Career, Business & Soft Skills

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “Where will you go to college?” Young people hear those questions all the time. Although we ask those questions in good faith, they also carry a burden of expectations.  By asking those questions, we imply that we expect the children to go to college […]

Business isn’t easy. Generally, when I look back at how much work it has taken to get a business off the ground, I wonder what I would have done if I had known what I know now. I wonder if I still would have been willing to put in all that work all over again. […]

When working in a business with people, you have two options: 1. Become bitter as you experience people, life, and issues. 2. Grow from experiencing people, life, and issues. I’m not proud to say it, but I realize now that when I started my business and had bad experiences, I would run to option #1 […]

When you think of a salesman, what comes to mind? Do you imagine a quiet person who helps you solve your problems by listening and evaluating you as a customer? Probably not.  When most people hear the word ‘salesman,’ they imagine a flashy personality who will talk to you for hours to try to get […]

I’m far from a country boy, but I did grow up in a rural area with animals, playing in the woods, and cleaning out chicken coops. Like many of you, we would play most of the day outside without our parents knowing or worrying about where we were. Was that an “unsafe” way to grow […]

There’s a moral to this story, though it is a bit more of a cautionary tale than most I write. While it doesn’t rank with the story of three wise men or even Frank Capra’s Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” you may find some common threads with both learning wisdom and remembering why throwing […]

I was sitting in a session at the HVAC Excellence educators conference (which was excellent, by the way), and my phone buzzed. So, like a typical punk kid, I looked down at it to see that my friend Josh had sent me a Facebook message asking if we served the east side of Orlando because […]

One trait I’ve seen with good technicians is that they take their jobs VERY seriously, but they learn not to take themselves too seriously. A few months ago, I had someone tell me online that I must think I’m the A/C “god” because I’m always telling everyone the “right” way to do things. This got […]

Before we jump into the stuff that will make folks angry, let’s start with some common ground. Most of us can probably agree that the desired result of education in the trades is: Knowing what you are doing and doing it as safely, efficiently, and correctly as possible. If we can agree that we all […]