Bowersville, GA, is a rural community of just 465 people (according to the 2010 U.S. Census) located near the Georgia-South Carolina border. It’s in Hart County, GA, and is the home of 24-year-old JN Electrical Temperature Control, Inc.

Though its name implies that their focus is electrical contracting, that is not the case. Owner Jason Nikkel says they are an HVAC company first and foremost. In fact, he explains that 91% of their 2021 revenues ($1.6 million) were from HVAC work.

For Jason, working in a small community means they need to be better informed, better equipped, and better prepared than the competition to be successful. That means his focus has always been on craftsmanship.

And that requires training and education. Training is precisely what Jason Nikkel did for himself and his team from very early on in the company’s history. Back in 2008, National Comfort Institute (NCI) did a profile on the company in which Jason is quoted as saying how training is a constant activity.

“We hold classes in the office and on job sites,” Nikkel said in that interview. “Training is for learning and also for gaining a greater conviction of why we do what we do.”

He credits his father for instilling in him the need to grow a company that delivers the best possible product and serves its customers well…and to be honest. His Dad’s principles have never let him down.

Change in the Past 13 Years

Since that article was published in the former Member Update email newsletter, Nikkel says he doubled down on his promise to invest and develop team members. He cites this commitment as the most significant change over the last 13 years.

“That investment is in the form of helping them set goals. It means training them in developing their soft skills. And we teach them about dealing with different customer personalities, and even people in their non-work life,” he says.

“I started by making changes to myself and then realizing the importance of it and how it can help everybody. Around the same time, I began to work on transitioning JN Electrical into a process-driven company. That is a work in progress — we’re not there yet.

“Still, we are much further down that road than we were in 2008,” he says. “This includes transitioning high-performance contracting, which I’ve been practicing at some level since 2004, into a process beyond just me driving the actions of our team. Hopefully, now we’re driving a process more than just individual actions.”

He says these processes include how to “score” the operation of HVAC equipment. Processes now exist for pricing jobs and for better operation of many different business areas.

“By this, I mean we have a process for everything from how we run a service call, install systems, and the way we commission a system,” Nikkel adds.

High-Performance HVAC Contracting Today

When it comes to delivering high-performance HVAC services to customers, Nikkel says they are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were in 2008.

It’s just part of their daily routine to professionally commission systems based on three things:

• Customer lifestyle
• Type of building the system is installed within
• Customer desires to have remote capabilities of thermostatic controls and filtration needs they’ll need in the future.

Nikkel says today, his team takes customer desires into account and then thinks about how such changes will affect that equipment over the next year to 10 years. Furthermore, static pressure testing has been a way of life for JN Electrical since 2004, but it’s evolved into a consistent process.

“Today,” Nikkel explains, “We live, breathe, and operate the company by testing, measuring, and diagnosing complete systems – including the ductwork. My techs know not to call me with a question unless they followed our process, documented everything, and had the measurement readings on hand so we can start talking about what is going on with the system.”

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