hvactoday.comAUGUST 2021 Are You Ready For Fall? ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Are You Measuring & Still Guessing? MUST-DO Combustion Safety Tests How to Price Duct Renovations TAKE OUR READERSHIP SURVEY - PG. 5 If You Don’t Measure, You’re Just Guessing! ™AUGUST 2021 VOLUME 5 NUMBER 8 TECHNICAL: Are You Measuring and STILL Guessing? Jim Davis addresses the issue of whether you are doing the right high-performance measurements. MANAGEMENT: How to Price Duct Renovations When pricing HVAC duct renovations, flat-rate pricing is just the first step. Here are some other considerations. TECHNICAL: Two MUST DO Combustion Safety Tests Contractor Tom Johnson says the two tests you should always do are checking for ambient CO in the house and conducting a building pressure test. 16 13 10 DEPARTMENTS AUGUST 2021 3HVACTODAY.COM Today’s Word .........................................................................................4 High-Performance Product Review ...............................................5 Contractor Spotlight: Basnett Plumbing & Heating ..............6 Member Update ...............................................................................19 HVAC Smart Mart ...............................................................................20 Ad Index ................................................................................................21 One More Thing ................................................................................22HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAY4 AUGUST 2021 heating season is the perfect time to begin selling them. If you already have one, maybe now is the time to update it with new service offerings. PERFORMANCE TESTING Speaking of updating maintenance agree- ments, do you include performance testing on yours? You should. Performance testing is a rela- tively low-investment, low-risk business you can add to your existing services that dovetails nicely with a healthy maintenance agreement base. Performance testing lends itself to sales lead generation from your technicians who do static pressure and airflow testing on every call. As Ron Smith also says, “Your best source of leads are from existing customers.” Maintenance customers can be the biggest source of perfor- mance testing leads and profits in the upcoming heating season. TRAINING Let’s not forget the absolute need for training. As things slow down in the fall, you need to begin planning to reinvigorate your team with technical and soft skills training. Now is a great time to ad- dress any issues your techs may be having. Wheth- er through virtual offerings, local classes, or in- house training, fall is the time to step this up. By the way, networking is also very important. It’s probably been more than a year since you’ve gone to live meetings, conferences, and trade shows where you can mingle and network with peers. Talk about a great way to recharge your own batteries! I could go on with more ideas, but the bot- tom line is this: as summer slows down, are you ready to move forward and take advantage of all the high-performance opportunities that can en- hance your upcoming heating season? A s I write this, temperatures are in the high 80s with humidity checking in around 73%. So, I must be a little nuts wondering if you’re ready for the upcoming heating season, right? From where I sit, however, it’s never too early to begin thinking about what you will do to stay busy once summer wanes and the solar engine that drives the air conditioning business begins to cool down. When that happens, it’s time to regroup and start thinking about the future. What changes do you want to make to advance the success and growth of your company at the beginning of the upcoming heating season? RECRUITING The first thing to consider is your team. Do you have enough people to not only handle the tail end of the summer “crazy” season, but to move forward with your growth plans for the upcom- ing year? Many experts say recruiting is something you should always be doing, but September is when schools return to session. Maybe it’s time to reach out to local high schools to see if they have any ca- reer days planned and if you can participate. It’s never to early to start planting seeds. Other ideas: With so many people out of work, you can reach out to special groups, like military veterans, minorities and women, and so on. MAINTENANCE AGREEMENTS Ron Smith, an HVAC Industry business guru and, perhaps, the father of the modern HVAC res- idential maintenance agreement program, once wrote that “The road to success in the HVAC In- dustry is paved with maintenance agreements.” If you don’t have one, create one now! The fall Are You Ready for the Fall HVAC Heating Season? TODAY’S WORD By Mike Weil Mike Weil is editor-in-chief and director of communications and publications at National Comfort Institute, Inc. Contact him at ncilink.com/ ContactMe.HVACTODAY.COMAUGUST 2021 5 HIGH-PERFORMANCE PRODUCT Written By HVAC Professionals for HVAC Professionals Carbon Monoxide (CO) monitor. The NSI 6000 monitor is sold exclusively by pro- fessionals trained and certified by Na- tional Comfort Institute (NCI), and is not available in retail stores or websites. Because specialized training and tools are required to diagnose and correct low-level CO issues, NCI, the exclusive worldwide dis- tributor of NSI products, only sells this mon- itor through qualified, trained resellers. This unique new product includes a Bluetooth function that syncs the moni- tor with a smart device. Your smartphone or tablet then communicates with a cloud environment that securely stores activa- tion data and any CO events data. New event information is synchro- nized every time the monitor is paired with a smart device. The NSI 6000 is powered by a long-last- ing 3V lithium battery, which makes it easy to install anywhere in a home. It can also be used in RVs, boats, vacation homes, hotels, or motels. The low-level monitor alerts occupants at CO levels of 15 and 35 PPM, and goes into full alarm mode at 70 PPM with no delay. This sets it apart from UL-listed alarms that can take up to 4 hours at 70 PPM to alarm! This monitor is equipped with the same type of electrochemical sensor used in professional CO analyzers. Each monitor is 100% factory-tested in CO. For more information on the NSI 6000 go to nationalsafetyinstruments.com or to become a reseller, go to ncilink. com/nsi6000 . — By Dominick Guarino, CEO, National Comfort Institute New NSI 6000 Low-Level CO Monitor After several years of careful R&D and design, including software and App de- velopment, National Safety Instruments (NSI), introduces the industry’s first Blue- tooth-enabled Low-Level 6 AUGUST 2021HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAY from commercial. Plumbing account- ed for 32% of those revenues, while hydronics work stood at 26%, and HVAC was 42%. In 2021, the overall revenue picture, according to Basnett, is double what it was in 2016. “The pandemic didn’t hurt us much either,” he explains. “We are slightly ahead of where we were in 2019. Sure, we lost some revenue during the first quarter of 2020 because the pandemic caused everything to shut down.” POST-2020 COMPANY TODAY Today, Basnett employs 23 people, which is up from the 14 in 2016. “Last year,” Rob adds, “we did a total of $3.9 million in HVAC and just $900,000 in plumbing.” In 2021 he says they are on track to hit $5 million. He also points out several other sig- nificant changes in the company since we did our first profile. The biggest is a company re-organization. “During the past five years we di- vided the company into profit centers. One center focuses on service — the other on installation. For years I had them under one center, but that didn’t work for everybody,” he says. “By splitting them up, we can now in- centivize the technicians on the actual work they do. As I did five years ago, we set goals at the beginning of the year. I then use a spreadsheet to track every- thing and meet weekly with the guys to see how well they are doing.” The company also sets revenue goals for ancillary sales, including service agreements and accessory add-ons on the service side. Basnett says installers have different goals. “Those relate to how many jobs they get done and what the end revenues are,” he explains. THE NEED FOR INCENTIVES Like many HVAC contractors today, Basnett always seeks more technicians. Rob says there is a difference in work ethic between different generations, which has been a challenge. So they’ve changed how they recruit, train, and incentivize younger people. For installers, that means creative incentivess. He says, “We calculate each job for x-number of hours, so the techs know how many hours they have to finish the job. If they do it in the allotted hours, they get a 1% bonus based on the total sale price. If we sell the job for $10,000, the bonus is $100 if they finish the installation on time.” Basnett takes that further. If the in- staller completes the job under the scheduled time, they get 1% of the sale price plus their wage for every hour they went under the expected time! For the service side, Basnett has an entirely different program. One of the primary metrics, according to Rob Basnett, is the number of callbacks. If a technician has zero callbacks in a I n 2016, Basnett Plumbing and Heating of Littleton, MA, was the subject of our Spotlight Series. Back then, Owner Rob Basnett talked a lot about the early days of starting the company, the struggles he faced, and introducing High-Per- formance Contracting™ into the daily culture. One thing that kept the freshman company out of trouble was Rob’s penchant for learning and his mission of continuing education and train- ing. Not just for him. He wanted those benefits for his entire team. “Education and practice are the keys to success,” he said in 2016. “As the team gets better at doing testing and system performance work, we expe- rience fewer consumer problems we can’t solve.” Five years later, that has not changed. But other things have, and with the fall- out from COVID-19, some things will remain changed permanently. THEN AND NOW In 2016 Basnett Plumbing and Heat- ing focused on the residential market- place, with 97% of the gross revenues coming from that sector and only 3% CONTRACTOR SPOTLIGHT By Michael Weil High-Performance HVAC: Turning the Next Corner Rob BasnettHVACTODAY.COMAUGUST 2021 7 month, he or she receives $500. “Callbacks are the bane of the ser- vice business,” Basnett says. “I’m hap- py to pay this incentive because it costs so much more than $500 to go out on callbacks. “During the past five years, we’ve added a process where we meet with our team weekly to go over the spread- sheets, correct any issues we are en- countering, and keep tabs on the incentives they are earning. This ap- proach has worked very well for us.” CHANGES IN DISPATCHING Another change is that Basnett be- gan dispatching technicians from their homes, plus added an option for them to work four-day work weeks. He began this before the pandemic. “It really worked out because once the pandemic shut everything down, the techs were already used to working from home,” he explains. The four-day work week is anoth- er incentive. Not all technicians make use of it, but the program is for both installers and service technicians. “On the service side, we 8 AUGUST 2021 CONTRACTOR SPOTLIGHT make sure technicians rotate. It’s a bit of a pain from a scheduling standpoint, but it typically gives participating techs longer weekends (either a Monday or a Friday off).” NEW APPROACH TO MEETINGS Even how the company, as a team, meets has changed. Rob says that like everyone else, the pandemic forced them to move meetings online. “Zoom meetings changed every- thing, he says. “I began customizing meetings for specific smaller groups. Service meetings on Zoom were just for the service teams. Same with in- stallation meetings. Plus, we added weekly Zoom meetings for the office staff,” he says. “Another advantage is that virtual meetings lead to better attendance. They are just so much more efficient. I love this approach and intend to continue using it from now on.” REVAMPING TOOL POLICIES Because he believes in the high-performance approach to de- livering total comfort, Rob under- stands the need to invest in quality tools and instruments. From ear- ly on in his company’s history, he had a written tool policy where the company provided each technician a monthly allowance for tools. Over the years, he noticed some of his team would wait until they earned enough in allowance money to buy tools, and then they’d leave and take those tools with them. This practice became a huge cost for the company. As time moved on, instrument tech- nology improved, moved toward wire- less communications, and cost more. So something had to be done. The answer was to create a differ- ent type of vesting approach. Rob ex- plains the accrual part of their plan remains unchanged, but techs cannot become fully vested until they’ve been with the company for three years. ANOTHER CORNER TURNED From a performance standpoint, Rob Basnett says he feels that doing air up- grades, duct renovations, and static pressure testing is more standardized today in the company’s processes. “But we can’t take our eye off the ball,” he adds. “I believe what gets fo- cused on gets done, and it’s the consis- tency that has been the toughest part of the performance process.” He says he believes the company turned another corner when they cus- tomized the performance approach to match the team’s skillsets. “We do a lot of duct renovations and air upgrades on nearly every new install. We never swap out equipment. It’s just incorporated with our replace- ments, a core part of our business.” STAYING THE COURSE Basnett says he finds it amazing how many HVAC contractors don’t under- stand the importance of airflow. The rea- son? He says it’s a training issue. “If you don’t invest in training, you can never exceed what you already know. You have to understand the importance of training before you can do anything with it,” Basnett explains. Staying the course, from Basnett’s per- spective, means committing to training. “Last year, during the pandemic shutdowns, I targeted my training ef- fort on those employees who commit- ted to training, who actually do it, then put it to use. “My philosophy is if you’re not willing to invest in yourself, I’m not willing to in- vest in you either. The result: we spent less money last year, and that worked well for us.” SETTING THE STAGE Though the pandemic hurt much of the U.S. economy, it also set the stage for the company to break records in sales and revenues. With reduced staffing and hesitant customers, Rob had to rethink his approach to the market. Setting up incentive programs and making neces- sary process changes helped the team make up for any losses incurred early in the shutdown period. Basnett says they are well on track to having a record year. “I think by focusing on what’s im- portant — bringing a performance perspective to our customers — and remaining among the top prob- lem-solving HVAC companies in our area, is why we are as solid as we are today,” Rob concludes. For these and many other reasons, High-Performance HVAC Today magazine once again shines its con- tractor spotlight on the team at Bas- nett Plumbing and Heating in Lit- tleton, MA. Next >