I am sort of embarrassed to tell you how long I’ve been in this business.
No one likes to age themselves, right? It has been just over thirty eight years, and it has all been under one roof, metaphorically speaking. The business itself has actually grown and expanded several times over the years, but I have always been employed by the same company, the same man who originally hired me right out of high school. Let me tell you that 40 years ago going to college was a big deal, and few of us could afford it. When I had a chance to work for a small HVAC contractor, I jumped on it, and the rest is history. Back then HVAC was considered a growth industry, meaning that it was poised to expand and get bigger and bigger. The funny thing is that 40 years later, HVAC is still a growth industry, one so well rooted in the society of this country that most people cannot envision a life without air conditioning and heating on demand. That means job security, and for me it meant regular pay raises and promotions, too, as the HVAC business got bigger, it built all of us up as workers. So to get back to my original point, I never had a cause or a reason to leave this HVAC business for another one, and the thought of starting my own never crossed my mind. Running your own HVAC business is insanely complicated, with so much overhead, so I am very lucky to have worked where I did.