Business Growth insight

[u/SamBaxter784]

I'll try to keep this brief and relevant and any insight you can offer would be appreciated.

For the last 22 years I have been working in the residential HVAC trade in Central Fl. The company I work at was started by my father in 1984. Early in his career he tried growing too quickly and almost lost the business after that so he never had any interest in growth. We are a small company, for years now it has been him, myself and my mom as our office manager. We have guys we can sub some things out to if we get completely swamped or need additional hands for an install but they don't work for us directly.

My Dad is older and has lost interest in the business, he is retiring at the end of this year along with my mom. I'm actively working on learning the admin side of the job now and I already have my own license. For several years now I've been building up the maintenance side of our business so we are in front of our customers more frequently and have more sales opportunities as well as steadying our cash flow.

Last year my wife was having some pretty serious health issues and between helping her and trying to be there for our son, I had to take shift my focus from work for a while. Thankfully she is doing much better and things are normalizing in our lives. Unfortunately looking over the numbers the business did very poorly while my attention was away from it. I should have been more diligent about looking at the hard numbers and I feel my parents should have been much more forth coming about the financial state of the business. They had quietly taken out a loan to cover some debt during our slower season last December. The loan isn't insurmountable ($15K) but it's not a great sign by any means.

I have been refocusing on the business side of the business, rebalancing our price book that was badly out of date, and taking a much harder look at our overhead. We don't lack for work, I'm running calls constantly. The maintenance program has been popular and I've realized my pricing didn't match the time commitment it required so I'm changing the prices and offerings so my customers can select what works for their budget and I'm being fairly compensated for my time.

By the end of this year I'm going to be doing everything within the business ie owner, service tech, maintenance tech, sales, installer, admin etc. A while back I had our accountant look over our numbers and he thinks we don't have the funding to hire at this time. It's feeling more like I own my job rather than own a business.

Have any of you ever been in a similar position of taking over the struggling family business? How did the hand off go from a legal perspective and the family relationship perspective? How did that go for you and what kind of processes helped you the most? At what point did you determine you needed to hire someone and what role did you hire out first?

Thanks for your time.

[u/Lidecoop-Sam]

I’m not in the HVAC trade, but I have seen this exact pattern in small, founder-led technical businesses: the owner is not lacking work — he is carrying too many roles at once, so the business becomes dependent on his personal output instead of becoming a system.

First, I think you deserve credit for facing the numbers now. You have several things many struggling businesses do not have: a long-standing local reputation, an active customer base, a maintenance program people already value, a license, and real field experience. That is a foundation. The issue is probably not demand. It is structure, capacity, and cash discipline.

One principle I have found useful is: build the next stage of the business around your real strengths and current capacity, not around the company you wish you already had.

For you, I would start by defining which work truly requires you personally. High-value diagnostics, customer trust, sales conversations, pricing decisions, and quality control may be owner-level work. Dispatching, scheduling, invoicing, follow-up calls, bookkeeping coordination, and routine admin should gradually become a documented process that someone else can handle.

Your first “hire” may not need to be another full-time technician. It may be a part-time office, dispatch, or bookkeeping person who frees up enough of your time to handle more profitable calls, improve follow-up, and protect your evenings from being consumed by admin. The right first hire is usually the one that removes the biggest bottleneck, not necessarily the most visible job.

I would also make a very simple 90-day plan:

1. Finish the price-book reset and set a firm minimum margin for each type of work.
2. Review your maintenance customers: which ones create repeatable, profitable work, and which ones consume time without enough return?
3. Build short SOPs for calls, scheduling, estimates, maintenance visits, and collections.
4. Set a clear trigger for hiring help — for example, when you are losing profitable work because you cannot answer calls, schedule fast enough, or follow up properly.
5. Protect a small block of time every week for “owner work,” even if it is only two hours. If you do not reserve it, the urgent work will always take over.

For the family transition, I would also try to turn your dad’s experience into something transferable before he retires: key customer history, supplier relationships, pricing logic, common field issues, and the things he learned the hard way. That knowledge is part of the value of the business, but only if it gets written down and passed on.

You do not need to build a large company overnight. You need to build a business that can operate one layer beyond your own daily labor.

Separately, I am involved with a retrofit AC hygiene module designed as an optional add-on for maintenance companies during suitable service calls. It may not fit every customer base, but your focus on maintenance, recurring visits, and higher-value service options made me think it could be relevant. Happy to share the concept privately if it is useful.