When Charles (Chaz) Schwartz closed his Colorado Springs plumbing business, it was because he was tired of doing all the administrative work that came with running his own business. He didn’t want to deal with bills, employees, or the pressure of everything being on him anymore. So he decided to close his company in 2014 and began working for UMC, Inc. as part of our Colorado plumbing team as a journeyman plumber.
But, as Chaz soon found out, UMC always has an opportunity for growth. Within three months, he was back in a leadership position as a superintendent in our Colorado division. He quickly became an integral part of the team and helped the team finish one of their biggest projects at the time, Copper Creek, which was 287 units.
Even though Chaz had wanted to move away from a leadership role in his own business, he found that he quite liked the role at UMC. Here he found the support and teamwork he didn’t have when running his own business. With the help of UMC, dealing with budgets, employees, and other project management concerns wasn’t a headache like it used to be. Instead, it became a fascinating challenge, and he felt up to it.
One of the reasons Chaz believes his attitude toward leadership changed when he started with UMC was the team’s culture. Here in Colorado especially, Chaz has enjoyed helping build a strong team that works well together. Today, our Colorado plumbing division is one of the top three markets in the company, and Chaz believes it’s because of the culture UMC has built focusing on the company’s core values.
Chaz’s mentality has always been to work smarter, not harder, and he found that UMC was an excellent fit for his philosophy, especially in our Colorado division. He found that the extensive planning, mapping, and communication about the scope of the work made it all easier to imagine each unit in a project as its own little residential house, just connected to each other. With this mentality in mind, Chaz quickly transitioned from residential plumbing work in single-family homes to large-scale multi-family unit projects with hundreds of units here at UMC!
Chaz will have been with us here at UMC this coming April for nine years. He’s now moved into a project manager position in our Denver office and currently overseeing several projects of all different shapes and sizes. From small 90-unit projects to a 12-story high rise, Chaz is in the middle of our tremendous growth in Colorado. We’re so grateful to have Chaz as a team member and glad he took a chance on us all those years ago!
