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16d •
Welcome to HVAC Owners Roundtable — Start Here
John Kelley here. If you're reading this, you've made it past the qualifying questions and you're now in a private room with other HVAC business owners. No techs lurking. No vendors selling. No tire-kickers. Just operators. Here's how to get the most out of this room: 1. INTRODUCE YOURSELF IN THE COMMENTS BELOW. Drop your: - First name + city - How long you've been in the trade - Truck count / team size - One thing you're working on this quarter that's keeping you up at night That's how we find each other and start trading notes. 2. OPEN THE CLASSROOM TAB. Lesson 1 is live: "The Johnston Air Close: How I Hit a 62% Close Rate" — the consultative sales system that took me from a $3,200 startup to a debt-free exit in 24 years. Read it. Try the 4 action steps for the next two weeks. Report back here. 3. SHOW UP TO THE FIRST LIVE CALL. Posted in the Calendar (date dropping soon). Owner-to-owner Q&A, real bids reviewed, no slides. Replay drops here within 24 hours if you can't make it live. 4. POST THE HARD STUFF. Bring the bid you can't price. The crew problem you can't fix. The customer who's grinding you on a $40K install. This room is for the conversations you can't have anywhere else. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE RULES ARE SIMPLE: - Owners only. No techs, no vendors. - No selling to other members. - No "buy my course" promotion. - Real names, real businesses, real talk. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ FOUNDING MEMBERS ARE LOCKED AT $49/MO FOR LIFE. Once we hit 100, the door price jumps to $79. The first 100 stay grandfathered forever. Glad you're in. Let's go build something. — John
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16d •
The real math behind a $9/mo maintenance customer
A customer pays $9/mo for the Priority Protection Plan. Sounds like nothing. Here's the real math from my Johnston Air books: - $108/year direct revenue - 84% retention year over year - Average tenure: 11 years - Lifetime PP revenue: ~$1,188 But that's not the real number. Of those PP customers over 11 years: - 22% replaced a full system through us (~$8,400 average install) - 38% added another zone, ductless head, or upgrade (~$2,200 average) - 91% used us for service calls vs. shopping around Real LTV from one $9/mo membership: $3,800–$4,500. This is why recurring matters more than people think. It's not the $9. It's the 11-year relationship that the $9 buys you. Are you running a maintenance program? What's your retention rate?
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16d •
Fired a 12-year tech last week. Worst week of the year.
He was good in 2014. Great in 2018. Coasting by 2022. By this year he was costing me callbacks, customer complaints, and morale on the crew. Talked to him 4 times in 18 months. Wrote up 3 specific issues. Set 60-day improvement targets. He hit nothing. Walking him to the door was still the hardest thing I've done as an owner this year. The lesson I keep relearning: techs don't decline overnight. You watch them slip for years and tell yourself "next quarter." Then you wake up and realize they're hurting your other guys, and the good ones are starting to ask why. When was the hardest fire you've had? How long did you wait too long?
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16d •
What's the biggest job you've walked away from on price — and didn't regret?
In 2009 I walked away from an $87,000 commercial install because the GC wanted me to drop my price 22% to "match a competitor." I told him my labor guarantee alone was worth more than the spread. If his other guy wanted to lose money, I wasn't gonna stop him. Six months later, the GC called me to clean up after the other guy. Charged him 1.4x what I originally quoted to fix the bad install. The lesson: the cheapest customer is your most expensive one. The cheapest contractor is your competitor's best lead source. What's the biggest job you walked away from? And did the customer come back?
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HVAC business owners only. Pricing, hiring, P&Ls, exits — from a 35-year operator. No techs, no vendors, no tire-kickers.
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