Picture Rocks, Arizona, is located in Pima County. A like-named mountain is there, guarding the eastern border of the north Tucson Mountain foothills. Here, you can find an area with hundreds of petroglyphs from what is known as the Hohokam era and before, carved into the rocks.

Picture Rocks is also home to a High-Performance HVAC™ contracting company of the same name, started in 2001 by Ron Arenas. Before opening his company, Ron worked for several small HVAC contracting firms in the area.

“Eventually,” he says, “I decided I wanted to serve the community better and give them the best service possible.”

In the early days of Picture Rocks Cooling, Heating, and Plumbing, Ron says he mainly worked alone.

“I would usually pick up one or two helpers during the summer and employ them from April through September.”

Janay and Ron Arenas

From those humble beginnings 23 years ago, the company today operates three service vehicles, one installation truck, and two plumbing trucks. Picture Rocks employs 15 people, and Ron says he hired a full-time marketing person for the first time last year.

“We should do just under $4 million in sales this year,” he says.

Ron Arenas adds that their focus is residential, though Picture Rocks also does some light commercial work.

“We don’t do any new construction,” he adds. “We used to. We used to work with some small general contractors who actually paid! But those guys aren’t around anymore.

“So, we pretty much stay away from new construction. We do some light commercial accounts, mostly maintenance, and some repairs or replacements. On the HVAC side, 90% of our work is residential.”

Concerning maintenance, Picture Rocks currently has around 500 agreements in place today, though Arenas says they want to improve this. In 2024, he says they’ve had more success selling them.

On the plumbing side of the business, they also recently added a plumbing inspection into their agreements. Arenas says, “During the summer, when plumbing is NOT so busy in Tucson, our plumbers will do plumbing inspections. This gets our team into houses one more time and could potentially lead to more work.

“They can go through the whole house looking at anything from a leaky pipe under the sink, a hose bib, or replacing an old water heater,” he says.

Arenas says that a big part of Picture Rock’s success is because they have a culture of training.

“Our team trains every other week. This training covers service or sales. We even train how technicians should walk up to a customer’s home because that could make or break the whole service call.

“We focus on how they present themselves. Everything rests on that first impression. We want to ensure that everything is how it’s supposed to be from the very start,” Arenas explains.