The Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA), the nationwide association of heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVACR) contractors, has announced the finalists for the association’s 2010 Contractors of the Year.
“Contractors from across the country of varying size and with many different business models threw their hats into the ring in our re-designed Contractors of the Year program,” said Paul T. Stalknecht, ACCA President & CEO. “These six finalists represent some of the most unique business approaches in the industry, and our panel of past chairmen who are judging have a solid group of finalists from which they can select the winners.”
The winners in each category—one residential and one commercial—will be announced at the 2010 ACCA Conference, scheduled for March 7-9 in Tampa, Fla. The finalists in the two categories are:
2010 Contractors of the Year—Residential
A Good Neighbor Heating & Cooling (Middlebury, Indiana)—A small company that has survived and thrived despite serving an area with the highest unemployment rate in the country and a large Amish population that requires no modern comfort facilities. And when the local newspaper went out of business, the company started its own newspaper to create a marketing machine that serves a broader community purpose.
Service Legends (Des Moines, Iowa)—It may look like a typical HVAC company on the outside, but inside you’ll find some atypical approaches to building a properly-incentivized team. Service Legends lets the employees develop the company’s systems, resulting in a sophisticated approach to performance-based pay and the type of continuing education that has service techs (yes, you read right) standing up in front of the company to give book reports.
Conditioned Air Corp. (Naples, Florida)—A company that grew its annual sales by a total of $15 million when it decided to stop being an HVAC company and start being a true business that happens to offer HVAC services. With disciplined decision making and open-book management, Conditioned Air is able to swiftly adjust to changing market conditions. The company’s growth is the result of having a solid, conservative business plan in place, and then empowering employees to make decisions to drive that plan.
