I was on an HVAC chat site recently and read technician after technician complaining about their job in hvac. Their complaints were things like:
The boss is an asshole.
I thought I’d be making more money when I became a service tech, but I’m getting paid crap wages, don’t even get 40 hours a week in mild weather, but work 80 hours a week in the heat in Summer.
I don’t get health insurance or any other benefits.
I know that few jobs are perfect, but it seems that HVAC is failing its workforce. People work hard to learn the HVAC trade, then enter the workforce and find it to be very disappointing. Another experience is that an HVAC company will hire an inexperienced, untrained person and promise to train them in the trade. They work for a couple years doing the worst parts of the job: crawl spaces, attics, etc., but are never offered the opportunity to advance and are stuck in a low paying dirty job.
I discovered early in my career in HVAC how low the entry bar is to start your own company. In many places in our country, anyone with a toolbox and set of gauges can say they are an expert. I confess that I had very little more than some tools, a pick-up truck and a couple years of experience when I started my own company.
That low bar often means that the owner of a company not only knows less than he should technically, he knows far less about the business side of running an HVAC company – especially about hiring and managing technicians and installers. He’s learning the hard way: by experience.
“Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.”
Since the vast majority of HVAC companies are small companies with 5 employees or less, company owners have to be their own human resources department, without the training of an HR expert. They run service calls or do installations during the day, then try to find a few minutes somewhere to hire, manage and pay employees. This results in great frustration in the owner and employee alike.
So the owner gets the title “asshole” because his management style consists of yelling at his employees when they don’t do things as well as the owner could have done. There is no time to train or specify what the expectations of the owner are, but the employee is scolded for not knowing what the owner wanted.
Wages and benefits are often too low given the amount of knowledge a skilled technician must possess and maintain and given the market value of his knowledge. This is caused by the lack of business knowledge of most owners. Without extensive business knowledge, owners don’t know how to price their services at levels that allow them to pay competitive wages and benefits and still make a healthy profit. In fact, few new HVAC businesses make it to the five-year mark before closing their doors, not for lack of customers, but for lack of profit. And that is because of lack of business knowledge.
The answer to low wages and benefits and “asshole” owners? Better business knowledge for owners and more profits for the companies they own.
I wrote a small book called: “How To Start Your Own HVAC Business” that offers HVAC business owners valuable information on how to run a profitable HVAC business. It’s free for anyone to download. I hope it makes a small contribution to improving the lives of both owners and employees.
To your success,
Doc
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