The Blueprint to a $10 Million HVAC Business w/ Jonathan Neves

Jonathan Neves started in HVAC at 14 through a vocational high school, launched Green Energy Mechanical at 27 with a focus on heat pumps and energy efficiency, and has since grown to three locations in Massachusetts. In this episode of HVAC Hotshots, he covers the fire-yourself framework for scaling, the intentional training system behind his process-driven team, why culture is built on relationships not perks, and the direct mail plus cold calling strategy averaging $3,500 to $4,000 per lead.

In 2012, Jonathan Neves installed ductless heat pumps in a Boston triple-decker on a 15 to 20 degree day. Nobody else in Massachusetts was doing whole-home heat pump systems at the time. Every other contractor said it would not work when it got really cold. While Jonathan and his crew were commissioning the system that morning, they were ripping off their jackets because the house was so hot.

That one homeowner, Jennifer, told everyone she knew. Green Energy Mechanical started growing naturally from there.

Jonathan grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts: single-parent Black household, gang violence, drugs, poverty. By his own description, statistically he should not be where he is today. He credits the trades with redirecting his life at 14, giving him something to focus on while others around him were heading in the wrong direction. He started his co-op at 17, worked for other companies for a decade, launched Green Energy Mechanical at 27, and now runs three locations serving the greater Boston area.

In this episode of HVAC Hotshots, he covers the systems behind his growth, the leadership practices that keep three locations running without him, and the marketing combination nobody around him is copying. Keep reading.

Jonathan built Green Energy Mechanical on a prediction: people would eventually pay a premium for energy-efficient solutions and care about their environmental impact. In 2011, almost nobody agreed with him. “At the time a lot of people didn’t really care much about that. They just were like you’re the only person talking to us about heat pumps.”

The Jennifer story is the one that changed the business. Her triple-decker had a boiler installed illegally in the 1980s. It caught fire in 2012, the fire department soaked the inside of the home, and there was no legal path to putting in another gas boiler. She had not lived there in five to six months. Jonathan proposed ductless heat pumps, had her sign clauses acknowledging they might not perform in extreme cold, and installed them. On startup day, with outdoor temperatures at 15 to 20 degrees, the system worked so well the crew was overheating inside the home.

From that one installation, word spread. Green Energy Mechanical became the company in Massachusetts that was doing whole-home heat pump systems years before anyone else. By 2025, heat pumps are one of the most popular upgrades in the state, with rebate programs, 0% financing, and every oil contractor suddenly claiming heat pump expertise. Jonathan’s position: “We’ve been installing these for over a decade, way before our competitors. So we know how to design them correctly, install them correctly, and service them correctly. That makes a huge difference.”

Looking ahead, Jonathan sees the industry moving toward something closer to e-commerce. BlackRock is acquiring single-family homes at a rate that could give it 40% or more of that market by 2030. Google is accumulating data through Local Services Ads and its HVAC ecosystem. His prediction: Google may acquire PE-backed HVAC groups and offer a fully integrated service Google Guaranteed contractor, transparent pricing, 0% financing, simple checkout. “People trust Google. Now they have a contractor, the van says Google, Google Nest goes on the wall.” Whether that happens or not, the operators who have built authority, reviews, and relationships before that consolidation are positioned very differently from the ones who have not.

The difference between a one-man operation and a scaled company is not systems, tools, or capital. “It’s 100% a different mentality. The biggest thing that I’ve learned was how to fire myself.”

When you are the only person in the business, you do everything. The longer you operate that way, the harder it becomes to let go of control. Jonathan’s framework is straightforward: at each stage of growth, identify what the next level looks like, who needs to be in place, what processes need to exist, and then progressively remove yourself from the roles you are currently filling.

The first step is easy: fire yourself from roles you hate. Jonathan is a visionary, not an implementer. Writing SOPs, setting up detailed processes, managing project follow-through: those roles drain him. Hiring people who thrive there and removing himself from those positions came naturally.

The harder step is firing yourself from roles you love. Jonathan loved being a service technician. He stayed in the field long after he had installers working for him, because the identity of the “know-it-all service tech who loves to fix things and helps people” was who he was. Letting go felt like an identity crisis. Then he threw himself into sales, became very good at it, and then had to fire himself from being the only salesperson. Then from being the sales manager. Each transition followed the same pattern: the role became his identity, he excelled, the company outgrew his capacity as the sole person in that role, and he had to hand it off.

The book Six Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni helped him name this clearly. Understanding which activities give you energy versus drain it is the roadmap for deciding what to hire away from yourself first.

Jonathan describes his operating mentality as “jump off the cliff and figure out how to assemble the wings on the way down.” That instinct has cost him at times. His wife, who runs the business alongside him, brings the process-orientation that balances it. “She’s more process driven and together we work really well. She runs the business with me and I’ll be the visionary.” That partnership is itself a lesson: find the person whose genius complements yours and build from there.

The HVAC industry’s biggest operational challenge is talent. Jonathan’s solution is not to find better technicians. It is to build a system that makes a less experienced technician effective.

The call by call process, which he implemented with help from Landon Brewer and Lewis Bruno, puts a central support person into every job via Slack. Technicians follow a standardized information-gathering process at each visit. When the right information comes in, a central expert helps with remote diagnosis. The result: “I can take someone off the street, train them for three weeks, he learns the process, he uses the tools, and I can plug them into our system at any location.”

The training that makes this work has to be intentional. His word for 2024 was intentional. “Training needs to be process driven. If I notice I’m doing the same thing over and over again, I record it.” He uses Loom for this. Any task he finds himself explaining repeatedly becomes a video series. The training process runs in a fixed sequence: watch the video, review it together with the manager, demonstrate the task from start to finish, then sign off.

The sign-off is not bureaucratic. It creates accountability. When a problem surfaces later, the conversation is grounded in evidence: “I know that you got training because I have this acknowledgment here stating that you did it. So let’s talk about what’s going on.”

He learned the coaching conversation structure from Joe Cera and the Service MVP team. The approach is relationship-based, not punitive. When a gap shows up, the first question is not “why didn’t you do this” but “were you trained on it?” If not: “That’s my bad, bro. I should have created that training for you.” Owning the training gap as a leader is, by Jonathan’s account, the thing his team credits him for most. “When I say that, they just light up.”

If the gap persists after training, the coaching conversation escalates, not to firing, but to a structured furlough where the employee takes paid time off to reflect and then re-interviews for their position. His lead service technician went through a two-week furlough. He came back and requested to continue. He has not had a problem since.

ChatGPT has made the SOP creation side of this dramatically faster. “With ChatGPT and all this stuff, there’s zero reason why I can’t create an SOP in five minutes.” He enters the prompt, generates the document, and builds the training from there. AI optimization for HVAC companies is already embedded in day-to-day operational work at Green Energy Mechanical, not just marketing.

The live fire training room reinforces all of it: boilers, air handlers, ductless systems, ductwork, and heat pumps all available for hands-on training at the facility. Office staff have used it too, which meaningfully improves the conversations they have with customers on the phone.

Three locations run more smoothly when the people in them genuinely want to be there. Jonathan’s weekly meeting structure is built entirely around that.

Monday: in-person with both the install team and the service and sales team together. Tuesday: service tech training via Zoom. Wednesday: sales team Zoom. Thursday: open. Friday: everyone on Zoom together, and this is the one he talks about most.

Friday meetings do not focus on business metrics. They focus on people. Everyone shares a personal win from the week. Then there is a curveball question: what is your favorite movie, where would you go on vacation, if you could wave a wand and have one skill outside of work what would it be? The answers reveal who people are. The relationships deepen.

The shift in his meeting approach came from a conversation at NexStar with Ishmael Valdez. Jonathan was running meetings where he would spend 30 to 40 minutes reviewing what was wrong before sending everyone back out. Valdez told him to love on his guys. Jonathan came in the next Monday, bought breakfast burritos for everyone, set up a speaker playing music his Gen Z team actually liked, and spent the whole meeting just hanging out. No work agenda. Then at the end: “All right, I love you guys. Let’s go crush it.”

“At the end of the day everybody talks about culture, culture, culture and it’s like such a buzzword. But culture is relationships. If you’re trying to lead someone you don’t have a relationship with, you’re not going to be a very effective leader. I have guys that will literally fall on a sword for me because they trust me and love me as a leader. But I had to trust and love them first.”

Maintaining that energy requires protecting it. Jonathan wakes between 4 and 5 AM. He goes to the gym. He has a morning window where he looks out at the backyard, forces a smile regardless of how he feels (there is real research on the chemical effect of smiling), and runs through gratitude. Before leaving the house, he commits to finding one thing that will make the day great. “If I don’t believe it, I stay there until I believe it.” Then he goes and finds it. “By putting all that positive energy into myself before I even show up for anybody else, I’m ready to rock.”

Green Energy Mechanical’s primary digital strategy is Google Business Profile dominance across multiple locations. One of the main reasons Jonathan expanded to three locations is that each one creates a separate local presence with its own geographic reach. A single location can only dominate so much of the map. Multiple locations extend that coverage.

The offline strategy is less common and more effective than most operators realize. A postcard goes out to a targeted area offering a $49 tuneup (vs. the standard $199). Shortly after the mailing, a Philippines-based calling team reaches those same households: “We’re offering a hometown discount, tuneups are normally $199, for a limited time it’s $49. We’re going to be on your street Wednesday at 7 does that time work?” Appointments are set directly into the calendar.

The call by call process then takes over on-site. “We’re averaging $3,500 to $4,000 per sales lead, and that includes every single lead warranty calls, repairs, all of that.” At that blended rate, the economics are very favorable.

The KPI Jonathan tracks to know whether his company is healthy is Gross Blended Average: how much money does every knock on a customer’s door generate, regardless of the reason for the visit. Not average ticket, not conversion rate, but the dollar value of every contact across every job type.

“If I use a metric where every single time my tech or my salesperson knocks on a door I can measure how much that knock is worth, I can know if I’m going to be profitable at the end of the month or not.” When the blended average drops, it becomes a diagnostic tool. Which teams are pulling it down? Which job types? He traced a callback problem to a drain line issue on a specific furnace type, created a training session from a recorded fix, ran it at the next team meeting, and the callbacks stopped.

Payroll percentage and equipment cost percentage round out the KPI picture. If those stay in line and the gross blended average holds, profitability follows.

For 2025, Jonathan’s two words are Ruthless and Momentum. He keeps a flywheel from Good to Great on his desk as a visual reminder. After years of chasing top-line revenue, his obsession is now margin: 20% net profit and finding ways to stay there as the company grows. Lead generation systems that support profitability rather than just volume are what he is optimizing everything around.

His final advice: never stop learning, never stop growing, and network relentlessly. “I’ve spoken to other HVAC owners at midnight, talking, helping each other, sharing books and strategies and manuals.” He and his local competitors share openly because all of them hold an abundance mindset: there are more customers who need help than any of them can serve alone.

Jonathan Neves built a multi-location HVAC business by staying in front of where the industry was going, building the discipline to fire himself out of every role as he outgrew it, and creating a culture where people want to perform because they feel genuinely seen and cared for.

The system is specific: intentional training with documented sign-offs, a call by call process that makes a less experienced technician effective, a coaching framework that starts with owning the training gap, and weekly meetings structured around relationships rather than metrics.

The marketing combination is unusual: Google Business Profile dominance multiplied across locations, plus a direct mail and cold calling sequence that generates $3,500 to $4,000 per lead at scale.

And the mindset underneath all of it: “This industry is creating millionaires left and right.” Jonathan came from a neighborhood where that was not supposed to be possible. He went back to those neighborhoods to tell students about it.

To apply any of this framework to your business, book a free TradeOps strategy call. Subscribe to HVAC Hotshots wherever you listen to podcasts.

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