How To Grow Your HVAC Business To a Million Dollars Ft. Chris Plunkett

Chris Plunkett started Tailored Mechanical in Tucson, Arizona in 2013 and has been in the trade since he was eight years old. He now coaches other HVAC operators through Conquer Coaching while running his own company. In this episode of HVAC Hotshots, he breaks down the referral engine that has been his top lead source for 11 years, the Myers-Briggs hiring system he uses before anyone picks up a wrench, and the leadership lesson that completely changed how he thinks about being an employer.

Introduction

The answer to “how do I grow my HVAC business to a million dollars” is almost never a new marketing channel or a smarter ad campaign. It is consistent execution on the things most operators already know they should be doing but have not built real systems around: earning referrals, hiring for values before skills, training every week without exception, and developing the leadership that a growing team actually requires.

Chris Plunkett has been in the HVAC industry since he was eight years old. His father ran an air conditioning business, and Chris has done every job in the trade at some point across a 32-year career. He started Tailored Mechanical in Tucson, Arizona in 2013 and now coaches other HVAC operators through Conquer Coaching, helping owners close the gap between technical ability and business competence.

In this episode of HVAC Hotshots, Chris covers the marketing budget framework he uses to adjust spend by season, the Myers-Briggs screening system that filters candidates before any mechanical evaluation, why he says financing must always be in the original presentation, and the coaching moment that forced him to rethink his entire role as an employer. Keep reading.

From an 8-Year-Old and a Furnace to Running Two Companies

At eight years old, Chris was on an after-hours service call with his father. His dad was upstairs talking with the customer. The house was cold. Chris wanted to go home.

Instead, he changed out his first blower motor on a furnace.

By the time his father came downstairs to start the job, Chris was putting the panels back on and the system was firing up. “I remember the look on his face. He was so surprised but he was so proud.” At that moment two things happened simultaneously: he realized he was capable of this, and he realized it helped people.

Chris is 40 years old. He has been in the trade for 32 years. He started Tailored Mechanical in Tucson in 2013 primarily because he wanted to control his time and spend more of it with his wife. He now runs the company while also coaching through Conquer Coaching, working with HVAC business owners on the business disciplines the trade never teaches.

The technical knowledge was never the constraint. What required years of coaching, study, and hard experience was learning how to build a team, lead one, and run a business that does not depend entirely on the owner being in the truck.

The Best Lead Source Nobody Wants to Depend On

Referrals are the most consistent growth engine for a well-run HVAC company. They carry the lowest acquisition cost, the highest closing rate, and zero dependency on algorithm changes, platform policy updates, or auction-based ad pricing. You earn them by doing excellent work, charging a fair price, treating customers correctly, and asking for the referral directly.

Chris’s business started with one. His wife’s cousin spread word about Tailored Mechanical when the company launched in 2013 and talked Chris up to colleagues in his office. One of those colleagues reached out for a service call. That single relationship has since generated approximately $75,000 in work over the years. “My best lead source is still referrals,” he said. “It always has been and probably always will be.”

The rest of his marketing mix is structured but measured. He runs a few hundred dollars per week on Google Local Services Ads and pays for ongoing SEO, treating both as infrastructure rather than primary drivers. The logic is simple: people need to know you exist before they can send referrals. Google Local Services Ads and SEO built for HVAC companies create the floor that referrals are built on top of.

For operators with a small starting budget, Chris recommends showing up inside Facebook community groups and neighborhood groups where homeowners already ask for contractor recommendations. Not paid boosted posts, which he did not find produced good returns, but genuine participation in places where trust is already in the air. In-person networking through BNI and Chamber of Commerce works the same way: free to join, costly in time, high in return when done with consistency.

He also points to the web of relationships around real estate agents. Agents are a well-known referral source for HVAC, but the people agents work with daily are also worth reaching: home inspectors, roofers, plumbers. One relationship in that network often opens three or four more.

Marketing budget as a percentage of revenue is how Chris sizes the investment: 7.5 to 10% of projected monthly revenue in growth mode, and 2.5 to 5% in periods when the existing customer base is generating enough volume. “It’s really important that we know our numbers and what our budget looks like so that we can make those plans.”

Building a retention-first lead generation system, where the goal is to stay in the customer’s life rather than constantly re-acquire them, is the structure behind those referral numbers. Lead generation for HVAC companies built on that foundation produces compounding returns in a way that cold acquisition campaigns cannot match

The Hiring System That Screens Personality Before Skills

Chris hires, trains, promotes, and fires based on core values. Technical ability matters, but it is not the first filter. The first filter is personality.

His framework centers on Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). He built a 20-question screening assessment with questions designed to surface how a person actually processes the world, not questions that a candidate can easily game. “If you’re at a party, do you prefer to sit in a corner and observe or do you like to be in the middle of the action?” The answers reveal introvert and extrovert tendencies and other MBTI dimensions that correspond with different roles. A technician, an installer, and an office coordinator each tend to fit different personality profiles.

He feeds the assessment results into a custom GPT he built to score and interpret the data. The output tells him whether a candidate is likely to fit the role before he invests time in a conversation or a hands-on mechanical evaluation.

“I can teach just about anybody to fix an air conditioner,” he said. “I can’t teach people the other things that we’re looking for in the soft skills. Can they have a conversation? Are they coachable? Are they humble?” Those qualities get screened in the first round. The technical evaluation comes after.

Once someone is on the team, the training structure is fixed: Mondays for soft skills, Fridays for technical. Monday sessions rotate between sales training with the company’s external coach, core values discussions, and process reviews. Friday sessions cover hands-on technical topics, including video walkthroughs, troubleshooting scenarios, and new equipment concepts.

Chris’s observation about training a room with technicians at different experience levels is worth holding onto. It sounds inefficient. It is not. “The new people are going to learn something new and the people that have been there for a long time are going to get a review and probably remember something that they forgot or maybe even fill in some gaps on some things that they thought they knew.”

Housecall Pro is linked with CompanyCam so every technician has a visual record of what has been done in each client’s home. Checklists standardize the process across skill levels. No one guesses what was done before or what

The Operational Decisions That Trip Up Growing Companies

Financing. Chris describes financing as something that must always be part of the original presentation. Research from Bankrate consistently shows more than half of Americans cannot cover a $1,000 emergency expense from savings. An HVAC repair often costs more than that. Without a financing option, a large share of potential customers have no path to saying yes.

“Always always always include financing options in whatever you’re offering,” he said. Present it alongside the job cost, not as a fallback after the customer hesitates. “The last thing you want to do is come back to somebody and say well if you can’t afford it we can always Finance it, because man does that make people feel like crap.” Housecall Pro integrates with Wisetack, which he recommends as a starting point for operators who do not yet have financing available.

Trucks. Do not buy cheap. “Every day that that truck’s not working you’re losing money.” A $500 to $900 monthly payment on a reliable vehicle is almost always cheaper than the compounded cost of a clunker going down in the middle of peak season. A technician on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck loses the job, creates uncertainty about equipment security, and affects morale. Newer used trucks can be a reasonable middle ground. Vehicles chosen primarily on price almost never are.

Vehicle branding. Wrap the trucks as soon as the brand is ready. Branding is what gives you the ability to charge a premium. “Nobody wants to pay what you value yourself at if you yourself don’t show that you’re worth that value.” The investment in how your vehicles look signals something about how seriously you take the business, and customers read that signal.

A website that matches the brand presence on those trucks closes the first impression before anyone calls. Web design for HVAC companies built around trust and local credibility reinforces the same professionalism a wrapped fleet projects on the road.

Admin ratio. One admin for every three to five field people is Chris’s rule of thumb. Once a company passes five technicians without administrative support, quality of scheduling, customer communication, and operational coordination begins to slip. Chris’s wife came on as office coordinator when the company reached three technicians and it became clear he could not manage field operations and office duties simultaneously. That hire is what allowed him to focus on building the business rather than running all of it.

Business structure. The answer is: talk to a CPA. The specific structure matters less than the outcome: protect personal assets through some form of limited liability organization, and structure the business so it maximizes your tax position. “Make sure that a CPA has helped you to build the right type of organization so that you are maximizing your tax benefits.” The S-Corp versus C-Corp versus LLC debate is a tax conversation, not a general business one.

Why Leadership Is the Real Ceiling

Technical operators who plan to grow beyond solo work eventually hit a ceiling that has nothing to do with their ability to fix equipment. It has to do with their ability to lead people. Chris describes his own leadership early in the life of Tailored Mechanical as something he is still actively working to correct.

The story that clarified it came through a coaching conversation. He had told an employee, mid-conversation, that he was there to make Chris’s life easier. His coach helped him see how backwards that framing was.

“My role as an employer is not to get people to fix things for other people,” he said. “My role is to make these people’s lives better. They’re out here busting their butts in hot, sweaty, gross conditions and it’s my job to make sure that their life is better because they’re out here working for me.”

That shift changes the lens on almost every management decision. Scheduling, equipment, training, communication, compensation: all of it looks different when the starting question is “how does this make my team’s life better” rather than “how does this make my operation easier to run.”

His advice for any operator with growth plans is direct: “Work on leadership. If you have plans to grow your company besides just being yourself in the field, work on your leadership. You absolutely have to work on leadership.” He found it through a coach. That is not the only path, but it is the one that worked for him, and it changed more about his business than any marketing change or operational system.

When to Bring in Outside Help on Leadership and Business Growth

Most HVAC operators hit the same wall somewhere between solo and five-person team: the skills that built the company stop being the skills that grow it. Leadership, systems, hiring, and financial clarity are a different set of disciplines, and learning them through trial and error is expensive in time, employees, and opportunity.

This is the exact territory where working with someone who has already been through it compresses years of learning into months. Book a free TradeOps strategy call.

Conclusion

Chris Plunkett’s path from eight years old in a cold basement to running two companies in the HVAC space was not built on any single tactic. It was built on a referral engine earned through consistent excellent work, a hiring framework that filters for character before credentials, weekly training that raises the floor across the entire team, and the ongoing practice of becoming a better leader.

The “million dollars” in the title of this episode is a destination. Chris’s framework is the road: know your lead sources and spend against them at a percentage you can defend, hire for who people are before what they know, never let a technician walk out without offering financing, and treat every operational decision as an investment in the people running it.

[Watch the full episode on HVAC Hotshots.] To apply any of this to your business specifically, book a free TradeOps strategy call. Subscribe to HVAC Hotshots wherever you listen to podcasts.