High Quality HVACR Service Installations

The Sale

While eating breakfast at a local restaurant, seated next to me was a man with a baseball cap. The name of a prominent local building contractor was embroidered on what was otherwise a Boston Red Sox memento.

“So, are you a “—– Construction” employee, or a customer?,” I inquired. “A customer.,” he replied. I told him I once worked as a subcontractor for the company, doing a $300,000 HVAC and humidity control project for them in a house being remodeled by the man responsible for developing the 1st cable modem.

The man chewed the last of his breakfast and said he was remodeling his home (not with the aforementioned contractor) and needed HVAC work done. He went on to say that he’d gotten 2 bids a year ealier. One was for $54,000 and the other was $129,000. I was all ears, as I like doing high-end projects.

He asked me if I wanted to give him a bid on his project. When I hear “bid” I think reality – I’ve done countless “bids” for “tire-kickers” and have not won anything but a free ticket to losing my time. So I asked him where he lived and the address he reported was in the same upscale neighborhood as the cable modem guy. I said okay, I’d “check out his project.”

I arrived at his residence – a seemingly modest home at first glance – and did a walk-through realizing the true expansiveness of the house (6,000 square feet). After touring the house for about an hour, discussing the nuances of what he had in mind for replacement of the old heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems, I concluded that a bid on par with his needs would mean a lot of design, estimating and proposal work on my part, work that I may never see a dime for.

“So, are you going to give me a bid?,” he asked a 2nd time. “Sure,” I said, “but it’s going to cost you.” “What, how much?,” he rightfully asked. “I’m going to hire you, I can tell you know what you are doing.” I responded with a confident line that they don’t necessarily teach in business school. “I may not want to hire you!” Then I explained how I’d recently turned down a $48,000 job for the largest petroleum ‘marketer’ in the Northeast, and cited 3 very good reasons for doing so. I told him I would provide him with drawings of equipment/duct layouts, estimates showing all my costs, mark-ups and gross margins, and proposals for all systems that he needed to accomplish his objectives for indoor climate control of his home. And I would guarantee my designs, as long as they were installed to my satisfaction.

Basically, I would give him everything he needed to shop out my designs for comparative, apples-to-apples bids – all for $3,600. Further, I would give him his design deposit back at the end of the job if he hired me to do it. To start I would need $1,800. He agreed and I started work a couple weeks later – this was in April of 2011.

I finished the project in December. It took this long because he added $19,000 of work beyond the original estimate. Plus, I have many air conditioning and refrigeration customers who called with service calls throughout the summer, too. The job total maxed out at roughly $162,000. (The job costing summary follows at the end of this post.)

With the backstory out of the way, here are pictures of the old systems in the basement of my new customer’s home.

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