Picatti Brothers is still family-owned.
Picatti Brothers is still family-owned. Still family-run. Still staffed by people who grew up around the work and chose to stay.
That's not sentimentality talking - it's the payoff of nearly a century spent building something worth holding onto: a team with genuine technical depth, a culture where accountability isn't optional, and a reputation the people here feel the weight of every single day.
"We have a hundred years of reputation that we have to back every day," says Doug Picatti. "And we feel the weight of that. That's not just a marketing line. That's true. Like the Hermès family - six generations deep in their craft, still family-run instead of selling out to some conglomerate - we grew up in this business. We understand what the name Picatti means to our customers."
If you've ever called Picatti Brothers in an emergency, you already understand what that reputation means in practice. They answer. They show up. They figure it out.
From Ground to Glass: What Picatti Brothers Actually Does
There is a phrase the Picatti Brothers team uses when they describe their work: water from ground to glass.
It captures the full journey, from the aquifer deep underground, through the pump system, through your pipes, and into your kitchen tap. Every step of that journey is something Picatti Brothers understands and services. Well drilling, pump installation, sales, and repair, electric motor repair and sales, municipal water systems, wastewater, and sewer systems. When water or wastewater needs to move, this is who you call.
What makes Picatti Brothers different from a guy in a truck is not marketing. It is depth. Engineers on staff. Technicians with decades of specialized experience. The ability to handle both electrical and plumbing repairs concurrently, which most contractors cannot do because they do not hold both certifications.
Most domestic pump systems last longer than most marriages.
And yet people put less thought into choosing their pump contractor than they do choosing a spouse.
They'll spend months, maybe years, getting to know someone before committing to a life together - but when the pump fails, they'll hire whoever picks up the phone first.
Think about it this way: you're not just hiring someone for a repair. You're entering a relationship that's going to last the next 8 to 15 years. Over that time, you're going to call this company. Not just once - for maintenance questions, for service calls, for the small things and the emergencies. This isn't a one-night stand. It's a partnership you're going to lean on again and again.
Here's what nobody asks at the altar: will you actually still be here in a year? One in five companies don't even make it through the honeymoon. So pick wisely.
Do you want a fling, or do you want a partner who shows up?
Can you trust this company to help you during an emergency? Pumps don't usually fail when you're not using them. Most people use their water system when they're home - during nonworking hours and on weekends. That means your pump is far more likely to fail at 6 PM on a Friday, or on the one weekend the whole family's gathered at the house - exactly when most businesses have locked the doors and gone home.
So the real question isn't whether a company can fix your pump. It's whether they're even answering the phone when it actually breaks.
Picatti Brothers has been showing up for that relationship for 98 years. Not because we got lucky, but because we built it to last - a team, not just a person, with the kind of structure that means someone's always there to answer when you call.
Choose wisely. You're making an 8-to-15-year commitment here, not deciding whether to spend a couple of nights in a cheap hotel. So wait a little longer. Pick the partner who's still going to be standing next to you years down the road, not just the one who said yes first. That's not a first date. That's a marriage worth making - with someone who shows up 24/7/365, for as long as you need them.
Picatti Brothers is that partner.
The Picatti Family Story |
From Italy to Yakima
The story behind Picatti Brothers starts long before 1928, in a small mountain village called Rocca-Conavese, in the Piemontese region of Northern Italy.
Gabriel Piccatti was born there in 1850. He left school after sixth grade to work in the coal mines, putting in 12-hour days six days a week. It was hard, physical work. When Gabriel's wife Maria decided it was not good enough, she pushed him to apprentice for a better trade. He spent three years earning a license as a Timberer, the craftsman who designs and installs the timber support structures inside mine shafts. He was promoted and sent to work in Turkey.
Maria hated Turkey. She hated the remote location, the conditions, the distance from family. She gave Gabriel an ultimatum: move the family to America, or she would take the children back to Italy and stay there. Maria was not someone you argued with. Gabriel agreed.
While visiting their son Joe at his military boarding school in Constantinople, Maria noticed a poster at the train station. The N.W. Coal Co. in Roslyn, Washington was seeking experienced mine trade workers. She insisted Gabriel apply. He did. In 1901, he was accepted, and the family crossed the Atlantic.
At Ellis Island, a clerk misspelled the family name on the immigration paperwork. "Piccatti" lost a letter. Gabriel either did not notice or did not want to make an issue of it. The family became "Picatti," the name they carry to this day.
On the train west from Chicago to Washington State, Gabriel overheard another couple speaking Piemontese, the Northern Italian dialect of his home region. They introduced themselves. The two families were heading to the same corner of the Pacific Northwest, from towns less than two kilometers apart back in Italy. They became close friends. Twenty-nine years later, the youngest Picatti son, George, married the youngest daughter of that family, Mary Deonigi. A chance conversation on a transcontinental train eventually became a marriage.
By 1904, the Picatti family had three sons born on three different continents: Joe, born in Italy; Stephen, born in Turkey; George, born in the United States. The family had a nickname for them: the Wop, the Turk, and the Sam. Three brothers from three corners of the world, building a life together in Washington State.
Those three brothers would go on to found Picatti Brothers.
How the Business Began
The company started as a one-man operation out of a back porch.
- In 1923, the eldest brother, Joe, was working for the Blackrock Irrigation and Power Company in Hanford. He had developed a genuine affinity for engineering and saw a gap in the market. He placed an advertisement in the Hanford Columbian newspaper offering pump and motor repair services and got to work from home. Joe eventually became a distributor for Allis-Chalmers, one of the major industrial pump manufacturers of the era.
- In 1928, the youngest brother, George, finished his engineering degree at Washington State College and completed graduate engineering training at Allis-Chalmers headquarters in Milwaukee. He came back to Yakima, joined Joe and Steve, and the three brothers formalized the business. Picatti Brothers opened at 103 South 4th Avenue in Yakima.
From that first day, the company had at least one family member with a degree in electrical engineering. That standard has held through every generation since. - The business grew steadily. In 1936, they moved to a larger shop.
- In 1958, the second generation came aboard: Joseph G., Charles, and Donald, sons of the original brothers, returning from military service in World War II and the Korean War. Picatti Brothers, Inc. was formally incorporated that year.
- In 1980, the third generation joined: David, Mike, and, later, Doug Picatti, each bringing engineering careers built at companies like General Electric, Boeing, and Square D back to the family business.
- In 2000, a new corporate headquarters opened at 2309 South 3rd Avenue in Union Gap, on 11 acres.
- In 2017, the company made a deliberate strategic decision: sell the electrical contracting and engineering divisions and sharpen the focus on electrical apparatus repair and well and pump services. The headquarters moved downtown. The scope narrowed. The expertise deepened.
Today, Picatti Brothers is still a Yakima company. Still family-run. Still built on the foundation that three immigrant brothers laid nearly 100 years ago.
The Generation Rule: Earn Your Place
There is something worth knowing about how Picatti Brothers thinks about family - and it starts with the fact that the name on the building has never been the only definition of it.
Many started working there around age ten - sweeping, weeding, filing, answering phones, doing whatever was asked. That was normal. You learned what work meant by doing it, even when the work was small.
Through high school, through college summers, the exposure continued - working as an entry-level employee in every part of the company, managed and trained not by relatives, but by the same people who'd manage and train anyone else.
No shortcuts, no special treatment. Just years of absorbing how the business actually runs, taught by the people who already knew it best.
And that's the part that matters most: those teachers weren't all named Picatti.
Some of the people who shaped how this business works have been here for twenty years, thirty years, longer - people who walked through the door as outsiders and, over time, became something the company couldn't run without.
They're the ones who grew up in the work itself, the same as any Picatti did. Some were born into it. Others showed up one day and simply never left, and at some point the distinction stopped mattering. You can't fast-track that kind of understanding, whether you share the last name or not. It comes from years of watching how a real crisis gets handled, of absorbing which principles bend and which ones never do. Nobody teaches that in an afternoon. You live it, year after year, until it's just who you are.
That's the real difference - not family versus employee, but time versus a training manual. You can hand someone a manual on their first day. You can't hand them thirty years. One is earned. The other is issued. Under real pressure, that difference shows - and at Picatti Brothers, the people who show up for that pressure aren't just the ones with the family name. They're everyone who stayed long enough to become part of it.
Even still, there's a firm rule for any Picatti who wants to come back as an adult professional: they must spend at least two years working somewhere else first. Outside the family business. In a different company, with different people, having a boss that is not family, learning things Picatti Brothers cannot teach from the inside.
"That's a real thing," Doug says.
How to Make It Right
It keeps the family from getting insular. It ensures that anyone who comes back - Picatti or not - earns their place on their own terms, with something new to contribute.
Employment here has never been a birthright. It's something you work for, whether your last name is Picatti or not. You're asked to come back, or asked to stay, because of what you've shown you can bring to the table.
That's why, when something goes wrong - a pump stops working, a motor stops spinning, a sewage alarm goes off at 2am - the person showing up doesn't just know plumbing. They know Picatti, in the deepest sense of the word.
Whether they were born into it or built their way into it over thirty years, they've lived the business long enough to know exactly how to make it right.
Our Team
Picatti Brothers is a small, experienced team. The faces are consistent. The expertise runs deep.
Doug Picatti
President
Third-generation owner. Doug came up through the family tradition, worked outside the company first, and returned with engineering experience earned at Square D, GE, and Honeywell. He is hands-on, direct, and the person accountable for how everything operates.
Mike Picatti
Vice President
Doug's brother, and a key part of the leadership team. Mike worked at Boeing learning from the world’s best engineers. Mike brings decades of field and engineering experience.
Don Picatti
Senior Engineer
Senior-level engineering expertise, called in when the complexity demands it. Don remains an active part of the Picatti Brothers network.
Joe Morford
Director of Well and Pump
Thirty years with Picatti Brothers. Not thirty years in the industry. Thirty years with this company, specifically. Joe is a no-nonsense get it done guy.
John Rice
Director of the Service Shop
John has years of experience in industrial service. John knows how to repair pumps, motors, and other mechanical devices. He knows how the importance of plant and field operations and the need to get repairs done quickly and right.
Lonnie Hatfield
Senior Salesman
Lonnie has years of varied experience that helps our customers. His many years as the President of Penguin Plumbing and Electric running multiple stores means Lonnie knows how to get you exactly what you want, and does it quickly. If you need electrical motors fast, call Lonnie!
Lisa Johnson
Bookkeeper
Lisa keeps the business running cleanly behind the scenes, managing finances and supporting the operational team. Lisa has years of Bookkeeping experience, especially in the jewelry business, where quality matters.
Our Technicians
Field technicians, many with a minimum of five years of specialized experience. Individual names are not published here by design: qualified people in this industry are in high demand, and Picatti Brothers protects its team. What matters is the standard they are hold themselves to the highest standard of quality and excellence - the Picatti Way.
Not Just a Guy in a Truck
This distinction matters, and Doug makes no apology for it.
Plenty of contractors can handle a straightforward pump problem - replace a float, clear a blockage, swap out a part. That work gets done. But when a job gets complicated, which jobs in water and wastewater systems often do, technical depth is what separates a real resolution from a recurring problem. Picatti Brothers prides itself on more than just fixing the issue in front of them - they use decades of experience and expertise to deliver the most technically advanced solution available, one that actually improves system performance going forward.
Picatti Brothers employs people with decades of experience, including engineers on staff. The team can fix what you have, or, when it makes sense, upgrade the system with new technology to improve on what you've got. Picatti has people who can go onsite to work on your problems and a motor shop to repair them. The company performs electrical and plumbing repairs concurrently, so when a problem requires troubleshooting beyond what any single-discipline contractor can handle, this team has the range to see it through. They've brought in subcontractors, worked directly with manufacturers, installed monitoring equipment, and spent months on intermittent problems that stumped everyone else - until they solved them.
The public school case study is a good example. A lift station alarm at the school kept triggering, month after month. Every repair addressed one symptom and revealed another. After more than a year of troubleshooting, Picatti Brothers installed a monitoring system at the station and spent months capturing footage until they identified the actual cause: a reverse suction condition from the city sewer main - something nobody had ever encountered before. They documented it. They brought in district and city utility staff to witness it firsthand. Then they proposed a solution.
"We went from having our reputation questioned to being a near superhero. No one could believe what they saw," Doug says.
That's the difference between a company with technical depth and one without it.
What a Typical Day Looks Like
People do not often call Picatti Brothers because things are going well.
An exception is someone building a new home, who wants a well installed on a planned schedule. Almost every other call comes from someone who has lost water, whose sewage system is alarming, or whose lift station is overflowing onto a public street. The calls come in the evening. They come on weekends. They come at 6:00 in the morning.
"If you don't have water, or sewage is bubbling out of the ground, you're having a bad day, and you want it fixed right away," Doug says.
The team has a schedule each morning. That schedule rarely survives intact. Triage is the operating mode. Plans shift around emergencies. The company encourages clients to call at the first sign of trouble, before things escalate, because a small problem caught early is almost always cheaper and faster than a crisis. But most people wait until it is a crisis.
That is what Picatti Brothers runs toward.
What It Takes to Work Here
If you are considering a career at Picatti Brothers, you deserve a direct answer about what the job involves.
The work is outdoor, physical, and often dirty. It can be dangerous. It demands mechanical aptitude: if you have never understood how a basic engine or pump works, this is a difficult place to start. It demands calm under pressure: the clients who call are often panicking, and the person who shows up needs to be the steadiest one in the room.
"We look for people who stay calm when everything else isn't — who think clearly under pressure and bring that calm to everyone around them," Doug says.
It also demands genuine curiosity. No two situations are identical. Technical knowledge matters, but so does the ability to think through something that has no instruction manual and figure out the answer anyway.
If that kind of work sounds exhausting, it probably is not the right fit. If it sounds exactly like what you are looking for, we want to hear from you.
Our Culture
Picatti is family. At this company, that phrase has a specific and literal meaning that goes back three generations and nearly 100 years.
The people here look out for each other. The team is more important than any individual. The work can be hard and the hours long, and the company takes that seriously: work-life balance matters here because the well-being of the team is directly connected to the quality of the work they do.
Picatti Brothers has deep roots in Yakima, and those roots come with a responsibility to the community. The family has supported charitable causes and local organizations consistently throughout the company's history.
A Timeline of Picatti Brothers
1850 Family Legacy
Gabriel Piccatti was born in Rocca-Conavese, Italy. Leaves school at age 12 to work in the coal mines.
1892 First Licensing
Gabriel Piccatti earns his Timberer’s trade license after a three-year apprenticeship. Promoted to work at a mine in Turkey.
1901 Immigration to the US & Name Change
Gabriel immigrated the family to the United States. At Ellis Island, “Piccatti” becomes “Picatti.” The family travels west to Washington State.
1904 The 3 Brothers
George Gabriel Picatti was born in Cle Elum, Washington. The three brothers: Joe (born Italy), Stephen (born in Turkey), George (born in the USA). Known in the family as the Wop, the Turk, and the Sam.
1923 Places Advertisement
Joe Picatti advertises pump and motor repair services from the back porch of his home in Hanford. He becomes a distributor for Allis-Chalmers.
1928 Picatti Bros Established
George returns from Washington State College with his engineering degree and graduate training at Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee. He joins Joe and Steve. Picatti Brothers opens at 103 South 4th Avenue in Yakima.
1936 New Shop
The business continued to prosper, and moved to 105 South 3rd Avenue.
1958 Second Generation
The second generation returns from WWII and the Korean War. Picatti Brothers is formally incorporated as Picatti Brothers, Inc.
1980 Third Generation
The third generation joins: David, Mike, and, later, Doug Picatti, bringing engineering careers from GE, Boeing, and Square D.
2000 New Corporate Office
New corporate headquarters built at 2309 South 3rd Avenue in Union Gap, on 11 acres.
2017 New Focus
Electrical contracting and engineering divisions were sold. The company focuses on electrical apparatus repair and well and pump services. Headquarters moves back to downtown Yakima to our 1936 building.
2019 Building on Fire
A fire breaks out in our office believed to be caused by a homeless man. The shop is completely renovated back to its 1936 roots.
2021 Back Into Renovated Building
Exactly 2 years to the day, we move back into our renovated building with completely updated infrastructure to take us to our 100th anniversary and hopefully to our 200th.
2026 Today
Picatti Brothers continues to serve Yakima and the Yakima Valley, family-owned, with the same commitment that started it all.
Frequently Asked Questions About Picatti Brothers
Picatti Brothers has been in business since 1928.
Founded in Yakima, WA, by three immigrant brothers with engineering backgrounds, the company has remained family-owned and operated for nearly 100 years.
Join Our Team
Picatti Brothers has employed hundreds of people since 1928. Many stayed for years. Some stayed for decades. A few retired here after long careers doing work that mattered.
If you are built for this kind of work, the kind that is physical, unpredictable, technically demanding, and genuinely important, we want to hear from you. Even without a specific opening, send a resume and explain what you would bring.
