With each passing year, it’s getting more and more taxing for family-owned dealers to compete with the sizable box companies.
Our culture has truly changed when it comes to small stores that offer quality products and personalized service, but my family has owned and operated a heating, ventilation and cooling contractor for many generations now, and all of us are proud of our reputation, and when my parents started the business, they depended on newspapers and penny savers to advertise their furnaces, ventilation systems, cooling systems, and related merchandise, paper advertising wasn’t cheap, however it was necessary in order to keep our name out in the public, gradually, as the internet replaced paper advertising, our family has had to adapt to the times, just like every other business, but my generation was more PC-savvy than my parents, so all of us took the lead in setting up a website, text, and social media.
All of us would run promotions on furnace upgrades that would run just before the Winter time weeks would hit, knowing that the consumer would be thinking about keeping their homes and dealers moderate in the long, frigid Winter time weeks. All of us featured many brands and chances of Heating & A/C-related merchandise, however all of us could never compete with the larger companies’ inventory and volume. Our repair was guaranteed and our Heating & A/C dealers are the best. But all of us started to truly believe the crunch with each passing year in the competitive market… So all of us did a market survey to assess what all of us needed to do to regain the market share that all of us were slowly losing. All of us found that if all of us provided twenty-several hour repair for our Heating & A/C products, all of us would have a competitive edge over the bigger Heating & A/C distributors. So, although it sporadically means sleepless days for our servicemen, all of us stand alone – thanks to unique offering.