Some HVAC leaders take a straight path into the trades. Others take a winding route that gives them a wide-angle view of homes, comfort, and what really drives performance.
For Shawn LeMons, the journey started in unconventional homes: a log cabin built from ski resort timber and an adobe house in the Arizona desert. Those early experiences sparked a lifelong interest in how buildings breathe and perform.
LeMons tried a number of things before finding his passion for building science—earning nearly every certification in the field — and then moving into HVAC, first at Mitsubishi and then into contracting. At the time of this recording, he was Co-owner of Mountain West Heat Pumps in Colorado. Since then, Shawn has stepped away to build something fully his own and that speaks to his passion for building performance, design training, and electrification education.
That mix of hands-on building science, technical design, and business experience continues to shape how he thinks about the industry—and what HVAC contractors can do to differentiate themselves.
Mountain West Heat Pumps was founded in 2020, mid-pandemic, and quickly set its focus on heat pump space heating and water heating. Based in Colorado, the company faces both opportunity and challenge: a fast-growing demand for electrification, but also high-altitude conditions that most contractors would consider off-limits.
“People are shocked when I tell them we’ve installed systems at 11,000 feet,” LeMons says. “They think, ‘there’s not enough air up there.’ But if you do the math, the systems work. Software runs the calculations. Experience interprets them.”
That combination of right-brain creativity and left-brain technical rigor is central to how the company designs systems. Load calculations, system sizing, and equipment selection are tools—but they’re not perfect. “Manual J is the best wrong tool we have,” LeMons notes. The real skill lies in using those tools with judgment, knowing when the math is enough and when the house itself is telling you something different.
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Colorado’s climate introduces complexity: older homes, multi-zone demands, boiler-heavy infrastructure, and the growing need for better indoor air quality during wildfire season.
LeMons emphasizes that system design isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about effectiveness. Homeowners bring their own “energy lifestyle” to the table. For some, that means wanting the feel of AC on their skin at night, even at 10,000 feet. For others, it means filtration that lets them sleep with windows closed during smoke season.
“Every home is different. Every system has to be custom-designed. That’s where trust and performance meet,” LeMons explains.
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Despite steady growth, Mountain West Heat Pumps has spent very little money on traditional advertising. Instead, the business thrives on referrals, community engagement, and reputation.
When the company rebranded from Midwest Appliance and HVAC to Mountain West Heat Pumps, they leaned on Podium to quickly generate five-star reviews from past customers. They’ve also partnered with local organizations to reach communities facing electrification mandates or unique grid challenges.
LeMons credits the approach to a simple reality: “If all your leads come from referrals, you’re accountable every single day. The quality of the job you did last year shapes the conversation you’re having this year—and next.”
That accountability shapes everything from pricing transparency to how they handle change orders. The result? A small but resilient company that can balance retrofit and new construction work while building long-term trust.
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What truly sets Mountain West apart isn’t equipment or flashy marketing. It’s the time, diligence, and care put into every project—and the effort to explain those decisions clearly to homeowners.
“If you can’t explain why you made a design choice, you’re just guessing,” LeMons says. “Customers can tell the difference. What they really notice is the diligence—when you take the time to walk them through it.”
That differentiation is a competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded heat pump market. Contractors who lean into what makes them unique—whether it’s careful design, communication, or operational excellence—are the ones who win.
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Mountain West Heat Pumps’ leadership is aligned on one thing: Mountain West Heat Pumps won’t chase reckless growth. “This isn’t a digital company,” LeMons says. “We’re hands and eyeballs. Growth has to be sustainable.”
The next chapter includes operational improvements, owning their own shop, expanding recycling efforts, and continuing to build a company culture that values both performance and people. That includes recognizing the mental and physical strain of the trades, and creating space for technicians to thrive.
As LeMons puts it: “The genius in this industry is underappreciated. HVAC techs are solving complex problems every day. The more we can value that, the stronger the industry will be.”
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[00:00] - Introduction
[02:23] - Overview of Mountain West heat pumps & Shawn’s early life in contrasting climate homes
[15:12] - Why is Mountain West focused on heat pumps?
[19:21] - Incentives, early adopters, and Colorado’s growing demand
[28:23] - Homeowner-first sales and design process
[36:38] - Looking ahead: shop ownership, recycling, and team wellbeing
[39:12] - Mental health in the trades and valuing hands-on genius
[43:53] - Final advice: stay curious, stay informed, stay human
[00:00:00] Shawn LeMons: In the meantime, we do use software tools around the load calculations and around the system design. We have really, I would say, relatively unique challenges of altitude in Colorado. And I've been involved with systems that are being installed at 11,000 foot elevation and people will blow their minds. What are you talking about? They can't work. There's not enough air up there. We just got to do the math right. And software tools help us do the math. And then it's this great. You have to think about it from both a technical and artistic perspective. Right. It's right brain. Left brain for sure.
[00:00:39] Ed Smith: Hey, everyone. Before the episode, I've got two quick updates for you. First, I'm very excited to say we've hired a new engineer. A huge thank you to all of you who shared referrals. One of your referrals is our new software engineer, so we are very grateful. And we met a ton of candidates from you all who though we didn't hire them, they were great. We were amazed by how good the folks were that you all recommended, so we may use the strategy again next time we're hiring someone. But thank you to all of you who sent great candidates our way. We are deeply grateful. Second, a quick note about today's guest, Sean. We recorded this conversation a couple of months ago, and since then, Sean has actually decided to leave Mountain West Heat Pumps to pursue something fully his own, something that speaks directly to his strengths and his passion for building electrification, building performance, technical design, training and teaching. He's still early in that journey of figuring out what's next. So I won't say more than that. That's Sean's story to write and tell, but he's an awesome guy with incredible experience. He has basically every building science certification that exists. Those tidbits I just shared, or the rest of this podcast spark anything in you and you'd like to connect with Sean. We've linked his LinkedIn page in the show notes. Feel free to reach out and give him a ping there. All right. With that, let's get into the episode.
[00:03:34] Eric Fitz: And I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amply energy.
[00:03:37] Ed Smith: Today we are thrilled to welcome Shawn LeMons, Co-owner of Mountain West Heat Pumps. Welcome, Sean.
[00:03:44] Shawn LeMons: Hey, good afternoon, gentlemen.
[00:03:46] Ed Smith: Thanks for joining us. All right. We're going to get into a bunch. We've got a good set of topics today. But before we even dive in, would you just give us like a two minute overview View of Mountain West heat pumps. Where are you guys? Overview of the business, that sort of thing. Just so folks have context.
[00:04:02] Shawn LeMons: Yeah, sure. Happy to do it. Yeah. So Mountain West Heat Pumps, which we recently changed our name from Midwest Appliance and HVAC, which is funny because we're not in the Midwest and we don't do appliances. So that was part of the prompt to change the name. But we focus on heat pumps where you focus on heat pump space heating and heat pump water heating. Residential primarily.
[00:04:25] Ed Smith: Awesome. And how long have you guys been around?
[00:04:27] Shawn LeMons: So my business partner Derrick King started the company in 2020. Basically during the pandemic, which seems like a bad idea to start a business in the pandemic for a lot of people, but not HVAC. It was an opportunity for him. And as we most of us know, it was a good year for HVAC contractors to reengage the market in new ways.
[00:04:50] Ed Smith: Yeah. Awesome. All right. Super helpful context. Now we want to double back a little bit and talk about you. So you have been in a whole bunch of different stuff, like you were with a heat pump manufacturer. You were an energy consultant and now you're in this role. Give us the Sean Lemons story a little bit. Like how did you get to where you are today? Yeah. Tell us more.
[00:05:13] Shawn LeMons: Yeah, sure. When I was a kid, I had the opportunity to live in a basically a new home every year in my life. So my parents were together. So I would go back and forth, and they gave me a chance to decide who I wanted to live with. And so I, as they tended to move, I also moved between them and got to see a lot of different homes, a lot of different places, Arizona, California, a little bit in Hawaii. And but there were two homes that were consistent in my life as a kid, and one of them was an octagonal log cabin two stories up in northern Arizona. So that was built by my father out of logs that came out of the local ski resort. And so that was my sort of home grown old climate type of rearing. And then the other home was an Adobe block home down in Tucson, Arizona, where my grandmother lived. And my grandfather built that house back in the late 1950s. And just having those two experiences cold climate, hot climates, wood, high mass, there was evaporative coolers in the mix and all sorts of fireplaces and all these things. So I got to learn a lot about real world, of creating your own comfort without all this automatic stuff that we come to expect these days. And then from there I moved into I'll fast forward into sort of my professional life. One piece that I wanted to go into architecture, but I got weeded out and thankfully got weeded out because it forced me to think about homes differently.
[00:06:52] Shawn LeMons: I still have this interest in the built environment, but I went through the business path and got into home improvement work, and I helped my dad with my newfangled business degree. I helped my dad grow his small business. That was cabinet improvements. So we didn't make cabinets. We made them better, right? So we would go into existing cabinetry and create roll out trays or roll out storage devices for people, mostly for folks that were getting older and wanted to stay in their home longer. So back to livability, back to staying in your home, this resiliency piece so that you didn't have to potentially injure yourself digging around for the crock pot kind of thing. And after that, in 2007, we were doing a good bit of business, growing at 35% a year. And in 2008 we were closed. So we got caught with our in sailing terms, I would say we were putting out our spinnaker when we should have been diving something like that, or tacking perhaps, but it was a great learning experience. Painful but useful. And it that allowed me to look around. And I found building science. I found the new sandbox that I wanted to play in for the rest of my life, and so to fast forward that a bit, it was energy audit or energy advising and lots of blower tests and lots of infrared and lots of certifications for that matter.
[00:08:16] Shawn LeMons: I ended up becoming a BP trainer and eventually a BP proctor and other certifications as well, and just learning a ton. And I was an independent contractor for a little while around building science verifications. And then I got into an inverse rating and mechanical design. Right. So sitting down at a desk, doing lots of software work and figuring out ways to forecast and represent what buildings are all about. And that was so I had this sort of existing home experience, and then I had this new home experience. And then I moved down to Arizona where I did. I would say field director, field technical director for a rating company down there. So I had the benefit of production home builders and got really into that's where I picked up my lead and my actual ResNet Raider certification, as well as S plus verifier. And so taking all these sort of sources of information and aspirations and trying to apply them to the field, that's where I really enjoyed as well. So taking a pass fail scenario from when you go out to do an inspection or quality control for a builder, or even internally finding something that wasn't quite in alignment. And how do you realize that, oh, we just trained this builder or this subcontractor last week on this. Now we get to do it again because it's a new crew. And so shifting from this pass fail scenario to fast train scenario. So helping to try to raise the knowledge base.
[00:09:53] Shawn LeMons: And while staying true to the intent of helping the builder move through their critical path as quickly as possible, not delay the opening of the house, the certificate of occupancy, etc.. So from there, I. Down in Arizona, I got tired of chewing on fiberglass and bumping my head and roofing nails in attics that were 140 degrees in the summer, and I decided that I wanted to take people to lunch for a living. And so that's I had an opportunity, a great opportunity to work with the performance construction team at Mitsubishi Electric Heat Pumps and an amazing team had a lot of fun. Got to meet really great folks, apply my building science background, and learn deeply about the sort of the heartbeat of the building, which is heartbeat and lungs of the building, which is HVAC. And then you might know about the Mitsubishi purge about a year and a half ago, though, our team and about I can't actually talk about how many people were let go, but quite a few people were let go from Mitsubishi and one of my clients, one of my customers contractor by the name of Derrick King, and he was one of the first contractors that really talked about building science without being prompted. And we got along and saw an opportunity. And so I said, hey, let's chat. And here I am a year later, as the partner in a great and growing HVAC company and trying not to go crazy every day.
[00:11:23] Eric Fitz: Awesome, man. That's an incredible journey from yeah, having those early experiences as a kid in those very unique homes. Yeah, with wood heating in a log cabin like that definitely teaches you a lot about changes in humidity. And man, Log cabin in particular is almost like a living and breathing creature. If it's a true full log structure all the way through, man, you've got it. Sounds like almost every certification you can get on the building science side, from BPI to full blown passive houses. Can you? So I'm just so impressed by just the amount of experience and knowledge you have. It's not obvious, though, that after the change in your role at Mitsubishi, why did you think it was like, yes, I want to co-own a contracting business now. That's the right thing to do for where I am in my career. With your background.
[00:12:11] Shawn LeMons: Someone say moving backwards, right? A lot of trades and move into ownership, and then perhaps getting tired of that and moving into distribution or manufacturing roles, that stuff. So yeah, maybe it's this subtext, mental subtext of the imposter syndrome. I know I want to learn about this. I want to really learn about this. Right? And knowing that there's a ton that I don't know. And so be fair. And maybe this is too much information, but to be fair, I don't think I would have taken the opportunity if it didn't have some ownership equity attached to it. And because there's somebody, a good friend, who was one of my mentors in building science, he told me. If you're lucky, you get to find a way to work to put yourself out of a job. To educate, to inform. To expand on what's out there, what you're doing, and work on things that are bigger than you that perhaps can't be solved in your lifetime. And so that's part of my big why is looking at the big picture. Was it futurist and frankly, just staying curious? And maybe that's the biggest thing. I was just curious, how do I learn and do a better job and help others do a better job.
[00:13:27] Ed Smith: And how is it so, like now that you took that jump, it's been, what, a year?
[00:13:31] Shawn LeMons: Yeah, a little over a year.
[00:13:33] Ed Smith: How is.
[00:13:33] Shawn LeMons: It? Yeah, I'm very fortunate. I am full of gratitude. And it's harder than I thought it would be. Yeah. For sure. And there's some recent LinkedIn activity and I responded to a great post. And I'm like, yes, this what this guy said because it's we live in a our country is graced by folks that do things on a shoestring and it's amazing. And then there's like this top tier performance of specifications and quality. And we get to benefit from that as well. And how to operate a nine person company. We actually one of our crews, I would say we had a mutual parting. So we used to be a little bit bigger and now we've contracted a little bit, I would say for the better. And so how to run a small growing company that aspires to the important points of quality, durability, safety and following the rules, right. So that's permitted work. And it's paying our technicians well and being both competitive as well as cost managing and all the things. There's just so many. Line items, so many little nuances of running a small business. And I think most HVAC contractors, they do a good job at owning their job, and that's not a problem. I don't see that as a problem. I just happen to want to have more impact than swapping boxes. And so there's tension in that about what is our aspirational goal as a company and as individuals. And I might save this recommendation for the end of the conversation here, but just thinking about what brings all of us to the table every day, what gets us to work on a project or work together every day. There's a lot of motivations out there, whether it's the clients motivations, whether it's the technicians motivations, the sales, professional ownership, and the people that basically help run the business every day, too. That's probably our biggest point of pain right now is just our operational administrative thinking of excellence. How do we get there? And some days are amazing and some days are just a pain in the butt. I don't know if Angie did question had.
[00:15:54] Ed Smith: You shot an arrow directly into my heartstrings? Because frankly, that kind of sounds exactly what it's like running amply. And it also deeply resonated for when we started amply. We were serving homeowners and we weren't even. So we were subbing out the installations, but we were designing whole home electrification projects. And the why was super important for us. What got us out of bed in the morning? Eric was an unbelievable taskmaster to make sure my designs for homes like, not surprising. The mechanical engineer knows what he's doing, and I have no idea. But Eric was a taskmaster for making sure the design was dialed. The manual J was dialed, manual S, manual D everything, and there was friction in our company for it was a little more like, is all this necessary? And he of course brought me around, but I can see that. So anyway, your answer was great and resonated quite a bit. And so it sparked for me another one, which is like your question on the why. And you guys just rebranded Mountain West Heat Pumps. What is the why? Why are you guys focused on heat pumps? Tell us more about that.
[00:16:54] Shawn LeMons: I'll add to a little bit of complexity here that we do for a small company. We do both primarily retrofit and some new construction as well. So when you say new construction to an HVAC professional, they often, you know, laugh at you and say, good luck with that and walk the other direction because it's a very different business model, right? It's not that it's a bad business model, which is very different. So how do we tackle all the complexities that are cutting edge technology and labor constraints? Knowledge? I would say short. I want to be polite about this. We don't have enough skilled HVAC folks in the country that want to take on heat pumps. Right. The joke is the good news is there's lots of ways to do it. The bad news is there's lots of ways to do it. And especially with the multi zones and ducted versus ductless and etc. and so on. So how to communicate that. And then the communication is this next level of our motivations of. For me it's about going all electric right. It's about decarbonization. It's about performance. And one thing that I learned working with Mitsubishi is I've thought about or realized I should say is that there's this the ability to value engineer while defending high performance. How do we help people move further down the pathway to what their personal goals are? And that might be financial and it might be comfort, it might be health and safety and it might be performance. And so I want the data off the system, etc.. And we're lucky that most of our clients are somewhere on that. Early adopter, early innovator. Half of the consumer adoption curve. The in Colorado, I would say we're transitioning from the early innovators to the early adopters because we get folks that are getting furnace AC quotes, but they're like, yeah, but I've heard about heat pumps, and we get to have that conversation and it's very much good, better, best types of thinking.
[00:19:03] Shawn LeMons: And frankly, the incentives which I'm going to set aside the the incentive conversation at the federal level because who the heck knows right now. And I will say in my opinion, that most of the incentives are going to continue to be promoted by a the local consumer demand, which is directly related to the utility in the area, and probably some jurisdictions, as well as just various entities that might be regional NGOs, organizations that are promoting decarbonization, strategic electrification. And so those all line up really well for us. And how that's Trance. How that's come about for us is we don't do any advertising. We run our business on referral, which is maybe either crazy to think about for some of your listeners or what they're trying to emulate, I don't know. Somewhere in the middle. Yeah, yeah. And in that it holds us accountable to our decisions every day as well, because it's not just about the conversation we're having right now that could be spawned from the conversation we had last year, but it also affects the conversations we're having next year and doing our best work every day. And frankly, as an individual believing in decarbonization. And I'll look at all electric transitions, I would say I'm in the minority, right. And there is new stock of professionals, HVAC and building professionals that are seeking this out, but certainly still in that early innovator, early adopter arena.
[00:20:35] Eric Fitz: When we're talking about electrification in particular, there's a lot of different challenges. I'm interested for you to talk about some of the pitfalls, whether that's the financial side, it's hard to navigate some of the rebates and changing costs of the equipment, labor or the like. The technical piece, the design aspect. What are some of the big challenges on the electrification front these days?
[00:20:57] Shawn LeMons: We continue to have conversations around the dual fuel opportunity that's out there in the market. And I think dual fuel is a excellent transition technology. And I would say we will be adding that in as the adoption curve. Our position on that adoption curve changes. I think we'll be looking at high performance dual fuel to help the right, the person that needs that fit for their home and their point in their lives. Right. I think it's societal win to eliminate 50 to 70 to 95% of the gas combustion. So we'll take that as a win. And we're moving in that direction. And in the meantime we do use software tools around the load calculations and around the system design. We have really, I would say, relatively unique challenges of altitude in Colorado. And I've been involved with systems that are being installed at 11,000 foot elevation and people blows their minds. What are you talking about? They can't work. There's not enough air up there. We just got to do the math right. And software tools help us do the math. And then it's this great. You have to think about it from both a technical and artistic perspective. Right. It's right brain. Left brain for sure. Okay. How do we solve this. How do you with a multi zone capable system with different uses of the house, different ages of the house, etc.
[00:22:21] Shawn LeMons: up in the mountains they're very boiler heavy and so it's ductless is a thing up there for sure. But then there's also this question about okay, we can bring in ventilation, right. Indoor air quality considerations and bringing that knowledge to the conversation, isn't it? They're like, yeah. We leave our windows open six months out of the year because it's amazing. But in the middle of that, six months is what they call smoke season or fire season, which seems to be getting bigger these days or longer. And so they do want the filtration. And they do. This might be second homes for someone that lives in Florida or Texas, and they expect to feel the air conditioning blowing on them in the middle of the night. It's just part of how they grew up. It's part of there is a term that I like to use. It's not so much energy efficiency, but energy effectiveness. And everybody has their own energy lifestyle. Right. So I'm not going to judge someone that wants to have air conditioning when they have a house at 10,000 foot elevation, because you might have to close the window and filter PM 2.5 while they sleep or etc.. It's balancing all these things and then along the motivations and a little bit.
[00:23:31] Shawn LeMons: Maybe another topic of conversation is the grid. All right. So all electric homes, all electric cars, etc. it's really prompting a lot of folks to worry about what does that mean for the grid? Durability and resilience, especially in small towns that have basically been told by local utilities that there's no more gas being piped in. And so there's we're seeing some very significant incentives for our transitions, changing of direction in these small towns that struggle in so many ways. Affordability, skilled trades, just the straight up cost to operate a business up there because it's going to take you twice as long to go the distance to get to the house. So there's so many pressures up in these places. And so having being able to have these conversations is really it's been a great journey for myself and how It's been a struggle, perhaps, to figure out how we convey that in our sales process, in our business process, in our messaging, etc. and so we will often partner with organizations that are already have they're already engaged in the local community, and they're having these conversations and promoting the directions that we specialize in. That's been a strategic I'll call it a strategic advantage for us.
[00:24:59] Eric Fitz: I love that. I feel like I heard two key things from what you just said. So one, things are changing pretty fast and you got to be able to adapt to those changes. I think it's interesting, like just the piece alone about yeah, fire season getting longer and that being a thing you really got to think about with air filtration, indoor air quality, where maybe even a few years ago you wouldn't have really been on your mind as like an important solution to offer an ERV in a ductless situation. And then that point about, hey, where there's unique challenges in a community, if that's so smart that you're partnering with someone local who understands the critical or unique dynamics in a particular community where, yeah, it's really challenging to be someone to come in and figure it all out all at once. So that's great. You're doing both of those things.
[00:25:48] Shawn LeMons: Yeah, it's a it's the art of the science, perhaps.
[00:25:53] Ed Smith: And so you mentioned it in there. But one of the challenges you mentioned the using software and your design process before we even I want to dig into that before we even get to that. If you guys aren't, if you're living the dream of not spending any money on advertising. You mentioned partnering with local organizations that are in the community that are driving this work, but like, how are you guys driving business right now? Is it all word of mouth, or are there a couple of different things that just anyway how you're driving those leads is would be intriguing?
[00:26:21] Shawn LeMons: We are. Yes. We're word of mouth. We are seeing leads come in, friends and neighbors talking to each other. And also we've recently brought on tools that align with our I don't know, I guess I can say the name. We use a tool called podium, which I think a lot of folks are familiar with. And when we changed our name, we aligned that, bringing it on podium to help us change the name relatively quickly and maintain uptake and communicate to our previous clients that we have changed. So it's simple things like putting it into our email signatures and putting a banner at the top of our website and obviously all that stuff. But then podium helped us reach out to our past customers and generate five star reviews pretty quickly, and that helps with the organic searches, etc.. So just some of the technical strategies that we've used. Also, the back on the personal and human and organic side is going up at events that you wouldn't normally think of as a source of leads Bleeds because being curious about solving people's HVAC challenges comfort challenges with their existing home, or maybe a new home. It really helps promote just the recognition that we're showing up because we are meaningful to us.
[00:27:47] Shawn LeMons: We're there for a reason, not just to swap boxes. And then the I will also say that because we're small enough when we can, if we're careful and diligent, we can do both new construction and retrofit. And that balance of business, both two different profit centers like that allow us to weather the storm, the seasonal storms. So January for us has been notoriously slow. And so we we've been able to keep our guys busy doing new construction stuff. And here's another interesting thing that we don't do, but we are working towards we don't do service. We don't have a service department, we don't have a service truck. We do not promote service, nor do we have maintenance agreements. So all of these things, we know these are opportunities for us to grow the business. And I would say we're working on tools that help us run the business and get prepared for that growth. And now and we are starting to look at marketing advances in marketing with various professionals. Actually, I don't mind recommending them because I think they they do a great job. Energy circle.
[00:28:59] Ed Smith: Oh yeah, we love those guys.
[00:29:01] Shawn LeMons: So you had Peter on.
[00:29:03] Ed Smith: I mean we yeah, we work with them all the time.
[00:29:06] Shawn LeMons: So I'm excited about being able to engage with them. And it's funny too because we continue to grow without doing any marketing. And Derek and I are like, yeah, but do we pull the trigger on doing all these things or do we like, continue to grow at a maintainable pace? The reason I mentioned 35% growth in the previous company, 35% growth for a hands on business is difficult. Oh yeah. Not. We're not a digital company. We are a hands and eyeballs company. And they are very different. Yeah. So totally being trying to be smart about growth.
[00:29:41] Shawn LeMons: And I don't know if I answered your question.
[00:29:42] Ed Smith: You did. It was a great answer. And by the way, feel free to mention anyone. One of the reasons people listen to this is like specific recommendations, like podiums are great. One energy circle we're two thumbs up on. No that's great. So that was helpful to talk leads. And you started to get into some of the differentiation of the experience of the homeowner. Right. So I'd love to know more about your sales and design process. What does it feel like for a homeowner? Why does it feel different? Yeah. Tell us about that.
[00:30:09] Shawn LeMons: So my partner Derek King and one of our key employees, Brad Plunkett, Brad actually used to work for conduit. And he was he became a client of ours. We talked to them and he was interested, and he was getting different bids and all that stuff. And then Derek and I went to his house and figured out a way to buck the trend, if you will, from what those companies were suggesting. And so we ended up putting a he lives in a really cool studio apartment in downtown Denver, and we put in a 1 to 1 wall cassette. And that was it was like people like, wait a minute, how can you do that with such a small thing? It's got to be two tons and all these things. And just so the process, we are on site, right? So we're not doing virtual assessments. So we're they're we're communicating with the homeowner trying to understand their look to the next level of what their needs, what they're asking for. And we're doing the 3D scans. And so we're that's and software tools are one way to do a load calc. Right. We could I could certainly ask like how big is your house. And I could do BTUs per square foot and I could adjust that up or down. And depending on the age of the home and all these things. And frankly, I love a good rule of thumb, right? I am a fan of two thumbs up on rules of thumb. Problem is, people don't update their rules. And so my good friend Joe Meadows, I don't know if Joe.
[00:31:41] Shawn LeMons: Measure quick whiskey and I did a presentation together a while back and it's thumb 2.0. So just update your thumb. And then there's also some other back checks of does this make sense for this house. Okay. We're getting a number in a software tool. It says this, but I feel like it's a little bit high or I feel like it's a little bit low. It's not that it's isn't following the algorithms, but are we. Is our data input correct? And dig into the menus and the inputs and make sure that we captured something directly or frankly. Listen a.k.a. manual J is the best wrong tool we have. It is absolutely the best buy. And it's not right. And every single manual.
[00:32:29] Ed Smith: It's the worst form of government. Except for all the others.
[00:32:33] Shawn LeMons: And I would argue, and I'm happy to have any conversations with anybody on this, but there's never been a manual calculation that's been 100% accurate ever. In the same way that no deck of cards has ever been shuffled the same way, or whatever they say about that, and whether or not we're talking about tens or hundreds or thousands of BTUs difference. What we're really trying to do is get within this plus or -10% margin. And if we can be comfortable in there and we can remember that, oh, wait, this house has people in it and people give off heat and so do dishwashers in the winter. Now, dishwasher and those people might be part of the calculation in the summertime for sensible and latent loads in the summer for peak cooling. But they are being ignored in the winter because the winter calculation is being done at this worst case time of day, which is going to be when the sun is not up and the people are not there. And so again, back to the art behind the science and interpretation of the plus or -10% tools that we have available to us.
[00:33:41] Eric Fitz: It's so important because it doesn't matter what manual J manual that manual D, these are all models, so they're only as good as the inputs you put into them. You get garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. And there's been a lot of careful thought engineering physics to try to make these models more accurate, but ultimately they cannot 100% simulate an actual built home. There's just too many variables. And so there are reasonable factors of safety built into each kind of step in the design process so that with reasonable inputs you're going to hit that plus or -10% window and you're going to have good outcomes for the homeowner. You're going to have good outcomes for your business. And the challenge is that when, you know, people try to somehow game the system and think, hey, I need to add a bunch of extra layers and not really verify what's going on in the home that bad things happen. It seems like you guys are all over that. You're making sure you're getting those inputs done.
[00:34:41] Shawn LeMons: I appreciate you saying that. So the load calc as a digital tool, the system D rating as a digital tool as well. So where Mitsubishi shopped, I was familiar with the equipment to client that I had that I joined also as they were installing Mitsubishi. And so I'm comfortable with it and how to use those tools. So Diamond System Builder being the tool that we use for verifying that the equipment selection that we choose, which is part of the manual s process, like it fact checks the equipment performance in our specific application tells us what the capacities are and we compare it against the manual. J loads on the heating and cooling side. Thankfully I again, gratitude. I don't know if I could live in a humid climate. So we're in the dry side. When you look at the US map within Google Earth or whatever, we're in the side that's brown and not green. Again, just having the right tools and applying them properly. What's funny is that layers, as you described, those layers are often applied by folks that are just in. The reason that rule of thumb, that's worked for them for a long time, and I'll bet it's probably still right within a certain range, but they're just covering for not doing that other math. They're just adding in that layer. Problem is, they don't know when to stop adding it. They don't know whether to add in 5% or 15% or whatever and layer upon layer and now you're too big or not getting your latent capacities correct, etc., or air flows. All the things.
[00:36:16] Shawn LeMons: Just to finish up your thought on process. It's load and then it's system sizing and de rate. And then it's we go through. We actually price out every job. It's not just a quick price, it's we don't we do some bundling in that stuff, but we work hard to price out all the stuff and all the time and then provide ourselves a comfortable margin and so that we can operate our business comfortably and weather the storms sometime, and then bring and not nickel and dime the homeowner when it comes to a change order. Sure, change orders occasionally happen, but we really try to stay away from them. We just. We include four inch filters, Merv 13, that kind of stuff. There's some times that it doesn't apply, and with heat pump water heaters we put in thermostatic mixing valves or sorry. Yeah, thermostatic mixing valves to extend the capacity of a 50 gallon tank. Another 20 to 30%. Although here's a hot tip. Just a reminder, because I had to deal with it yesterday and I should have known this. But we had a builder that was building to Energy Star Next Gen, and we put in a 50 gallon water heater and they call this out.
[00:37:31] Shawn LeMons: So the now we have to go and swap it out for 65 because there's a minimum water heater size or a heat pump water heater of 59 gallons. And the builder asked me like, why 59 gallons? I'm like, it's because it's between 50 and something else 65, so that we're sure we get it covered. I think my point there is, and lots of folks, there's great conversations going on LinkedIn and Nate Adams calling out, prompting this new article from Ari around liabilities and potential lawsuits and these kinds of things. And not that we do what we do to avoid lawsuits, but I think there's more people paying more attention, and it is important to use the tools available to you and come from a defensible position. And even if you make a different choice, have a reason for that choice that you can comfortably talk about. And that is the kind of thing that I think sets us apart from most contractors in the eyes of the customer. The amount of time and effort and diligence that we provide in the house, and if we're doing our best work every day, we get to see that all the way through the process.
[00:38:38] Ed Smith: Love that answer. Super clear. And it makes sense why you're in this kind of enviable position where you're not having to spend much, if at all, to get new leads. You guys are busy. You've got a tight team, folks focused on quality between you and Derek. You've got a ton of leadership for a company of your size, which that's often the gating factor for growth. You've got one founder or one owner. And so with you guys that's great. So I'm curious, what does the next chapter look like for Mountain West heat pumps? Like if Wave of Magic wand two years from now, you come back on the pod. What would you guys look like?
[00:39:16] Shawn LeMons: You'd get two different answers from Derek and I think.
[00:39:19] Ed Smith: I think we are 95 of a good partnership, because if you asked me and Eric Fitz, you would get two very different answers about anything too. So that's.
[00:39:26] Shawn LeMons: Great. And I'm what I'm happy about is we are 95% aligned on what this might look like. I will say that for me, wave the wand. And we are far much further along in our operational excellence every day. We have moved past the administrative hell. If you were of like day to day, just trying to solve all the little things, we've got inefficiencies. Eliminate a lot of those operational inefficiencies. To be more specific, we would like to. I think we'd like to buy our own shop and have our own space security and how it is. Industrial spaces are not always the safest areas, right? Where you have a shop and trucks and inventory and all that stuff. And Derek is keenly aware of security for the company as well as the people that work there, and having a shop where we can arrive and leave from routinely. And then I as the company tree hugger, I'm like, hey, all this metal we're pouring out of this house, we get to recycle that and all the cardboard that's coming off these shipping containers, we get to recycle that and these kinds of things. And in fact, turn that not just in as a looking at ways to find small incremental wins with all the stuff we do every day. That's really what I'm after over the next two years. And then if our team members are doing their best work every day, then we can come up with an extra, however much money to go have some fun with. I want to have more. I want all of us to enjoy working together and have a little bit of fun, and there's a little bit of smack talking in court language and that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, we're here. Not only Derek calls it our work family. So finding a way to reinforce that work family in productive and responsible ways.
[00:41:21] Eric Fitz: Awesome that focus on those like this. Operational excellence where you make these small tweaks like this half a percent 1% improvement, but you do it across a lot of different areas. All of a sudden those changes add up to like really big impact for the business. And like all those little edge areas that you're having trouble with, where those add up and those create, like the headaches that they turn into big problems. So if you can chip away at them, smooth them out, man, it's both from like your mental health perspective. Things get better. And then also just have the business starts to really just run, really thrive.
[00:41:56] Shawn LeMons: I'm gonna cue in on your comment on mental health. When we first started talking about doing this podcast, it was something that came to mind. And so the there's so many interesting parts of this that don't often get talked about. And I think if I'm correct, I think that 1 in 5 men in the United States are what they call functionally illiterate, which is a weird term. I think they're functional, but there's a reason why skilled trades don't like to do a lot of the book stuff, or struggle with some of the expectation of documentation or what have you. And it's not that they can't do it, it's that they might struggle with it. So whether it's dyslexia, which one of our leads struggled with learning disability? The dude is brilliant in so many ways. He can make things out of a sheet, a single sheet of metal. Then I'm like, Holy cow, how'd you do that? And he just sits down and he just does it right. And there's a great podcast out there. Our YouTube channel called He Talks About. He's one thing he talked about farmers are geniuses, right. Because you have to solve so much. And so I think I would take that and apply it to this to HVAC trade and plumbing and electrical, etc. and there's so much genius that is underappreciated within the industry. And I think that feeds into sort of that mental health piece that we're pushing and trying to get all these things done every day. And then it's morale for a company or even a business owner, just like the burnout factor or the body impact on the body.
[00:43:32] Shawn LeMons: These guys are guys and some gals. Now, which is awesome. The just how hard it is on the body to crawl through a crawl space and crawl with your knees across attic. The bottom cords of trusses. Just the things that you have to do to get into the places to install HVAC properly, and the amount of time you have to spend there to get it right. Is underappreciated, for sure. And so I think there's an opportunity for that conversation to be elevated and have greater appreciation as. And I think it will come up more so as we see this movement towards or adoption of AI and this sort of job loss worry that a lot of folks have. I think the skilled trades are going to be hyper resilient to that change. And along with that, hopefully will come the awareness that what if you're feeling like crap on the job site, there's lots how do we get ahead of it? Rather than taking out it, taking it out on your coworkers or taking it out on the industry at large, or frankly, driving down the street with your big truck that you're getting frustrated just literally trying to go to your job and the person in front of you or behind you or whatever. It gets back to how we treat each other every day with a little bit of respect and grace.
[00:44:57] Eric Fitz: Yeah, totally. I feel like it's this aspect, especially as a leader within the business. It's so important that you're setting what are the cultural norms and that particularly around the things that you're talking about, like it's okay. In fact, it's very important that if you are struggling Learning from. You've been in the crawl space and you're like, it's you're physically like you're at your limit for the day. Like you got to speak up and you got to. That's not you're not like, you're not a bad person. You're not a weak person for doing that. It's a reality. Like, this is tough work. It's physical work. And if you're having trouble mentally, like same thing, you just got to speak up and have a work environment that's like safe and you're able to do that and feel comfortable sharing that with your colleagues. And so you can then support each other. And then the other piece of, holy cow, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint. If you go into everything thinking like, I've got ten minutes to get this thing done, and if I don't get it done, oh my gosh, it creates days become really hard, weeks become really hard, and suddenly you're in a bad place. So trying to figure out how to make it feel more like the steady, longer horizon view leads to a lot of good things.
[00:45:58] Shawn LeMons: Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for providing an opportunity to talk about that a little bit.
[00:46:04] Eric Fitz: Yeah, sure. Sean, I think we're at a good spot to start wrapping things up. We love to ask really a final question around all your years of experience, is there a particular resource book, an organization that would really be helpful to someone who is either at your stage of trying to build a business, or they're thinking about starting their own heat pump focused business that help them get going, help them scale.
[00:46:28] Shawn LeMons: So three things. One is stay curious. If you're not sure what you're looking at, be willing and able to gather information and go research it and find how to integrate it, whether or not to integrate it into your business, for sure. But just stay curious, because that's I think that's how we move forward. I don't want to use the p word progressive, but I do believe that there's progress in at an individual and at an industry level when we can stay curious around stuff too, is get involved with the amazing. I would say upskilling and knowledge building that is available in the industry these days and whether it be excellent tools like amply or newer versions of manual S supplements, if you will. How to properly utilize these software tools to align the equipment's ability with what you need it to do. And there's yeah, there's a lot of math in there, but there's some great tools and screenings and conversations around all this. And so I'm a fan of the Heat Pump podcast and some really good YouTube channels out there as well. Some really great stuff coming. And my last item is Brian Orr's book. It's called oh shoot, I just had and I lost it. Uh, unconfirmed. And so back to the training and unconfirmed does a great job in talking about dignity in this arena. And then the HVAC school, their annual building symposium, which is actually probably the last place you and I saw each other, but really good events and there's lots of really good events going on all over the country. And if you're really lucky, go to a great event in another part of the world and go experience another part of the world and how people live and do HVAC in other parts of the world.
[00:48:25] Ed Smith: That's great. Shawn, this was awesome. Thank you so much for joining us on the heat pump pot.
[00:48:32] Shawn LeMons: My pleasure gentlemen.
[00:48:33] Eric Fitz: Thank you. It was great. Super fun.
[00:48:38] Eric Fitz: Thanks for listening to the Heat pump podcast. It is a production of Amply Energy, and just a reminder that the opinions voiced were those of our guests or us, depending on who was talking. If you like what you've heard and haven't subscribed, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out! You can reach us once again at hello@amply.energy thanks a lot.