships. The two branches share resources and balance each other well.
Projects that define a business
Some jobs stay with you. The Tauhara geothermal power station near TaupÅ, part of a $1.2 billion Contact Energy programme is the biggest project by scale Advanced has tackled.
When Cyclone Gabrielle hit, the business essentially stopped taking new work for a month to help with the clean-up, including a particularly grim stint at a food processing facility where flooding had left 800 tonnes of rotting product to be cleared before refrigeration could be restored.
“We never waved our flag about it. We just got stuck in.” Relationships built through that work remain among the most valued in the business.
Today, Advanced is simultaneously delivering three landmark projects: Heretaunga House, a major new commercial office complex in Hastings with Hastings District Council as its anchor tenant; the Napier Civic Precinct and the extension to the Hawke’s Bay Regional Prison. It is a pipeline that reflects not just capacity, but sixteen years of hard-won reputation.
A broader group with purpose
Advanced Plumbing is the core of the business, but over the years the team has built a wider group of complementary interests. That includes EMS, an effluent management business that sits alongside Advanced’s core plumbing operations and reflects the same instinct that has always driven the company: find the areas that require genuine expertise and own them.
The integrated model means the group can offer clients a broader range of solutions, particularly as water, waste, and environmental management become increasingly central to both residential and commercial development.
Water: the next frontier
Water runs through everything Advanced does, literally and philosophically. Mark is direct about New Zealand’s attitude to the resource. “We waste a hell of a lot of it. We could capture more, store more, reuse it, recycle it. We’re really not doing much at all.”
Advanced is developing rainwater harvesting and greywater reuse systems for residential clients, including live research tracking actual household water usage to build practical offset packages. A likely shift to smart-metered billing in the future will change behaviour fast.
“When people get their first smart-metered water bill, there’ll be a holy moly moment.”
Regionally, Mark is equally direct. Hawke’s Bay’s future depends on water, and the debate around storage needs to be tied to genuine ambition for high-value production.
“Water should be unlocking the next high-value thing. That’s the conversation we should be having.”
Growing the next generation
Advanced has trained around 40 apprentices across its history. The business has won the New Zealand Master Plumbers Plumber of the Year award twice, produced a James Douglas Medallion recipient for best newly qualified tradesman in the country, and Mark has been recognised as Training Leader of the Year. The pride is clearly in the people, not the trophies.
Mark is equally passionate about the status of the trades. “For years, tradespeople were treated as second-class citizens. AI can replace many professions before it can replace a plumber or tradesman.”
He now speaks directly to school students alongside others in the industry about trade careers, championing the gateway programmes that barely existed when he started out.
Giving back, and getting rescued
Community obligation was hardwired into Advanced from its very first month of trading, when Mark made his first donation to the Hawke’s Bay Rescue Helicopter Trust. They have sponsored the service ever since. When the TaupÅ branch opened, sponsoring the local rescue helicopter was the first community act.
That relationship took on unexpected personal significance around eight years ago when Mark fell down a cliff while hunting near TaupÅ, landing on his back and unable to move. The helicopter he had quietly sponsored for years flew in and brought him out. His wife Suzie, working near the base at the time, watched it fly directly over the house fully aware it was on its way to collect her husband.
“After that rescue, when the opportunity came up to take on the lead sponsorship of the Karamu Rotary Cocktail Party, there was only one answer.”
For around eight or nine years prior, that sponsorship had been held by IMS Payroll, the business of Kevin Atkinson, a figure Mark had long admired for demonstrating what serious community contribution alongside business success actually looked like.
Taking on that mantle carried weight. This year marks a decade of Advanced as lead sponsor, and the 2026 event promises to be the biggest yet.
Mark joined Karamu Rotary because his grandfather was a lifelong Rotarian, and because when he walked through the door he found exactly his kind of people.
“Individually it’s very hard to make an impact. When you’ve got a group of like-minded people and an avenue to do something, that’s where it happens.”
What comes next
Advanced Plumbing heads into its next chapter in solid shape. The pipeline is strong, the team is growing, and the instinct to specialise rather than simply expand remains the compass. Built on pressure, driven by purpose, and with sixteen years of hard-won trust behind it, Advanced Plumbing is exactly what its name always promised to be.
