< Previous30 APRIL 2019HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAYwhenever they purchase services and products through RevuKangaroo. Learn more here (ncilink.com/Revu-Kangaroo). Be sure to sign up here: ncilink.com/RKTIPP.If you have any questions, call our Cus-tomer Care Help line at 800-633-7058.Introducing Partner RevuKangarooNational Comfort Institute is pleased to introduce our newest partner, Revu-Kangaroo – an online reputation man-agement service. They can automatical-ly gather all reviews posted online about your company on third-party sites (Yelp, Google, BB, Facebook, and more) and help you make the most of them.Why is this important? It allows you to tame the internet beast, to better man-age your online reputation, improve em-ployee relations with customers, and take care of any customer concerns be-fore they get posted to review sites.RevuKangaroo centralizes all your re-views so you don’t have to hunt all over the internet for them. They offer the fol-lowing benefits: Send customers to your website to leave a review Allow customers to rate your employee’s service Publish positive reviews to popular third-party sites Provide you instant review notifica-tion and real-time reporting Provide social sharing of your reviews.Furthermore, as a participant in the Training Incentive Partnership Program (TIPP), NCI members earn NCI Bucks NCI MEMBER UPDATEHigh-Performance Talk: Are You Missing Out?Last year, National Comfort Institute (NCI) updated our members-only email discus-sion forum to improve your daily peer-to-peer communications. It is called High-Per-formance Talk and it is an easy-to-use, fully featured website. The cool thing is, you don’t have to go to the website to interact with your fellow members – you can do it completely through email – once you’ve set up an account and created a password.The biggest benefit for you is that once your account is set up, you never have to log in again (unless you go to the website). All your discussions can be done via email. To do that, you just use the following email address: hptalk@highperformancetalk.com.Creating your account is easy. Just call our Customer Care help line at 800-633-7058 and one of our representatives will get you all set up. It’s a valuable part of your membership and won’t take long to do. Once that is done, you can adjust the settings on your account to make the site work best for you.Already have an account, but forgot your password? No problem. Just go to HighPerformanceTalk.com and click “Log In” then “I forgot my pass-word,” then enter your email address and the “Reset Password” button.By the way, be sure to add @highperformancetalk.com to your ‘safe senders’ or whitelist for your email to make sure that you get emails from the site. What kind of emails? They are conversation threads on a variety of topics that affect your business and the in-dustry. They can be ques-tions about specific prod-ucts, advice on what to look for in after-hours answering services, suggestions for so-liciting engineers, or any-thing you are interested in sharing or asking about.So, don’t miss out. Get set up and get involved. There’s an entire world of Performance-Based Con-tractors out there facing the same issues you are. Draw upon their experiences and share your own. The wisdom of the high-performance contracting crowd can not only benefit your business, but your life as well. This is the High-PerformanceTalk main page that shows all the discussion threads.APRIL 2019 31HVACTODAY.COMPHOTO OF THE MONTH“Leakage test? What’s that?” — Patrick Wilks, Wilks Air Conditioning, San Antonio, TX This is just one of 12 supply outlets in the home. All had the same treatment: “Custom” register boxes, no collars, no thought of sealing to the sheetrock. The flex wasn’t even taped to the register box. Truly plug and play. No worries, the grill will cover it. Pat Wilks from Wilks Air is the April 2019 winner of our Photo- of-the-Month contest, as voted on by the subscribers to the https://hvactoday.com/monthly-issue/ and visitors to the website. He will receive a $50 gift card. You can too – submissions are always welcome. If you’d like to submit a photo for consideration in our Photo-of-the-Month contest, click ncilink.com/POMSubmit and fill out the information as requested.THE MAY CONTEST OPENS ON APRIL 08, 2019. That gives you plenty of time to submit something in any of our three categories: The Good , The Bad , WTH (What the heck).32 APRIL 2019HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAYHVAC SMART MARTAPRIL 2019 33HVACTODAY.COMHIGH-PERFORMANCEHVAC TODAY TMAD INDEXArzel Zoning Technology, Inc. | ArzelZoning.com ....................................................................32Bacharach, Inc. | www.mybacharach.com .................................................................................26Baker Distributing Company | BakerDist.com ..........................................................................26Dwyer Instruments, Inc. | www.dwyer-inst.com ................................................................2, 29Fieldpiece Instruments, Inc. | www.fieldpiece.com................................................................10Goodman Manufacturing | www.GoodmanMfg.com .................................................6,23,35Jackson Systems | www.JacksonSystems.com ........................................................................21Lazco Corp. | www.LazcoCorp.com ...............................................................................................32R.E. Michel Company | www.REMichel.com ........................................................................14,29RevuKangaroo | https://revukangaroo .........................................................................................9ServiceTitan | www.servicetitan.com ..........................................................................................15The New Flat Rate | www.TheNewFlatRate.com ...............................................................21,32To Your Success | ToYourSuccess.com ...................................................................................10,32TSI Inc. | tsi.com ...............................................................................................................................4,15United Refrigeration Inc. | www.uri.com ....................................................................................25To Subscribe to High-Performance HVAC Today:ONLINE: Visit HVACToday.com/subscribe for a FREE digital subscription.PRINT: 1 year/$72; single copy $7. Canada: 1 year/$92; single copy $9. Payable in advance with U.S. funds. Prepaid subscriptions may be sent to: High-Performance HVAC Today, PO Box 147, Avon Lake, OH 44012. Phone: 440-949-1850; toll free 800-633-7058; FAX 440-949-1851, or visit HVACToday.com/subscribe to order online.PublisherDominick GuarinoEditor-in-ChiefMike WeilArt DirectorConnie ConklinOnline Development DirectorBrian RosemanCirculation ManagerAndrea Begany- GarsedEditorial AssistantMarge SmithEmail us at advertising@hvactoday.com with your comments or for more information.34 APRIL 2019HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAYActually, if you price an upgrade or renova-tion project to earn the correct gross profit dol-lars per man-day, it shouldn’t matter whether your installers are renovating systems or install-ing equipment. In fact, successful Performance-Based compa-nies make higher gross margins on system im-provements than equipment installations. Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sell equipment – that would be ridiculous. The two not only go well together, but the best results often occur when you replace equipment and upgrade or renovate a system at the same time.Another common concern is “My techs won’t test and generate leads.” This is mostly a matter of training and confidence. They need to be given the opportunity to practice, and yes, even fail – but not in front of the customer. They should practice on your systems, on their homes, even their relatives’ homes. Even a sea-soned professional concert violinist wouldn’t think of playing a piece for the first time in front of a live audience!Finally, a common excuse for not selling high performance is not being able to do as many maintenance calls if they are testing and talking to the customer about their findings. This topic will be addressed by Biloxi, Mississippi contrac-tor Jim Ball, at the NCI Summit this April. I could fill a page on why it’s so wrong to ex-pect your maintenance techs to run four to five or more calls a day. But in short, the whole purpose of a traditionally low-margin maintenance agree-ment is to generate additional service and instal-lation work that is often badly needed. Two to three maintenance visits a day will yield far more profitable business when done right with perfor-mance testing and customer education.Speaking of Summit, we hope to see you in Orlando this year. It’s shaping up to be our big-gest and best Summit ever! F or nearly 30 years, NCI has had the privi-lege of working with tens of thousands of contractors across North America to help them become more performance-based. Unfortunately, for every company that follows through and is successful at it, at least two do not. We often hear from those who didn’t implement right away, beating themselves up for not getting started the first time. As you can imagine, we’ve heard hundreds of excuses for not moving forward. Because there’s not enough room on this page to ad-dress all of them, I’ll share with you the ones we hear most often.One of the most common objections is, “It might work elsewhere, but not here.” These con-tractors tell us how their market is too small, or too large, or too suburban, or too rural, or too ur-ban, or too poor, or too rich. Get the picture? The truth is thousands of companies across North America are able to make performance work, regardless of population count, demo-graphics, or size. Interestingly, while some of the most success-ful Performance-Based Contractors are in small communities in semi-rural or rural areas, many NCI-trained companies in big cities and suburbs are also having great success.The truth is people are people, no matter where they live or their walk of life. It’s about connect-ing with and educating them on why they don’t have to live with sub-standard comfort systems, poor IAQ, and high utility bills.When you show a homeowner through test-ing why they have these issues, there’s no need to hard sell them; nine out of 10 will be interested in learning more.Another common reason for not selling Air Upgrades and renovations is, “We can’t make enough money at it,” and “It reduces the amount of regular installations we can sell and install.” ONE MORE THING...By Dom GuarinoHigh-Performance Contracting Myths DebunkedDominick Guarino is publisher of High- Performance HVAC Today magazine and CEO of National Comfort Institute, Inc. He can be reached at domg@ncihvac.com Next >