At fifteen years old, Marcelle Flowers sat her parents down. “I told them they were finished raising me. I no longer needed their oversight. I could take it from here.”
They were shocked. Their bullheaded daughter, who they called “stubborn as a mule,” was proclaiming her independence without a plan.
That independent streak would carry Marcelle through a series of reinventions, eventually leading her back to the family business she thought she’d left behind and into a career she never expected.
Growing Up in the Trades
Marcelle grew up the daughter of a plumber. Her father, Tom Vance, learned the trades as an apprentice under his own father. Both were union plumbers. Tom later started Vance Plumbing in Southern California, and in 1985 he moved his family of seven to Sacramento and bought a small shop called Bob Armstrong Plumbing.
Marcelle wanted nothing to do with the family business. Having barely made it through high school, college wasn’t an option either. Instead, she found herself a young, pregnant single mom with no idea what was next.
“I found that I was rather resourceful, and I loved building businesses.”
So Marcelle got to work. She became a piano teacher, a wedding consultant, a surgery technician, and an entrepreneur. She even found time to volunteer for the Boy Scouts.
A born risk-taker and early adopter, Marcelle had a restless spirit and an appetite for reinventing herself. “I was always looking around the corner, asking, ‘What’s next?’”
Called Back to Her Roots
When her father asked her to join Armstrong Plumbing, something shifted. Soon, she was running the company.
The early days were rough. “Remember that bullheaded part,” Marcelle says with a laugh. “I got that from Dad, so the early days were often some good head-butting.”
But Tom Vance also had the same soft heart as his daughter. On the days when Armstrong was barely scraping by, Marcelle looked to her father for hope.
“‘Honey,’ he’d say. ‘Our profit is the people.’”
It was an indelible life lesson. It shaped how Marcelle treated employees, customers, and vendors, eventually becoming the basis for Armstrong’s mission statement: “to care for people in a way that improves their quality of life.”
For Marcelle, that meant understanding how much a customer relies on the person showing up at their door and how much an employee’s family relies on the business behind that person.
The Weight of Running a Business
Under Marcelle’s leadership, Armstrong transformed from a struggling commercial plumbing company into a service and repair business. Marcelle officially became CEO. Over the next seven years, Armstrong became profitable and grew to 70 employees.
Somewhere along the way, Marcelle learned what it really means to own a business. Everyone thinks the owner is the boss. But really, the owner is the person they call when something goes wrong.
Angry customer? Absent employee? Broken-down truck? Tight payroll? All of this and more was on Marcelle’s plate. Even when she sat down to dinner with her family, part of her was still at work. Missing a single phone call could mean losing a customer for life.
Marcelle wore her ability to carry it all as a badge of honor, but eventually, it wore on her.
After decades of juggling those pressures, she was ready to move on. She put Armstrong on the market, found a buyer, and waited for the deal to close. Days away from signing, the deal fell through.
Devastated and worried about the future, Marcelle turned to prayer. On her knees, she asked God for answers. She heard three words clearly: “Wait until June.”
An Unexpected Introduction
Several months later, Marcelle’s office manager told her that a couple of kids wanted to talk to her. Marcelle grabbed some cash, thinking they were probably selling candy bars.
They were not selling candy bars.
AJ Jain and Adi Ketkar were two young engineering graduates exploring how technology could help trades businesses. Marcelle told them they had five minutes.
They asked about her pain points at Armstrong. She laid it all out. She needed people. She needed phones answered. She needed leads followed up. She needed revenue.
When AJ played an AI appointment reminder call on his phone, Marcelle immediately recognized a use for it. She had just lost the receptionist who used to make those calls.
“Can you make that for me?”
AJ and Adi returned two days later with an outbound agent. For Marcelle, the appeal was immediate: they had built something that addressed a job she needed done.
It was June 11th.
She remembered the words she’d heard months earlier: “Wait until June.”
Just as memorable were the two young men themselves, “hungry, humble, and teachable,” as she describes them. They listened carefully and wanted to understand the problems she faced.
A Contractor’s Perspective
Working with AJ and Adi gave Marcelle a new way to put decades of experience to use. They brought the engineering expertise to build and test the technology. She brought firsthand knowledge of the business it needed to serve.
As they worked together, Marcelle could explain what happened when a call went unanswered, an appointment fell through, or an office team had more work than it could handle. Those were situations she had spent years navigating.
“We were solving problems I had lived with for decades.”
Today, that experience informs her work as Broccoli’s Chief Industry Officer. Having been responsible for employees, customers, and payroll, she approaches the product with practical questions.
“I don’t look at a new feature and ask, ‘Is this impressive technology?’ I ask, ‘Will this help the contractor answer more calls? Book more jobs? Save money? Get some of their time back?’”
She also understands what it takes for an owner to trust someone with part of their business.
“I know how important one customer, one lead, one phone call can be. And I know what running a business can cost the family behind it.”
The People Behind the Business
Marcelle’s career has taken her from the plumbing shop to a technology company, but her father’s lesson still guides her.
Her goal for Broccoli is straightforward: “To deliver a Product that works, for a Price you can afford, from People you trust, to put Profit in your pocket.”
Behind each of those promises are people like the ones she worked alongside at Armstrong: the owner trying to make payroll, the office employee keeping the day on track, and the technician heading to the next job.
Marcelle knows their responsibilities because she has carried them herself. Helping build something useful for them is the next chapter in a working life shaped by her father’s words:
“Our profit is the people.”
