It’s Time to Look at an HVAC Business Like It’s a Machine

If there’s one thing every HVAC contractor and technician understands, it’s how to service a machine — if only running a successful business could be that simple.  

When Ed Bishop, sales and operations management professional, and also the senior director of strategic partnerships at Service Fusion, spoke at the Service World Expo held in Orlando earlier this month, he challenged attendees to look at their businesses from a different angle.  

As a man who worked in several different sectors throughout his career, he said he’s found there’s always one constant — business is business.  

When specifically looking at the HVAC industry, it can help to think of a business as a machine, he said, as that’s what technicians in this field do — service and repair machines.  

In Bishop’s analogy, he paints the four cornerstones of business as gears — each is intrinsically intertwined, moving together to build speed and power. But, if one gear is torqued on too hard or the machine is fired up out of sequence, things can get messy. The same thing happens in a business when too much attention is placed on one aspect, or too little on another.  

It takes a certain level of self-awareness to be successful in a business endeavor, and Bishop acknowledges that’s often one of the most difficult things to understand. So, when it comes to servicing a business like a technician would service a machine, it’s important to recognize when there are certain components or aspects that a contractor might not necessarily understand as well as other elements, but once they become aware of that, changes can be made.  

For this strategy to work, Bishop also suggests only wearing “one hat at a time,” and blocking out time to solely concentrate on one aspect. This is especially vital for smaller companies, those that make under $3 million, as it’s usually one person wearing multiple hats simultaneously while trying to run the show.  

Bishop’s “business gears” work in a linear progression, starting with marketing, and then shifting to sales, operations, and accounting.  

Marketing 

It all starts with making the phone ring.  

In plain terms, marketing is about putting messages in front of people: Bishop said contractors need to ask themselves how they’ve marketed in the past, how marketing should be done going forward, and how satisfied they are with their targeted audience understanding the company’s unique selling positions.  

Try to avoid getting stuck in the same old routine, and be willing to adapt to different approaches if the current one is not working. One great low-cost option is the vehicle wrap, which is highly visible and, as an added bonus, mobile.  

Company culture and how technicians are trained can also be leveraged as a power marketing tool — not only can this help to attract new technicians, it will also instill confidence and trust in customers. In this sense, adding somewhere in an advertisement that a company is committed to training and developing its team can be impactful on multiple levels.  

A short to-do marketing list: 

• make a list of customers and prospects 

• enter the last date communicated with them 

• enter the main message shared 

Sales 

Are you calling the right customers/prospects at the right frequency and with the correct message? At the same time, are you leaning too heavily into your repeat customers? 

“New customers are the lifeblood of your company — if you’re tracking new sales compared to repetitive sales, you’re missing something really, really important,” Bishop said. “If you don’t put new blood in, you’re going to lose some on the churn on the other side and you’re not going to keep up.” 

When it comes to a sales teams, Bishop said, like in a marriage or any other important relationship, things can fail if clear expectations aren’t set and understood.  

Make sure there are conversations about how to get to the desired performance level, instead of just stating a goal. Frequently reviewing and revisiting these expectations will help to make any necessary adjustments along the way, instead of all at once, where most of what is said will be forgotten or not implemented.  

Questions to contemplate: 

• How satisfied are you with the sales team? 

• When was the last training session the team attended? 

• Are you using consultative selling techniques? 

• Are you aligning sales with other departments like operations? 

Operations 

Put simply, operations should be repeatable and without great effort.  

To safeguard operations against catastrophe, like the departure of a highly-valued technician, Bishop said to start creating an SOP, written by the techs themselves. 

“Force them to write it all down,” he said. “Tell them you want a binder above their desk of every one of their tasks and how they do it exactly.” 

While there’s going to be pushback at the suggestion — it will take too much time, it’s too complicated — tell them to just do it.  

“It might take time, it might take years for the right individual who is super important to (your business), but that’s called disaster recovery,” Bishop said.  

Also, make sure that it is written in a way that someone from outside the company could understand, because having these procedures documented and in place can add value to a company, should the owner eventually want to sell.  

“Procedures are what gets you paid, not hard work — I hate to tell you that, but I found the hard way a long time ago,” Bishop said.  

Bishop also said business owners sometimes overcomplicate things, and it can be beneficial to stop striving to be “great” all the time, as great can be the enemy of profits.  

“Quit being great, be good — we spend so much time trying to be great that we step over an awful lot of money,” Bishop said. “And if we were doing good, we’d be doing a lot better for our communities and ourselves.” 

Questions to contemplate: 

• Do you have the right team members where they should be? 

• What changes/improvements have you wanted to make? 

• What do customers love about doing business with you? 

• What drives your customer crazy when working with you? 

Accounting 

When Bishop asked attendees to stand up and congregate in one of the four corners of the room, each representing a part of the business machine that they felt was the most important, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the accounting section was the least populated.  

But, no matter how a business owner feels about this aspect, it can’t be ignored. By recognizing this may be a bit of a shortcoming, it becomes easier to reach out to another professional for help. But, when doing this, don’t completely abdicate responsibility and think this is something that only needs passing attention.  

“There’s a there’s a theory out there,” Bishop said, “If you only ask once a year to fix something, you only have one time to fix it. You ask 12 times a year, you got 12 times … if you’re not talking to your accounting person and your tax person on a frequent basis, you might as well not be paying up, because the actions that they tell you to do are way too late.” 

It’s also vital to ensure all of these systems are backed up, which will be something incredibly important if a business is the victim of a ransomware attack or something similar.  

“And when I say back-up, I mean everything that’s important to you,” Bishop said.  

Questions to contemplate: 

• When was the last time you reviewed your practices? 

• What do you need to know and when? 

• What do the people who do that accounting think you can do to improve? 

• When was the last time you evaluated your legal documents and banking relationships? 

Making It All Happen 

There’s a phenomenon that when a contractor leaves a convention with a head full of ideas on how to improve business operations when they arrive home, some struggle to actually do it.  

“We fill you with great ideas,” Bishop said. “And you know what happens when you go back? You have 732 emails, 15 angry customers, blah blah blah, and you don’t do anything, even though you have the best intentions in the world.” 

Bishop suggests pulling out your phone right now and setting an appointment for yourself, to actually sit down and implement the things that can help a business to thrive.