Why Your HVAC Company Needs a ‘Cheerleader’

Our culture is what can set us apart from our competition.  In the home service industry, competition can be literally a stone’s throw away in many markets.  How you invest and support in your team can make the difference in an applicant choosing you over the company down the road. Your culture is contagious, it can be felt as soon as you walk through the doors.  The cheerleader role can be a vital part of creating a positive and uplifting culture for your entire team: technicians, call center, warehouse, managers and others.  Each department knowing they have someone to lean on and rely on is what helps keep your team working seamlessly together.  It’s not one department against another, it’s one team grinding and focusing on one goal.  When you get your team to that point, you had better hold on because your company will catapult.

Passion for People

My background was in retail management and as an escrow officer at a title company.  Customer service has always been a part of my life.  People are my passion.  In 2010 I began working in the home service industry with my husband Joe.  He is a second-generation HVAC company owner, taking over in 2006 from his father.  He was running the company pretty much single-handedly when I started.  He was answering incoming calls while in the field diagnosing repairs, coordinating crews for residential new construction installs, you name it, he was doing it all while trying to grow the business.  The focus of the company at that time was mainly new construction.  Joe knew that to grow the business we had to make a name for ourselves in residential service. 

I came on board to help build a website, do a little marketing, clean up the software and answer the phones.  Our plan was for this to be a temporary gig for me.  The thought of working together all day every day seemed like it would be for the birds.  Luckily, we worked very well together, and we decided building our business is exactly what we were supposed to do.  We joined Service Nation in 2011 to learn from industry dominators on how to grow in the service industry.  Also, that same year we added a plumbing division.  We built a brand and began making our name known. 

We grew our business by 50 percent year-over-year.  I had many roles during this time of growth, including office manager, CSR, dispatcher, payroll, accounting, A/P, A/R, recruiting/hiring, psychologist, marriage counselor, day care coordinator, janitor . . . you get the idea.  We quickly got to the point of needing layers of management. 

Passion for People in Action

As we brought in new employees, I would train and help get them acclimated.  I became their go-to person for all the things.  I was their support system.  I was their cheerleader.  My focus was now able to be on the people.  I still handled payroll and accounting, but my passion became my people.  It was very important for everyone on our team to know the numbers.  We all must know the goal, so we know where we’re going, if we aren’t talking about where we are to that goal then we’re spinning our wheels.  It was all about the numbers and making sure our team understood what the numbers mean for our company. 

I took over the weekly tech team meetings, and began each meeting with a “thought of the day”, something positive to start the day, or to encourage or challenge them, and some were just funny.  We shared the individual tech numbers, each department’s numbers and overall total company numbers.  We went over where we were to our goal and to what we did last year.  We read the latest reviews in front of the whole team.  We held contests and bonus opportunities to encourage the techs to get the results we needed.  Joe always says what gets rewarded, gets done.  We celebrated the wins as a team and discussed the opportunities as a team.  It is amazing how quickly your team can come together as one when you share the vision of your company with them, when you include them in the process of how we intend to get there and when you get their buy in.  Our growth continued to catapult and in 2021 we were able to sell to private equity.  Joe and I stayed with the company and that was mainly because of our people.  We wanted to ensure that they were taken care of during this transition of ownership.  And that’s really when the cheerleader role took off for me.