Taking Over a 60-Year HVAC Company: The Real Cost & How to Beat Private Equity

Taylor is the fourth owner of Washburn Air, a Grapevine, Texas HVAC company founded in 1960, bought with no prior HVAC experience in 2024. In this episode of HVAC Hotshots, he covers the first moves he made taking over, his hiring and pricing approach, and how a local operator competes when the market is the second toughest it has been in 20 years.

Taylor spent most of his career in semiconductor manufacturing after getting his engineering degree from Texas A&M in 2000. In 2024, looking to acquire a business, he landed on HVAC. His reasoning: relatively recession-proof, and in Texas, where temperatures routinely hit triple digits, HVAC is genuinely critical. “For some people in their 70s, 80s, 90s, HVAC can really become a life or death situation. We can be more important to that customer than a doctor can be.”

Washburn Air in Grapevine, Texas has been in operation since 1960. Taylor is the fourth owner. Grapevine sits centrally in the DFW Metroplex, close to the airport and within reach of 5 million potential customers. The previous owner ran the company more as an absentee operation. Taylor went in at 40 to 50 hours a week.

The first conversation Taylor had before changing anything was with the previous owners. He wanted to understand the culture, the customer base, and what had made the company work for six decades. From there, the changes came fast.

Step one was personnel. “Step number one for any business is just making sure the right people are on the bus.” The right employees, properly motivated, before any systems or marketing conversations happen.

Step two was distributor relationships. Coming in as an outsider to the trades, Taylor had to build these connections from scratch. He talked to everyone: Sheer Supply House, Goodman, Carrier, Lennox. He became a preferred dealer with three of them. The preferred dealer status delivered better pricing on equipment, which flows directly to being competitive on quotes without sacrificing margin. His advice: share your vision with your distributors early. “Convince yourself that you’re going to be successful, then convince your distributors. It’s a volume game, it’s a numbers game.”

Hiring. The paid route on Indeed costs $15 to $25 a day and generates seven to eight candidates daily versus one or two on the free tier. Taylor was looking for five to seven years of experience, EPA certification at minimum, journeyman preferred. His expectations going in: plan to interview 25 to 30 technicians before you have a real feel for what you want.

The most important interview question: “Would a customer feel comfortable with this person being in their home?” Clean background check. Relatively clean driving record (commercial auto insurance rates spike significantly when techs have multiple DUIs). Visible piercings and uncovered tattoos are considered. Small things, but they matter when a technician is in someone’s home around their kids.

Tenure is the other filter. “Retread technicians” who hop companies every six to eight months are a red flag. Taylor is looking for candidates who stayed two to three years with previous employers, because that signals someone the previous employer trusted and invested in.

Training is scheduled in fall, winter, and spring only. “In the summer, it’s go time.” Pulling a technician for eight hours of training during peak season while customers are calling for emergency AC service is not an option. Distributor training programs handle the technical side; they are available and free through the preferred dealer relationships.

The customer-sourced parts problem. When homeowners find parts online and want you to install them, Taylor’s answer is no. “How do we know they bought the right part? The unit doesn’t work and they’re looking at us like we broke something.” The standard is to diagnose, source the correct parts for that specific model and serial number, and guarantee the work. The volume pricing advantage means operators rarely pay what a single homeowner would pay online anyway.

The target margins. On install: 45%. On service: 60%. Taylor offers these as targets for any properly licensed, insured company that does good work. Right now, hitting them consistently is harder than it has been in recent memory.

2025 in Dallas is the second toughest HVAC market in 20 years, with COVID being the first. The causes are structural: interest rates have not dropped, leaving consumers tighter with discretionary spending. Tariffs have pushed parts costs up roughly 20% compared to 2024. The EPA mandate transitioning refrigerants from 410A to 454B and R32 required manufacturers to redesign entire product lines, and the newer refrigerants and smarter components cost more. All of those pressures land on the end consumer simultaneously. Taylor has seen companies with 40 trucks running only four in service on a given day.

The response: be willing to lower margins to stay competitive while the market is tight, but know what you are giving up and track it.

Marketing. SEO is a long-game investment. New websites go through a Google sandbox period where rankings are suppressed for months before the domain builds authority. Taylor’s been at it for a year and calls it the main channel, alongside Google Local Services Ads and direct mail. The inherited domain from a 1960s-era company gave a head start that a startup would not have.

The direct mail tactic that works: magnet mailers with the Texas Rangers baseball schedule in the spring and the Dallas Cowboys schedule in the fall. Nothing proprietary, all public domain game schedules. The result is a branded, useful object that goes on the customer’s refrigerator and stays there through the season. “If I can get something the customer wants and have them put it on their fridge, that’s a huge win. It has my logo on it, it has coupons on it. That homeowner then has a party at their house with 20 or 30 people. That’s subliminal advertising the customer is doing for me.”

Competing with private equity. Dallas has an HVAC company doing $100 million a year with a $20 million marketing budget. Taylor is not pretending to match that footprint. The strategy instead is local dominance: be the premier HVAC company in Grapevine specifically. Currently top five on Google locally, working toward top three. The research method he describes: Google your competitors and study the first 50 results that come up under their name. Find their backlinks, understand who they are connected to, and reverse-engineer the framework that makes them rank well.

“We offer a better product. We’re just not going to get our name in front of the customer as much as that competitor will. So how do I convince them of that?” The answer is showing up consistently at the local level, building reviews, and investing in the channels where a smaller operator can still compete on cost and quality.

Washburn Air is at washburnair.com, on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. For any HVAC operator thinking through acquisition or local growth strategy, book a free TradeOps strategy call.

Related: Google Local Services Ads for HVAC and plumbing companies.