Hi, I’m Doc Garner, an HVAC Veteran and Pro!

The smells of a service truck on a hot summer day bring back memories of riding with my dad in his powder-blue Chevy pick up truck with tool boxes mounted on the sides. I didn’t know it then, but I was learning the skills that would be the way I made a living for the rest of my life. It wasn’t called an apprenticeship, it was carrying tools for dad, watching him greet the customers, diagnose the problem with the cooler or refrigerator, and fix it. He did this day after day and supported a wife and six kids comfortably. And he was self-employed all but a couple years of my early childhood.

In my self-centered teenage mind, it never crossed my mind to follow in my father’s footsteps and do HVAC.  So when I finished high school, I went to college and earned a degree to be an English teacher. After teaching for a couple years, I discovered that I couldn’t earn enough to raise my family on a teacher’s wage.  Plus, school principals and I didn’t get along. So, I changed direction.

 To make a long story short, I quit teaching and started my own HVAC business, using my dad’s old, borrowed powder-blue pick-up truck. The business was doing well enough so that, a year later, my dad left his business in Ohio and joined me in Tennessee, his original home state. We worked hard, made a living, and built a relatively large business of apx. 2.5 million in sales. 

   But we struggled the entire time. Never enough cash to pay our suppliers by discount; never any left at the end of the year for a bonus or wage increase,; never any time for vacations more than a long weekend. 

 Shortly after the death of my father, I declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy and left the business for what I thought was forever. I didn’t want anything to do with the HVAC business. I just wanted a secure teaching job that I could live out my days in peace. I didn’t care how little I got paid, and was determined to put up with whatever crap I got from school administrators.

But I couldn’t walk away from HVAC that easily. Refrigerant ran in my veins. Despite the security of a government paycheck, I missed being the master of my fate. In quiet times, my mind wandered back to why I failed. What should I have done differently? I had kept all the books I had bought and read about business and re-read some of them. “If others can make a good profit from the HVAC business, why didn’t I? What did they do that I didn’t?”

For 6 years, I enjoyed the relative security and ease of a teaching job in a community college. I even had time after work to grow a nice garden with a strawberry patch! But it wasn’t enough. I resigned and once again started an HVAC business. This time however, I did it differently. I was determined to not make the same mistakes as before. I carefully designed my pricing systems, my selling manuals and my employee management system.  Using the marketing skills I had learned from my first company, I quickly had enough work to begin hiring installers and technicians.

It has been another 18 years since that new start, and I am the proud owner of a growing, profitable company. And I’m enjoying the heck out of it! A few years ago, I brought on a partner. He’s doing a good job of running the company and that gives me a little time to pass on some of what I have learned to anyone interested, especially to new start-ups.