The magazine on our wall: Water Technology, March 2001
I'm Austin. There's a framed magazine page that has hung in our shop for as long as I can remember. It's from Water Technology, the national water-treatment trade magazine, March 2001 issue, page 24: a feature by Morgan Lyle about a small O'Fallon, Missouri dealership called Jones Enterprise, written under the headline "Challenge and opportunity in Missouri."
That dealership is us, before we were Jones Air & Water. And the 2-year-old in the photo, standing in front of the old shop counter with my mom, my dad, and my 4-year-old sister Marissa? That's me.
What the industry saw in us 25 years ago
Reading it now, what strikes me is how much of it still describes this company. The article profiled my dad, Everett, as the owner and, in his own words, most of the staff, with my mom Jennifer, an accountant, keeping the books. It noted he already had 13 years in water treatment by 2001. It described 12-hour days and six-day weeks. It listed how we found customers back then: door to door, the yellow pages, a billboard, business networking, and a website called www.joneswater.com, the exact same address you are reading this on today.
It also captured a genuinely hard moment in local water history. After the hot, dry summer of 2000 drew the water table down across eastern Missouri, and after Missouri-American ran a big new supply line into St. Charles County, a lot of customers assumed their new municipal water was soft and canceled their treatment service. It wasn't soft, it was just less hard. Our residential business dropped by about a third, and my dad answered by going after commercial and industrial work rather than talking anyone into anything. That instinct, test it, explain it, and let the water speak for itself, is still how we operate. It's why the first thing we offer anyone is a free water test, not a pitch.
What's changed since page 24
In 2001 we were a $250,000-a-year, one-and-a-half-person shop in O'Fallon. Today we're in Portage Des Sioux, we've installed and serviced systems for thousands of families across five Missouri and three Illinois counties, and the toddler from the photo grew up to handle sales, service, and installs. My sister from the photo grew up too; Marissa runs her own nutrition practice now. My dad went on to serve on the board of the Missouri Water Quality Association and earn the WQA Master Water Specialist certification, the industry's highest. The phone number in the photo's banner still rings in our shop.
Some things we deliberately never changed: an owner still installs every job, and we still put our name on the wall next to the work.
Why we're writing about it now
Water Technology's print edition is long gone, and its 1990s and 2000s issues were barely kept anywhere, so this framed page is one of the few surviving copies of the story. We figured a 25-year-old, third-party look at who we were belongs next to the hundreds of reviews of who we are now. If you want the fuller history, it's on our About page.