From $0 to $11 Million+ in HVAC: Darron Yarbrough Reveals His Secrets to Building an HVAC Empire

For eight or nine years, Yarbrough & Sons did somewhere between $4.5 and $5 million a year. Not declining. Not growing. Flat.

Darren Yarbrough is clear about the reason: “That was all that I could manage.” Every decision routed through him, and $5 million was the most decisions one person had hours in the day to make.

He went to trade school in the early eighties on his father’s advice to get a trade, and hung his own shingle in 1988 with his wife dispatching and himself running service calls. He sold the business in 1998, worked for the buyer, then came back and rebuilt it. Today the company runs HVAC, plumbing, septic, and generators out of Blanchard, about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City, with all three sons in leadership roles.

This post covers what he told us on TradeOps Radio: how the plateau broke, why he is unbothered by private equity, what happens when you show your team the real numbers, and what he is working on now.

The plateau was not a demand problem. It was a capacity problem, and it lifted when three people arrived who could make decisions without him.

His middle son Kobe joined in 2015, his oldest Will around 2016 or 2017, and his youngest Tucker in 2018. Darren had spent their childhoods telling them to go get an education because there had to be an easier way to make a living. They went, and came back anyway. Today Will is the general manager, Tucker is the CFO, and Kobe runs sales.

Once all three were in, the math forced a conversation. Four Yarbrough families now needed supporting, plus the team. Growth stopped being optional.

From that point, revenue moved from about $4.5 million to roughly $11.3 million last year. It went to eight, then ten, sat at ten for a year or two, then eleven. This year the company is running about 6% behind, which he attributes mostly to the economy.

His own summary of four decades of this is worth keeping: “I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to outwork my stupidity.” Mistakes still happen. The company just outworks them.

Before the sons arrived, Yarbrough & Sons did no advertising at all. Plain white trucks with the company name on the driver’s door, white pants and black shirts, and nothing else. Everything came from word of mouth.

They changed two things at once. They started advertising in earnest, and they hired a full-time marketing manager, Bryce, who has now been there four or five years. At the time, Darren says, no other heat and air company in the market had a dedicated marketing person, which gave them a head start on Facebook, YouTube, and the rest.

The second shift was mix. The company had been roughly 70% commercial and 30% residential. They pushed residential demand generation because the margins on residential change-outs are better, and the ratio has since flipped to about 60% residential and 40% commercial. They do almost no residential new construction: everything is change-outs, retrofits, and commercial package unit replacements.

The social content is not polished corporate material. Darren describes Bryce as out there every day beating the drum, which in a market their size is probably the right instinct.

Darren has already been on both sides of this. He sold his first company in 1998, at roughly $1 million in revenue, for about $180,000, which he calls not a whole lot of money. He worked for the buyer as a commercial manager for a couple of years, decided he was not such a bad manager after all, and went back into business for himself.

That timing puts him inside a wave history has already judged. Service Experts formed in 1996 by rolling up independent dealers, and Lennox acquired it in January 2000, taking its retail dealership count past 200. Lennox later exited the business entirely.

So when Darren says the cycle repeats, he is describing something he lived through. His read is that private equity comes in a wave, disappears, and comes back, and the current wave has run five or six years. The scale is not in dispute: KKR reportedly agreed this month to acquire A1 Garage Door Service for around $2 billion, according to Reuters.

His position is practical. Private equity is here, so you either compete with it or get run over.

Where he believes a family company wins is in the room where something went wrong. Investors buying equipment at better prices does not lower the price for the homeowner. What changes is who picks up the phone. Someone can call Yarbrough & Sons and reach a Yarbrough, and managers have the authority to take a loss on a job to make a customer right.

He credits the line to another contractor in a peer group, but repeats it because it fits: we may suck at a lot of things, but we take care of customers pretty well. The rule underneath it is shorter. If you screw up, fess up.

There is a margin point here too. Darren is content with 8 to 10% net, and notes that an investor with money in the market usually is not.

The last Friday of every month, the managers start cooking at 5:30 in the morning. About 120 eggs, eight pounds of bacon, six pounds of sausage, breakfast burritos.

Then they show the team the numbers. Gross revenue by division, what it cost to produce that revenue, labor rates by trade, overhead, then the profit at the bottom.

When net clears 6%, 10% of that profit goes into a fund that comes back to the team.

His reasoning is the strongest argument for open-book management I have heard from a contractor: whether he shows the numbers or not, people are going to come up with something in their heads.

If nobody sees the expense side, the owner is assumed to be pocketing the gross. If everyone sees it, decisions become legible.

His install and service manager spends money all day buying equipment, sheet metal, and parts, and never sees the receivables side. Twice a year he asks how they are doing, and because he sits in the breakfast, the answer is already on a page he has seen.

It also reframes raises. Compensation conversations run off labor percentage, so when someone asks for a raise and their labor percent is 50%, the answer is a number both parties can look at rather than a judgment call.

The tenure numbers suggest it holds. His second hire from 1988, a firefighter who started helping on his off days, still runs the sheet metal department. Several people are past 20 years, and average tenure is around seven. In 40 years, they have never laid anyone off for lack of work.

Yarbrough & Sons separates diagnosis from selling, and the structure is worth copying.

When a service technician finds a dead compressor, he photographs everything on site with CompanyCam and calls an estimator at the shop. They may FaceTime. The estimator walks the homeowner through three or four options in real time, while the technician is still standing in the house.

The homeowner does not take a second afternoon off work to meet an estimator hours later. The technician does not sit in a driveway waiting. And the company does not lose the window where a homeowner starts phoning competitors, which is exactly what happens when a tech leaves and a quote is promised for later.

They kept one estimator, Keith, working the old way for jobs that need someone on site from scratch, like a house with no air conditioning at all.

Hiring runs on the same logic. Oklahoma’s licensing path is long, which pushes people out of the trade: the Construction Industries Board requires three years of verifiable experience for a mechanical journeyman license, plus an additional year for a contractor license. So Yarbrough & Sons recruits from local vo-techs and from farm kids who do not mind heat, then trains them.

Winter slack gets absorbed rather than laid off. Oklahoma winters are mild, and people tolerate a broken furnace better than a broken air conditioner, so residential slows. Plumbers stay steady, and residential HVAC crews move onto commercial jobs.

When things go quiet, Darren calls a local school and offers free labor to change every filter in the building if they supply the filters at cost. That keeps a technician busy and buys goodwill in a community where it matters. Any operator with an uneven seasonal curve can build a version of this.

Ask Darren what stands between $11 million and $20 million and the answer is not a marketing channel. It is systems and procedures.

They are working on it constantly now, and he is candid that he is the holdout. He describes himself as the lone wolf while Will, the general manager, rides on top of everything saying stick to the procedures. His own job at this stage, as he puts it, is to get out of the way and let other people follow the process.

He is also honest about the company they now keep. At $11 million they sit in rooms with operators doing 30, 40, 50 million, and one doing 120, borrowing from those companies rather than from the small shops they used to resemble.

On tooling, they are leaning into AI harder than most operators their size. His sons built a workflow that registers customer equipment warranties automatically, removing a chunk of an office manager’s week. One recent week covered about 84 pieces of equipment.

Darren’s summary of what the technology does for an operator is blunt and fair: it makes an average man a pretty smart guy.

He is equally clear about the catch. Output that looks right is not the same as output that is right, which is why he reaches for a line he thinks came from Reagan. It did. Reagan used “trust but verify,” borrowed from a Russian proverb, at the INF Treaty signing in December 1987.

The reason his company gets useful results is that it has 40 years of job history, pricing, and material lists to feed a model, plus the experience to spot a wrong answer instantly. A newer operator has neither. That gap is the real story of AI in the trades right now, and it favors companies with history.

Three things come out of this conversation.

Find out whether your ceiling is the market or your own calendar. If every decision still routes through you, the number you are stuck at is the number one person can manage, and no marketing spend fixes that.

Show your team the whole picture, not just revenue. They are already estimating your profit, and their estimate is almost certainly worse for you than the truth.

Separate diagnosis from selling before you train technicians into salespeople. The knowledge load is too heavy for one person on a hot roof, and the structure costs nothing but a phone call.

Darren’s closing thought was about the shape of the path rather than the tactics. It is never a straight line. His own ran through a sale he came back from and eight flat years before the climb.

The full episode with Darren Yarbrough is on the TradeOps Radio YouTube channel, and subscribing there is the easiest way to catch the next one.

If you are sitting at a revenue number that has not moved in two or three years, it is worth knowing whether the constraint is demand or capacity before you spend more on either. Book a free strategy call with TradeOps and we will look at where yours actually sits.

Building the lead flow behind that kind of growth? See Lead generation for HVAC companies.