I'm Laszlo. I answer my own phone, and I've been doing this since 2009.

I trained as a telecommunications technician in Hungary, where I grew up. In 2008 I moved to the United Kingdom, and a year later I started a small maintenance company. It began with nothing more than a desk in a kitchen and a lot of hard work.

Word got round. Customers told their friends, their friends told theirs, and the business grew from a local job here and there into a company working across much of England, from Manchester down to Brighton.

At its peak, my UK company had 28 people on the payroll, doing emergency plumbing and roofing work for insurers and facilities companies like AXA, Homeserve and Mitie. We held CHAS, SafeContractor and ISO 9001 accreditation for many years, with £5 million public liability cover behind every job. Brexit and Covid made it hard to keep good tradespeople in the UK, and by 2024 I made the call to wind the company down rather than keep struggling to staff it. I'm not chasing those certificates here in Spain — it's just me on the tools most of the time — but that's the standard I was trained to run a business to, and it's still how I work today.

Running a company that size taught me things you don't learn just fixing pipes: how to manage a team properly, how to keep to a schedule, how to stay calm and professional when a job's gone wrong and a customer's stressed. Those habits never left me. During that time I also ran a plumbing business in Hungary, which added even more to what I'd learned.

I brought all of that experience here in 2016, to Marbella and the coast around it. Costa Plumber is a newer company than the UK one was, but it's built on years of real work, not a fresh start from nothing.

I cover Marbella and the western Costa del Sol, from La Zagaleta and Puerto Banús in the west, right along to Calahonda and La Cala de Mijas in the east. Most of my work is around Marbella itself, and I know the area well, from the big villas up in the hills to the apartments along the coast road.

You speak to me. Not a call centre, not someone reading a script who then passes it on. I'll ask you a couple of questions on the phone, because half the time that tells me what to put in the van before I set off.

I turn up when I said I would. If I'm running late you'll hear it from me first, before you start wondering. You get the price before I start, and that price is what you pay: no discovering an extra hundred euros on the invoice because the job took longer than I guessed.

When I'm done I clean up. You shouldn't be able to tell I was there, apart from the thing that was broken working again. And if something isn't right afterwards, ring me and I'll come back and sort it. That's what the twelve-month guarantee on my labour actually means.