About Me.
A Face for Radio – A Brain for Heating and Air Conditioning.
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Hello. My name is John. I like soft rock, puppy dogs, and sipping piña coladas on the beach. Oh… wait. This is High Performance Heating & Air, not Tinder. Besides, what I really like is sipping Manhattans in a nice restaurant where there’s no chance of getting caught in the rain. Ten points if you get the cheesy 1970s reference.
Obviously this isn’t a traditional “About Us” page. It doesn’t have a mission statement, a vision statement, or a long list of self-aggrandizing superlatives. What it has is a little bit of history about yours truly, the guy pictured above pretending to be a radio announcer. I was never actually in radio because, well, I don’t like being broke.
Professional Past
I got my first job at Burger King in the late eighties. I worked my way up and eventually became the assistant manager at the Danville location. It was rather run down. I found myself fixing the equipment rather often. I rather liked it. It sure beat managing people. In hindsight, I’m glad for the boss’s penny pinching ways. Had he replaced the equipment in a more timely fashion, my talent for fixing things might have gone unnoticed.
That talent needed refinement, so I went to Sequoia Institute. They had automotive and HVAC programs to choose from. The average graduate’s starting wage was $6 and $9 per hour respectively. You’ll never guess which program I chose. A year later I graduated in 1994 at the top of my class. Don’t be too impressed. You know you’re not in an Ivy League school when one of your instructors cracks a Copenhagen smile.
I went on to work for the “HVAC man” for next nine years. It was during that time that the industry went through its first wave of major consolidation. Hundreds of local HVAC contractors were suddenly part of a corporate chain, including the one I worked for. Our new corporate captains didn’t know which end of a screwdriver to hold, but they did know how to turn the screws on their employees by giving us a simple choice: Sell more crap or make less coin.
Professional Present
I refused to sell out, so I got out by starting my own company in 2003. I called it On Time HVAC. The first few years were slow going, so I filled the time by taking classes. It was a revelation. I thought I had become a top technician and, in some ways, I was. But taking all those classes made me realize how little a typical top tech in residential HVAC knows. It was humbling. A few years and a few hundred hours of training later I got my groove back.
Some of that training included a building science course put on by the CBPCA. One of their instructors kept referring to “high performance heating and air conditioning”. I never really cared for my original business name, not to mention the original truck lettering. (Please don’t mention it.) So in 2005 I changed the business name and, mercifully, the truck lettering. I later traded in that black beauty for a full-size Ford Transit.
Professional Future
There’s no grand plan for the business, but then there never was. I started the business on a wing and a prayer and a belief. I believed that if I worked hard and honestly that, by God’s grace, the customers would come. And they did. It wasn’t a matter of doing what I loved and having the money follow. I don’t love working in sweltering heat and freezing cold. It was a matter of doing right. That’s the only plan I have for myself and my customers.