In my experience as whole in the air conditioning industry and at newtons heating and air conditioning as a HVAC contractor myself, one of the most upsetting things is a dishonest HVAC contractor. Now i have worked as a HVAC technician and owned a company as a HVAC contractor so i feel like i have a lot of experience with this. I have worked at companies that you would see on tv and small HVAC companies where there is only a couple of HVAC technicians. I can safely tell you that their is major differences between working with the two. I will start off with the larger companies i have worked at. Firstly how it works for pay at these companies as a HVAC technician you may get $15 dollars for going out and doing a maintenance or maybe a service call. So if that is the case how would they ever make a living? Well you would get crazy high commission rates as high as 8% on HVAC installations and maybe 25 to 30% on any system repairs. This may sound great for a technician but as a homeowner it maybe difficult to believe these HVAC technician’s have your best interest at heart. Now in contrast with a smaller company my experience has been maybe $100 dollars total for selling a HVAC installation. This is why in my opinion our industry has become so sales driven. I remember having weekly meetings where they would pull up a projector and show what everybody’s sales were for this week. They would bring in sales experts to show you how you could pressure people into buying certain things. And maybe you guest it, if you don’t sell enough you get fired. I had a customer just this year that called me and another company said her compressor was bad and she needed to replace her system. The magic price for this was 24,000 dollars for a HVAC installation, that should have costed no more than maybe 8,000 at best. But think about the commission for this HVAC technician , it would be almost 2,000 dollars. That is why our number one motto is ” Are you tired of pushy HVAC salesmen trying to sell you a new unit over a minor problem? ” and here is the kicker. We were able to fix her system and get it back up and running for around $350 dollars. Now they may have very well have thought the compressor was bad, but that is the problem. These people are not tradesmen they are salesmen hence our other motto ” we will send tradesmen not salesmen”. So your maybe starting to get the picture, with this type of pay structure of course people are going to try and take advantage otherwise they wont make money. But this is what makes me so upset because it is so rampant in our industry especially they do this with people that are elderly. So when picking a HVAC contractor weather its newtons heating and air conditioning or another company or really most trade companies i always recommend mom and pop shops. When you call newtons heating and air conditioning you talk to the contractor not a sales manager. So in conclusion when picking a HVAC contractor be very selective and get second opinion’s to make sure they are being honest and not trying to just get that high commission amount.
Tips for your HVAC contractor whether or not your in Clearwater, Saint Pete, Largo or just all of Pinellas county
