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44 minute read
In January 2024, Bill Spohn hired an investment banker to sell TruTech Tools.
By May he'd picked a buyer. By late June, due diligence was nearly done and a closing date sat on the calendar for early July. Then Bill went to the buyer's offices for what he assumed was a transition-planning meeting.
Instead they told him they weren't interested in buying all of it. Maybe 25 to 40 percent. They had some things going on.
"You took me this far?"
He didn't say anything rude. He waited 24 hours. Then he called the deal off.
Bill is the owner and CEO of TruTech Tools, host of the Building HVAC Science podcast, and one of our board members at Amply. He mentioned this offhand in a board meeting once, and we'd been waiting to ask him about it ever since. What we didn't expect was that the collapse of the deal is what made a family succession possible.
The cost nobody quotes you
We asked how much of his mental bandwidth the process consumed once it got rolling.
"Too much. Too much."
Here's what that meant in numbers. TruTech Tools had never had a down year. 2024, the year of the process, came in at roughly minus one and a half percent.
Bill doesn't blame the market or the buyer.
"I'll raise my hand and say I was distracted, which also pushed distraction on other people, because they got drawn into things which are not right."
Growth came back the following year — his recollection was somewhere north of 12 percent — but 2024 is the year the process took. If a sale is anywhere on your horizon, budget for this. Not the fees. The focus.
The part that surprised him
Due diligence got detailed enough that Bill's leadership team had to be pulled in — weeks of questions from a much larger company, data rooms, meetings with the buyer's people.
They came out more confident, not less. The feedback Bill got was that the buyer had never heard of some of what TruTech does — and that in places, TruTech was doing it better. Less constrained. Cleaner decision-making.
That's a strange thing to learn by trying to sell — you spend all your time looking at what's in front of you, and a process like this forces an outside view.
Then his son Billy asked him a question.
"Dad, since you didn't sell to them, would you ever consider selling to me?"
Billy is now a 25 percent owner. Over the next year or so, he'll buy the rest.
Why the handoff is possible at all
A business can only be handed to the next person if it runs on something other than the founder's head.
Bill started building that in 2015, wanting a business plan that fit on two pages. He traced the idea to its source — the Vision/Traction Organizer from EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System — read Traction, scored a 42 out of 100 on the self-assessment, and sat on it. COVID moved him. Around 2020 he hired an implementer for a two-year rollout.
His description of what EOS actually is remains the most honest one we've heard: "a package where you just pour in sweat and out comes your systems. Not water. Sweat."
Two pieces worth stealing.
GWC — gets it, wants it, has the capacity to do it. TruTech uses it to interview for a role and then evaluate the person in it. Gets it: you explain the job, walk away, and feel no tension — you know they understand. Wants it: they see the bigger picture, and you can tell from the dialogue. Capacity: some skills are innate, some learned. That last one is the only one you can coach. When someone's struggling, GWC tells you which conversation you're actually in.
Core values as a tool, not a poster. TruTech built theirs from an exercise — name three real people you'd want stranded with you, and the qualities you'd want beside you — then made them load-bearing. They interview against them and review against them. Somebody reads them aloud at the start of every Level 10 meeting. There's a bulletin board where employees write each other up on index cards for living one out, drawn quarterly for a gift card.
Bill's case for the effort is the most practical one we've heard: "Anybody, any place in the company, you come across a problem, and it's, 'Oh, what do I do?' The core values will tell you what to do. You don't even need to ask somebody."
That's what makes a business transferable. Not a founder with good instincts — a company where the answer doesn't have to come from him.
Timestamps
[00:00] – Introduction
[03:41] – Introducing Bill Spohn and the origins of TruTech Tools
[08:41] – Bill's engineering background and career journey into HVAC
[11:35] – Discovering building science and the path toward electrification
[17:00] – Living inside a net-zero home: successes, surprises, and lessons learned
[23:37] – Heat pump design, commissioning mistakes, and why proper installation matters
[27:51] – The inside story of almost selling TruTech Tools — and why the deal fell apart
[42:18] – How EOS transformed TruTech Tools' leadership, culture, and operations
[49:27] – Building strong teams through core values and the GWC hiring framework
[55:25] – Better HVAC: creating a community dedicated to continuous learning and better craftsmanship
Transcript:
00:00:00.200 — 00:00:42.640 · Speaker 1
TruTech had this beautiful, lucky progression of basically never having a negative year compared to the last. Every year is growth, sometimes double digits, sometimes single. 2024 was like -1.5%. And I'll raise my hand and say I was distracted, which also pushed distraction on other people because they got drawn into things which are not right.
And then 2025 actually went up. I should know the number, but it was like in the order of more than 12% compared to 24. So I made up with it. Plus.
00:00:46.920 — 00:03:28.010 · Speaker 2
Hey everyone! We've got a great episode for you today. It's with a guest. Many of you already know the one and only Bill spohn, co-owner and CEO of TruTech Tools, and host the building HVAC science podcast, As you heard from that intro clip, Bill gets incredibly self-reflective and honest in this episode. Bill is always open and transparent to a remarkable degree, but I felt like this episode took that to a new level, and we're very grateful to him for that. We cover some fun stuff, like Bill electrifying his own home in Pittsburgh, but I think the real meat and inside of the episode comes when Bill opens up around two things. First, Bill talks about taking true tech to the brink of a sale. He went most of the way through the process, had an investment banker, went through due diligence, had a target acquirer, had a closing date on the calendar, and when the terms changed at the last minute, he walked away. Acquisition is very much on the mind of HVAC owners right now, so this is an amazing glimpse into what one of the most respected entrepreneurs in HVAC learned when he almost sold his business.
The second thing I was pretty excited about was getting into iOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. Bill, is the reason I read the book. Traction cover to cover something like 3 or 4 years ago. He walks through what iOS actually changed day to day at True Tech. He walks through what gets it. Once it has the capacity to do it means. And he talks about why his son, Billy said that instituting iOS was the single greatest gift Bill could have given him during the generational leadership transition they're going through right now. It's a great episode. Okay, before we get into it, three quick things. First, we just became official partners of the National Comfort Institute. In my humble opinion, they're the single best organization to be a part of. If you want to be a high performance HVAC contractor, there are high performance. HVC summit is coming up September 1st through third in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee at the Dollywood Heart Song Lodge. Details are at www.gotosummit.com, and we've got a discount code for that too.
It's AMPLY2026 all one word. And the 2026 is in numbers, not letters. So it's amply 2026, but all one word. Second, sign up for the US Heat Pump Summit at www.usheatpumpsummit.com. It's September 15th and 16th in Worcester, Massachusetts and this will be our third year going. If you're building a heat pump business these are your people. Use the code amply just the word amply for a discount when you register. And last, if you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe, give us five stars or even better, write a review. We do this because we love it and we learn a ton. And your like, subscribes and reviews do great things for our show. All right. With all that out of the way, let's get to it. Enjoy our conversation with the one and only Bill Spohn.
00:03:31.890 — 00:03:34.370 · Speaker 2
Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. I'm Ed Smith.
00:03:34.370 — 00:03:37.130 · Speaker 3
And I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amply Energy.
00:03:37.170 — 00:03:42.850 · Speaker 2
Today we are delighted to have Bill Spohn on the pod. Bill, it's been a long time coming. Thank you so much for joining.
00:03:42.890 — 00:03:47.050 · Speaker 1
Absolutely a pleasure here. I love the ideas that we're going to talk about.
00:03:47.050 — 00:03:53.850 · Speaker 2
And you're our first guest where we were on your pod and now you're on our pod. So this is very exciting to turn the tables.
00:03:53.890 — 00:03:57.610 · Speaker 1
Wow. Maybe create some cryptocurrency or something for this.
00:03:58.250 — 00:04:01.130 · Speaker 2
A token seems like the exact right thing to do from this and I agree.
00:04:01.170 — 00:04:01.890 · Speaker 3
Excellent idea.
00:04:01.930 — 00:04:20.370 · Speaker 2
Yeah. All right. Bill. A lot of people in this space know you, so this almost feels silly asking, but for those who don't tell us what is TruTech tools and who's built upon. What was your path to being CEO of TruTech? Owner of TruTech? Would love to just get both of those. Intro at the top. Sure.
00:04:20.410 — 00:08:24.310 · Speaker 1
So what is TruTech? E-commerce online store. Web store focusing mainly on tools and test instruments for HVAC and building performance. I would say a tighter focus on residential and commercial, although we do have customers from both worlds Energy Raiders thing, and I think it was actually the genesis of the idea came from a couple people, the former chief executive of BP, Larry Zucker.
I was working for Tesco at the time and I was at a conference and this was like the cocktail party and he and another guy were talking, Laverne Degli. She was also on the board of BP, and Larry's ill. I know you make great products at Tesco, but we need to have everything in one place. We need a one stop shop. I'm like, oh, okay.
Wow. So that idea got planted in my head. Then at that point, Jim Bergman was also working for Tesco as HVAC technical advisor. He was working full time as an educator at a career center, but working part time at Tesco. And when he came into the company that assigned him to me, the market manager for HVAC. And that's how our friendship blossomed.
So Jim was working for me at the time, and we were always thinking about how some of these great tools were not getting utilized, either properly or at all. And I would go on sometimes I would go in sales calls to brick and mortar distributors and just very still, very vividly remember trying to talk to someone about a combustion analyzer.
They're like, I got to take a call. Somebody just walked in. I got to go do a cycle count. Why don't you come back later? I flew in here to talk to you about this product. To try to sell over the counter. You're not interested? I know people need this. Jim and I connected on that point. Jim's dad had retired, had become a widower, and was looking for something to do.
He went with Jim to test Joe's Christmas party in the late part of 2006, and someone there from Tesco said you should start an internet company, Mr. Bachman. And he said, what even is that? And so they took that idea, that kernel of idea. And immediately in early January, Jim's talked to me and said, do you think this has legs?
Where do you think this could go? And I said, this is really interesting. I said, you guys are going to work with it. He said, yeah, we're going to try. So he actually came back to me with the first name for the company. Totally testo. I'm like, oh wait a minute, that's going to be limiting. I know we love testo.
That's our world right now. This is where the idea came from. But let's not just stop there. And his second idea that he came to me with was TruTech tools. Hold on. So love that idea. And then they were more hands on, applications oriented guys. And Jim was really starting to build his science brain out at that point to where it is now with measure quick.
Just tremendous. The way he approaches looks at things and things he knows. And they were looking for somebody like a business side and even just what inventory should we carry? Which should the products be. How many should we have there thing. So I started providing advice. I say like on day two pretty much, and I was a paid advisor for about a year and a half, and then it had started to take off.
It went from about 70,000 in sales the first partial year to 750,000 in the second year. And by the end of that year. Jim. Hey, my dad and I need more help. So I talked with my wife, and we decided I could take the leap and join as an owner and also a general manager of TruTech. Actually, I did this just a few weeks ago.
Jim shares offices with us in Mogador, Ohio. I saw him in the hallway, said Jim. Sometimes people ask me or try to position me as founder of TruTech, and I'm like, I don't want to misrepresent things. Would you call me a founder or how would you position? He goes, Bill. My dad and I were flounders. You were the founder.
Okay.
00:08:27.390 — 00:08:28.110 · Speaker 1
I love that.
00:08:28.110 — 00:08:28.310 · Speaker 2
Great.
00:08:28.310 — 00:10:22.240 · Speaker 1
Love. So that was a long explanation there. So where did I come from? How did I get here? Yeah, yeah. As a youngster, I liked taking apart things, occasionally putting them back together. I grew up in a small town called Rome, New York. Really nice, sweet place to grow up. Ended up going to college for mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester.
Not a real hands on program, actually a more of a theoretical based engineering program. But in the process, I already always had in my mind that I wanted to run my own business. So I actually tried a couple of ideas. One is I pitched electro photography consultant when I moved to Pittsburgh, and it was to somebody, Westinghouse.
I was going to try to fake it until I made it doing that, because that's what I had worked in at Kodak in Rochester. I also teamed up with another guy and was looking to build a to take a PC training center and turn it into a typist pool, one that existed, use it after hours to run business through that and lease it from somebody that failed.
Another one was something called just the facts. Friend of mine said, hey, somebody's doing in my area, you could do it in Pittsburgh. You just send out jokes, hints, recipes and take advertising on the facts and send it to everybody who has a fax machine. When I found out there's this thing called the Can-Spam act, and every one of those faxes could have generated a $10,000 fine.
So that one didn't work. Jeez. So I went to work for Kodak. Then a company called Fisher Scientific got to learn about measurement instruments there. Then work for Bacharach, an instrument manufacturer in Pittsburgh, for ten years. Then a little stint in between with Superior Valve and then testo for ten years.
So let's latches onto the story I just gave about meeting Jim, working with them, sharing this philosophy. Meeting someone from the field who says your store is needed. And that's how we got here.
00:10:22.280 — 00:10:41.040 · Speaker 3
Obviously. Testo and these other instrument companies, they had products that were serving the HVAC industry. But why did you move towards this business that was serving contractors specifically? Why tools. Why mostly focus on residential.
00:10:41.080 — 00:11:25.800 · Speaker 1
Sure. So when I was at Bacharach, a large chunk. Half of my time, there was an engineering design of products. A couple of patents from there so intimately knew how these things worked. And Jim knew how to squeeze the most value out of them. So with that combination, the engineering side and how do you get value and apply them in the field?
That was just so logical to approach that. And the Bacharach thing was HVAC instruments. The test thing was HVAC instruments. And I was also able to work with people from those businesses who knew a lot more than I did and absorb an awful lot, see a lot of things happen. And with testo on a Global Basis. So I would say it just enriched my mental library of what the possibilities were.
00:11:25.800 — 00:11:55.080 · Speaker 3
I think it's a good segue into the next question. Ultimately, I feel like you're an engineer at heart. You just love digging into problems. Clearly, from your podcast, you've gone deep into building science. when did you go from the HVAC building science to then start thinking more about this electrification space and something that you wanted to get further into, and something that you actually believed in as important movement or an important thing to focus on?
00:11:55.120 — 00:12:57.610 · Speaker 1
Sure. I'll take it back to another. In retrospect, I can say there was like this seed idea. My mind and my senior year in college, mechanical engineering took an energy systems class. I was like, this stuff is freaking cool. I really like how energy gets converted, transformed, and I graduated from college thinking at some point energy is going to be part of my career in the future.
I don't know where that's going to be. Then, moving into the rural at Bacharach, they were very intimately involved with providing combustion analyzers to do carbon monoxide testing for standards that we're developing in the burgeoning weatherization industry starting around the late 70s, early 80s.
So I came in there in 88 and was already established. Hey, we go to these trade shows, we meet with these people. Weatherization loves our products. Hey, Bill, can you give a presentation here? Can you explain something there? Can you write a little white paper there? Can you help us with a product description?
Like, sure. And that's where I got exposed to all of that.
00:12:57.650 — 00:13:07.890 · Speaker 3
Wow. And so that planted the seed. But how did you then go, oh, I really want to get after this a bit more. I want to talk about this more as something you wanted to focus on.
00:13:07.930 — 00:14:01.170 · Speaker 1
Sure. Going to these conferences, it's hard not to get the firehose of information about home performance and getting the idea of house as a system. It was really hard to miss. So House is a system, all these interrelated components. And I'm like going back to my engineering days and it's like simplicity, energy conversion, usage.
So this is ringing a bell in my head. This all makes sense. And then actually applying some of that as a couple different houses that I lived in. Doing some remodeling work myself and not following any building science. And then in the last two houses before this one saying, hey, there's opportunities to fix things, let's do a blower door test, let's do some ear sealing.
Let's make sure everything's in tune, that the air flows are good. And so that all came together. And then my wife and I were thinking about, hey, where are we going to end up besides the Earth?
00:14:03.250 — 00:14:22.290 · Speaker 1
In which city? And then we just homed in on. Yeah. We're going to stay in Pittsburgh. Why don't we make our build our first and last and make it our forever home? And then at that point, I was like, there's a lot of things which I've experienced and learned over these years. Let's try to put them all into play to best we can.
00:14:22.450 — 00:14:26.450 · Speaker 2
And how nervous was your wife when she heard you say that sentence?
00:14:27.570 — 00:16:39.020 · Speaker 1
She had lived with me in these ideas for so long. It just made sense. She is a scientist by background. A chemist, and actually I met her. She made sensors at Bacharach. Yeah. So it all made sense to her, too. And it was like, let's tread lightly. That's John Hick's old business name, lightly treading as tread lightly on the earth, if we can.
So we started to put together an idea, and I think actually I launched a Facebook page in 2018 and we didn't start building until 2019, 2020, and then invited a bunch of people to it and started posting questions, posting designs, ideas, and got feedback. So I had this giant cohort of people friends over the years just commenting on things, and then we're moving along the line of passive House.
That seemed very appealing. It just been introduced, that topic. But then a good friend of mine pointed out that passive House would probably be electric. That's just fits the equation so nicely. It's not that rigorous, but I think I believe all passive houses or electric. We didn't want to go all the way to passive with the air sealing the additional external insulation.
It just seemed like it became unaffordable. So it was like, do something much better, but we can't do the ultimate. So that's how we found a builder. It came up with this design. And then as I'm putting things together and planning things, it became very easy to see, hey, electrification makes a lot of sense.
And there's a group which I'm a volunteer advisor called Solar United Neighbors son, and they were running a bidding co-op for our county and that I could cash in on one provider providing solar for 30, 60 different customers, and they would do it at a reduced rate. And oh, this all serendipity works together.
So that's how we got the solar through solar United neighbors. Wow. And then it just electrification made a lot of sense to just from Energy efficiency, and it's also a little bit trying to prove a point. Like it could be done. And that's the way I approach it now, when I talk about my house and what we're doing here, it's not like, ha.
00:16:39.020 — 00:16:40.020 · Speaker 4
Ha, I did it.
00:16:40.060 — 00:16:49.780 · Speaker 1
It's more like, you want an example of how it's done. I'll talk about the pluses and minuses, but it can be done. Maybe not everybody's budget now, but it can be done.
00:16:49.820 — 00:17:04.459 · Speaker 2
I saw you on stage at HVAC Symposium this past January, and you were talking about your house, and you said something very similar to what you just said, but you started it with, I'm living inside my ideas.
00:17:04.500 — 00:17:05.699 · Speaker 1
Yeah. Let me inside my theories.
00:17:05.740 — 00:17:15.540 · Speaker 2
Yeah, in theories. And there's pros and cons to that. So now with the story of like how you kind of got to your house and tell us about what is it like living inside your theories.
00:17:15.540 — 00:19:16.830 · Speaker 1
It's really nice. And there are a lot of human things that are done, just things for overall environmental comfort. Good friend of mine named Chris Dorsey. He wrote a book with John Krieger About the home performance book. It's like a Bible in the industry. He actually knew heard I was doing this, and he bought me a copy of a book called The Pattern Language, and it's 400 different little articles about building communities, lighting space.
Just some people have studied all these different aspects. So actually, my wife and I sat down and we picked like 30 chapters out of the 400. That made sense to us. And we went through them and then talked about those things and how we could incorporate them into the house. So things like solar shading, permanent solar shading, so that the high summer sun doesn't come in the window, but the low winter sun does, putting most of the glazing, most of the windows facing south for hiking in the winter so we can cheat the outdoor environment and warm things using the sun coming inside, increasing the solar heat gain coefficient of these windows, which you wouldn't do in Arizona or California, perhaps, but doing that here.
So it's just like a lot of these little bits and pieces got put together. And I just one of the things we did when we found the site, I'm sitting in my office right now, I was standing right here in the middle of the field, which we called Sunny Field. That's the name of the property because it was a big sunny field, all cleared.
And I just said, I want to get lost in the view. That was like the number one thing on my punch list. So if I put the shade up behind the screens, the monitors here, where you guys are staring at me, that's I can get lost in the view. And that was like the feeling that was part of the age in place, forever home thing.
And then just a big sky view also, which gives us the ability to get a lot of solar because there's up on a hill, so we're not blocked by anything around us. All those things fit together. I'm rambling.
00:19:16.870 — 00:19:17.550 · Speaker 5
That's great.
00:19:17.630 — 00:19:48.870 · Speaker 3
I like it. You're talking about all kinds of different parts of the system and picking a site in addition to the decisions you're making about the home itself. But I think what's so cool in general, what you've done with your own house, you're like, you're leading by example and you're sharing your experiences.
And I feel like that is a through line. If I were to say one thing that I know about Bill Spon is that you consistently lead by example and you share what you've learned as you go along in life and your professional experience. So it makes perfect sense to me. That's what you continue to as you've done in your own home.
00:19:48.910 — 00:19:49.670 · Speaker 1
It fits.
00:19:49.790 — 00:19:50.510 · Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:19:50.830 — 00:19:51.990 · Speaker 1
From Eric Fitz.
00:19:51.990 — 00:19:52.750 · Speaker 3
Oh, yeah. Nice.
00:19:54.150 — 00:20:13.870 · Speaker 3
Excellent pun. So, Bill, just to follow up, Ed actually asked a piece about what were you surprised about? In a good way. In a bad way? Yeah. Just tell us a little bit more about what you actually have learned from now living in the house that you've carefully designed. And you collected all these insights from people that in your orbit and from these great books.
00:20:13.870 — 00:20:55.080 · Speaker 1
One thing was it was not specifically designed to be net zero energy, but it ended up being net zero energy. I took. I embarked on a fool's errand. One day at our old house and collected all the nameplate data on all the electrical appliances and all the gas appliances in that home. And I made this elaborate spreadsheet, and I looked at time of use in wattage, consumed, and tried to figure out how many kilowatt system I would need at the site.
And then we had already picked that solar provider through this co-op from Solar United Neighbors, and I was proudly presented with the spreadsheet and Andy goes, we're just going to do it our way. Is that okay?
00:20:56.440 — 00:22:00.640 · Speaker 1
And I think I would have put in twice as much. I just did not realize all the aspects of nameplate data does not equate to actual usage. So a lot of respect for that. But it ended up being net zero energy. And even when we just before we added an electric vehicle in our lives, we added more solar so that we could stay net zero energy.
A couple of things that on the bad, not the bad side, but I actually was giving a presentation to the Pennsylvania Housing Research, their conference, and State College, PA and I had a pie chart of from my Emporia Energy monitor with all the circuits on it and just proudly showing I measure everything and some of the audience goes, what's that relatively large square there?
That's 25%. And I was like, oh, I squint and I'm like, oh, that's the motor for the septic aerator. Dang, that uses a lot of energy. And then the next one was the radon fan. So together, the septic aerator and the radon fan use a megawatt a year.
00:22:00.800 — 00:22:01.360 · Speaker 5
Wow.
00:22:01.720 — 00:23:16.170 · Speaker 1
Yeah, it's on my list at some point to see if I can replace it, but it's. We're still in that zero. Do I need to go there? That thing. But that was just surprise me. It wasn't good or bad. It was just a realization. The thing that surprised me in the bad side was There were a couple misses by the builder. And this isn't anything about building science or HVAC, but they were ready to grade the soil next to the house, right up to the siding, and leave no exposed foundation.
And that's a code that you must do that. I was so surprised they did not know that code. But again, through my circles I had been in some presentations somewhere where they talked about that. And then our house was built in a factory, so a lot of it was finished and delivered in four boxes to the site. Only in the last two years did we discover that they didn't properly installed the shower pan system and allowed water, got into the OSB underlying it and blossomed these wonderful mushrooms which were unintentionally grown.
So we had to have that all cut out and removed and rebuilt. So those are the two downside bad side. I think that could have happened anywhere.
00:23:16.210 — 00:24:05.290 · Speaker 3
Yeah. As you were describing something. Anything with the shower pan not going right. That's a bad day when you discover those kind of challenges. Fascinating. It's so interesting. Yeah. Going deep on that nameplate data and trying to predict electricity consumption in particular. It's such. Yeah.
Your microwave is going to pull almost a kilowatt, but you're actually only using it in 32nd increments a few times a day. Sure. I think power draw in real time, but actual energy consumption is low. And those kind of things, like you're saying with a radon fan or the aerator for your septic, it's like one of these things where maybe you can swap a motor and it'll drop the consumption, but maybe the aerator, it doesn't need to be running continuously.
Maybe it's like we can just put a timer on it and it runs half the time, and it's still to get this job done.
00:24:05.330 — 00:24:08.970 · Speaker 1
Yeah, it actually does run exactly 50% duty cycle.
00:24:09.010 — 00:24:45.090 · Speaker 3
Okay. So yeah, I don't know. But it's these things that when you're going through a design process, you've got all these different components of a system that you're selecting, and then you're putting them together in a system, and then there's commissioning. And if someone misses some checklist of like when you're commissioning the aerator, they leave it on a 100% duty cycle instead of 75% or 25%.
It makes no difference from the person doing the install. It's no different amount of effort. But for you as the owner of the system, holy cow, it makes a huge difference for your long term operational costs and experience and all those things. And it's hard. It's hard stuff to figure out.
00:24:45.090 — 00:24:50.930 · Speaker 1
And one more thing I'd be remiss not to mention is the heat pump was heat pump. Eight guys.
00:24:50.930 — 00:24:51.530 · Speaker 4
Heat pump.
00:24:51.530 — 00:24:53.130 · Speaker 2
I was gonna ask, I was.
00:24:53.490 — 00:25:45.730 · Speaker 1
He pump was installed by a non contractor, the builders guy who installed furnaces and a couple of AC's in 1 or 2 heat pumps. He claimed he left the factory flare on the lime set and didn't use a torque wrench and cracked it. So when it went into heating mode, it blew the charge, and I only noticed it because just four weeks before, I had connected the Emporia Energy monitor and I saw the electric furnace basically, which has the blower and the coils in it.
Just saw the consumption shoot way up and I'm like, oh wow, I thought I could get close to net zero, but in no way. And it's oh, here's what it is. And then going back to Jim Bergmann explained it to him. And it was the day after New Year's. He drove out a hundred miles to my house, helped figure it out, and it ended up being we had to replace everything with the refrigerant touched.
00:25:45.770 — 00:25:46.410 · Speaker 2
Oh, wow.
00:25:46.730 — 00:25:47.210 · Speaker 4
Wow.
00:25:47.370 — 00:25:48.370 · Speaker 1
That was bad.
00:25:48.690 — 00:25:54.210 · Speaker 2
Can I ask, what do you pump system you have in your house? That specific plug for anyone in particular? I'm just curious what ended up in Bill's house?
00:25:54.250 — 00:26:43.620 · Speaker 1
Yeah, it was our builder who's now out of business. Used a brand called Datsun. Datsun built in Montreal, Canada, because they make low output systems for very efficient housing. And so our builder was like, hey, we're comfortable using these folks. And I'm like, I'm not going to force you to do anything else different.
The only thing is, there's no service people in this area who work on death, sin. But I made one. There's a guy I know. He's turned into one for us. Nice. The outdoor unit is green, relabeled, and then the coil is ADP. So it's like off the shelf coil you get in the US and the electric furnace is theirs made in Canada.
And then the controls that run the whole thing are made by them in Canada.
00:26:43.660 — 00:26:47.540 · Speaker 2
Getting really invasive here since it's so low. Here's what is the load on your house.
00:26:47.540 — 00:26:48.900 · Speaker 1
Just over two tons.
00:26:48.940 — 00:26:49.420 · Speaker 5
Okay.
00:26:49.460 — 00:26:57.140 · Speaker 1
If you include the basement, which we keep at 67 degrees, it's 4400ft² conditioned.
00:26:57.180 — 00:26:57.780 · Speaker 4
Yeah.
00:26:58.300 — 00:27:03.540 · Speaker 3
Another good shout out for why we don't use rules of thumb based on square footage for sizing, because.
00:27:03.580 — 00:27:04.300 · Speaker 2
Totally.
00:27:04.820 — 00:27:06.100 · Speaker 3
Yeah, that's quite the ratio.
00:27:06.140 — 00:27:22.820 · Speaker 1
Of I don't think you guys were in business doing low calques at the time. But I had Michael House did a cool calc. Russell King did a quick model, and then I had something done called a passive house planning package. Okay. And they basically triangulated on this two tons.
00:27:22.860 — 00:27:23.500 · Speaker 5
Amazing.
00:27:23.540 — 00:27:25.220 · Speaker 3
That is helpful when they all agree.
00:27:25.940 — 00:28:26.140 · Speaker 2
Also helpful to have on speed dial. A couple of guys who have in the HVAC grapevine. Like most active, most expert commenters like Michael House and Russell King. Like that's pretty good. Yeah. That's awesome. Moving from your house to another thing near and dear to your heart. TruTech. So built Your Honor board, which were deeply grateful for.
I think it was two meetings ago. We were chatting about a few things, and you mentioned offhandedly that you went really far down the path of almost selling TruTech before you realized, no, you didn't want to do it. And we moved on to talk about other things in that meeting. And I've been wanting to ask you since then, tell us the story around that.
Because, man, acquisition is a hot topic in HVAC and HVAC adjacent, which is what TruTech is. So just for someone who is as deep an entrepreneur and business operators, you just love to know the story behind that.
00:28:26.180 — 00:29:13.350 · Speaker 1
Sure. First, I'll take you back to just a quick recap of ownership history at TruTech. So it was Jim and his dad started as a partnership. I came in and we changed to an S Corp and I was a minority owner but significant shares but minority. Then Eric Preston and I bought out Jim and his dad and I became large minority owner.
And basically in 2024, I bought out Eric to become 100% owner basically throughout 2025. Now in 2026, my son Bill Jr, he's now 25% owner. And in the Next year or so, he will buy the rest of it for me, so it's going to transition over to him. That's probably the first time I talked about this publicly.
00:29:14.390 — 00:29:18.750 · Speaker 2
Thank you. Yeah. Do you regret any of those numbers? Do you want to go back and take it from the top?
00:29:18.790 — 00:29:20.790 · Speaker 5
No no no no no.
00:29:21.190 — 00:30:49.670 · Speaker 1
So in the just looking, say around 2020 I'm not going to live forever. Don't want to keep doing this while I'm still have good health. Get around. Want to do things with my wife and I with our lives. Travel a little bit, just be in retirement and start to look at different plans for succession in the business.
And I had in mind a plan where my co-owner, Eric, would be like CEO for a while until my son was ready. But as it turned out, that and I started to look at that, it was like, do I want to delay that long? Is Billy interested? So I reform it because I was a majority owner. I reformatted it to I think I'm just going to cash out because I would say since the late 20 teens, I would get few emails a month from different people shopping.
Usually it's like a lower level exec in an investment banking firm or something like that. So I started to go a little deep with them. I realized I shouldn't go too deep and considered a distraction. I attended a couple seminars and it's one of the seminars was like by an investment banking firm called Generational Equity, and they deal with all businesses.
I would say a very comprehensive overview one day seminar of the process of when to sell, how to sell, how to prepare to sell. And I think that just resonated in my head. And I'm like, I should do this. This is the time, this is the way I'm going to exit.
00:30:49.710 — 00:30:54.230 · Speaker 3
Why did that suddenly resonate? Does it feel like because it was just simpler or what? Yeah.
00:30:54.390 — 00:30:55.030 · Speaker 5
Yes.
00:30:55.190 — 00:31:40.800 · Speaker 1
Yeah, it was simpler. Yeah. And also you don't know what you don't know. And I do have very small handful of either business owners or old colleagues who get calls from me. I get calls from them, and we just talk about stuff, some of it confidential. Just to continue to help me answer questions about things.
So after this seminar, I was like, yeah, I'm going to shop the business. So talk to some of my advisors and figure it out, like how to pick an investment banker. And we picked one in January of 24. And they did a really nice job preparing something called a SIM Confidential Information Memorandum SIM. And it was like 50 pages and it was like a brag book on true talk.
00:31:40.800 — 00:31:43.000 · Speaker 4
I was like, oh, this is really nice.
00:31:43.080 — 00:34:15.530 · Speaker 1
But they also brought in the market, they brought in the competition. They brought in a lot of different factors. Our approach, I made it sound very attractive. And if people aren't familiar with this process, investment banker shops you versus you getting a call from PE and saying, yeah, I want to work with you.
Or they can start to take over versus creating an auction process. So the investment banker who gets a commission on the sale in the 4 to 5 6% range, something like that, but they do a crap ton of work to prepare you to look good. And then they're in a network where they have lists. And I think our first teaser, without any information on who we were, the little teaser that went out to 1500 different companies, PE firms, etc. and then another couple of other terms you want to hear are there's financial buyers and there's strategic buyers.
The company you are may relegate where you fall in. A financial buyer is interested just in the fact you're a money making machine, and they want to add you to their portfolio and provide some help. Where are the government? We're here to help. Then a strategic buyer is doing something that's interesting.
We either want to do more of it, or you fit into our scheme of thinking currently, or our future scheme of thinking. And usually a strategic buyer offers more than a financial buyer. Financial buyer is just like grinds the gears on your data and says you're worth this much, but in the process. So you go out to both of these types of buyers, and then the less went through a funnel narrowed down until about four were left.
And there were some people flew in to have meetings or drove in to have meetings with us and pursue things. So the other thing I'll say now, if anybody from our company is listening, you didn't know about all this because you didn't need to know about this. And that's not me being a jerk saying you don't need to know about it.
But what if you did know about it and nothing happened, but you made a decision based upon what you thought was going to happen? Bad for both of us. So I have a friend who sold his business to a larger company, a strategic. His thing was. Somebody heard the rumor. They were for sale, and he had a bigger company, 100 people.
He had a meeting and said, listen, you've trusted me to get you this far. Trust me now. And that was it. So I didn't have the chance to do the trust me speech. But I was prepared because I have people in my circle that I talk to.
00:34:15.570 — 00:34:45.690 · Speaker 2
Nice one ticky tack question. We actually have quite a few customers who got into HVAC as entrepreneurs through acquisition. So they're not a PE shop, they're not a strategic. They're like a guy who got out of his military service and was like, I don't want to have a boss. And he got a small business Administration loan, bought a company.
Would they fall into a third bucket, or would they just be one of the other two? Or and I imagine you're too big for that sort of thing. Or were there individuals, entrepreneurs to acquisition in the mix too?
00:34:45.730 — 00:34:46.490 · Speaker 4
There were.
00:34:46.810 — 00:34:54.970 · Speaker 1
Yes, there were. And then and we still get questions. Oh, there's this thing, I call it the Stanford approach because they teach it at business school and.
00:34:54.970 — 00:34:56.129 · Speaker 2
Stand for funds.
00:34:56.570 — 00:35:14.090 · Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I'm a great person. I'll move to your area. I'll take everything over. I know how to run businesses. And you get emails, printed letters, photographs of them and their kids, handwritten letters, everything. Perfumed letters came our way with these search funds.
00:35:14.130 — 00:35:21.210 · Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And they're a little bit of a third bucket, right? Because I imagine they can't pay as much as the other two.
00:35:21.250 — 00:38:42.500 · Speaker 1
No, they're going to want to. They're not going to pay. They're going to want to leverage and pay over time and run with a private note. So it was everything. They came up with their research. And then it was the investment banker. And it was like everything that we could think of, who they should approach, specific names or just companies, I think.
So they did their thing and narrowed it down to four. And then from the four we picked one. And there was a very small basically the two owners at that time, Eric and I. We picked one to go forward with. And then went into the process of due diligence. And they're a big enough company. Large fraction of $1 billion in sales but still regional.
They had some good people on their team to ask us questions, have meetings and due diligence process of providing data and uploading it to a data file room, virtual room, data room. And we went through all that and tried, and I think we did answer every question as quickly as possible and as thoroughly as possible and providing as much backup data as we could.
But as you started to get, we started the process January of 2024, I think it was May. We had picked who would be the entity to work with, started due diligence, and then got to the point where it was looking like early July would be a closing date, and during maybe one third of the way through. Starting to get a little uneasiness with their attention to detail and their attention to us.
Everybody wants to be taken care of, visible that thing. But are you sure you want to buy us or what are you? The questions are rolling through my mind and then got down to, hey, why don't you come to our offices and we're going to talk about the next steps? Okay, good. Who's on the transition team? What are the key things we need to do?
What's the time frame look like? And it was. We're not interested in buying all of you right now, maybe 25 to 40%. But we got some things going on. You took me this far, and I was stunned and didn't say anything rude, but waited 24 hours and said the deal's off. And so that sent me into a period of thinking, what's next?
Now that I did that, and I was told by the investment banker, it's not cool to go back to the second and third people on your list. You've blown it for at least a year, maybe two. Figure out what didn't work with them, what didn't work with you. You may need to improve some factors and things like that, or change some things, but through the process, our leadership team got brought in during the due diligence phase because it got to be so detailed.
So people on the leadership team got a chance to experience, I think not for the first time for all of them, but the first time for most of them. What this looks like, what the process looks like, and also some insight into how a similar strategic business runs their things. And a lot of the feedback we got was they've never heard of what we do, or I think what we do is actually better to what they do, and it's not as constrained to decision making happens a little bit smoother and cleaner.
And Billy basically said, dad, if since you didn't sell to them, would you ever consider selling to me? I'm like, okay, that's a different plan.
00:38:42.540 — 00:38:44.380 · Speaker 2
Yeah, that's a cool moment.
00:38:44.420 — 00:39:05.980 · Speaker 1
Yeah. So he had to pull it all in. Think about it for 3 or 4 weeks, and then decided the best steps to do that was to buy out Eric, so that I could own everything, to take the process, to transfer and keep it in the family. And that started to make more and more sense for us at that time. It still does.
00:39:06.020 — 00:40:00.590 · Speaker 2
That was so interesting and helpful. You're good because you only hear these days about I cashed out. I'm living in Florida now, and I ran into one of our oldest customers who went through a similar process HVAC company, but slightly different, but got to the two yard line and it fell apart at the very end.
And one of the things he was like, I just lost six months of my life. My business basically flat didn't flatline. It plateaued the amount of time it takes. So super interesting to hear and thank you for the utter honesty and transparency. Can I ask you how much of your mental bandwidth did it take up when you once things got really rolling?
Up until when you said deal's off too much. Too much? Yeah, that's a great answer.
00:40:00.870 — 00:40:44.590 · Speaker 1
Tree Tech's had this beautiful, lucky progression of basically never having a negative year compared to the last. Every year is growth. Sometimes double digits, sometimes single. 2024 was like -1.5%. And I'll raise my hand and say I was distracted, which also pushed distraction on other people because they got drawn into things which are not right.
And then 2025 actually went up. I should know the number, but it was like in the order of more than 12% compared to 24. So I made up with it. Plus made up for it.
00:40:44.630 — 00:41:24.750 · Speaker 3
Plus, that is a heck of a story. It seems like there were a couple of different silver linings or lessons that came out of it. Obviously, you can't get back the six months of your life that you were distracted at all these other challenges, but can you just elaborate a little bit more about you said leadership got brought in farther down the process.
It sounds like you realized, wait a minute, we've got a really good thing on our hands here. We're doing this better than we're like in the upper echelons of process and decision making and systems. And was there anything else, any other insights that you realized from doing the process that now TruTech has got better, stronger business?
00:41:24.750 — 00:42:08.520 · Speaker 1
I think you really just said it right there is we joined them at the table looking into our things and heard them comment on what we are from a different perspective. You always think of just what's in front of you sometimes, and this allowed us to take a. External view of things. That's why I encourage. That's why I said on boards.
And that's why we belong to an entrepreneurs institution as part of the university here in Pittsburgh is to hear different things and not just hear. Hey, you're doing great. It's like, how do people do it? And also and then, like you had said much earlier, Eric is sharing. We found something else really cool.
Yeah, sure, we'll share it.
00:42:08.560 — 00:43:02.120 · Speaker 2
Bill, since Eric just mentioned processing how you guys were running the company, it made me think of it was a podcast you did three years ago when you had your iOS consultant on. Yeah. And it was just like it was maybe the fifth time I heard about iOS, but it was didn't stick because I'd never heard of it before.
And then when I listened to Your pod and you went so deep on it, I bought traction, read it cover to cover. And you have been doing some recent episodes on iOS two, which has been interesting to hear, because now I heard you at the beginning of the journey, and now hearing where it is now for folks who don't know, what is it?
What's iOS? What did it change the day to day, and why did I think Billy said on the episode you guys just did with the oars? He said iOS was the greatest gift you could have given him in the transition. That's high praise. So a big open ended question, but tell us more about iOS.
00:43:02.120 — 00:44:50.130 · Speaker 1
During the time when Jim and I were co-leaders, co-owners of the company, Jim would say, hey, why don't we develop a business plan and get a certain stage in a business? It was hard to do. We're just steeped in operations, just doing moving this from here to there in and up. But it always made me feel like a lesser of a leader not to have a business plan because I'd come.
I'd worked for a couple large companies like Tesco and Bacharach and Eastman Kodak, and they had business plans, Superior Valve, and I feel lesser because I don't have a business plan, So I want to say probably it was shortly after we bought Jim out, Jim and his dad out. But maybe in 2015 I started looking around and I found.
That through internet research, the description of here's a two page business plan. He said, oh, I like that idea because it may take a lot of thought to get there, but it's something people can look at frequently and understand and not have to read through tables and graphs in 3060 pages of things. That's really cool, and I think I put that aside until around 2017 and it resurfaced.
Then I found out that what was underlying that was the Vision Traction organizer from iOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. Gino Wickman, created this system, this process of when I talked to some people who work for big businesses, they're like, yeah, we have that, and we have this person who runs it and that person who developed and this person who maintains it.
It's like you've got enough staff where you can do things your own way. But for me, it's like iOS is it's like a package where you just pour in sweat and out comes your systems.
00:44:51.530 — 00:44:52.850 · Speaker 3
That water, sweat.
00:44:53.170 — 00:44:53.810 · Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:44:54.090 — 00:44:55.490 · Speaker 3
Maybe a little blood to the.
00:44:55.490 — 00:46:33.090 · Speaker 1
Little, little blood to. Yeah. They'll tint the mix there. So this was developed over 20 years ago. Something like more than 100,000 companies around the world use it. I found a lot of people talk about using it, and then some people really use it. And sort of my picking this in my engineering background said, if we're going to do it, we're going to do the whole thing.
We're going to do it right. But so I read the book in 2017, I took the quiz in the back where you score yourself, and it was something like a 42 out of 100. I'm like, oh, that's not really that good. But are all these questions, these things, these attributes they talk about meaningful and just stewed on that for a while.
And then I want to say around 2020 when we have a moment of self-reflection during Covid, it's like, hey, are we going to make it through? We have our act together. And we did end up making it through just fine. Even grew to people not buying a brick and mortar and buying more online. I was like, we need to pull something together and start having some dialog, some information sharing, not just keep it all nestled in the top of the company and started doing things like having different manager meetings, doing formats.
And when we got to the point where we decided, yeah, we've got enough cash that we can invest in an iOS implementer to guide us through a two year process of really embedding it in our company. When we started that process, the very first meeting, one of the people in the room raised their hand, said, we've been doing some of this already.
It shouldn't be that hard. But Yes. I hacked it in,
00:46:34.730 — 00:47:00.650 · Speaker 1
so it wasn't all a big surprise. There's this sea change of what we're doing. But I took two years to try to think about what are some of the things we could do? It'd be like an iOS light, but not even labeled as anything. Just here's something we're doing. We're going to have monthly manager meetings. We're going to work with an agenda.
We're going to have some stated goals at the beginning of the year. We're going to measure against those goals. And that's like all video says.
00:47:00.690 — 00:47:03.130 · Speaker 2
And how critical was the implementer?
00:47:03.170 — 00:47:58.140 · Speaker 1
Very. We actually interviewed him. They do allow you to do that. It's a franchise type of thing. And they control pretty tightly for good reason. Who gets to implement them. And we found somebody who is. I wanted to have someone who we could meet with in person and not have the additional expense of flying them in to meet with us.
So one of the criteria was find somebody in Cleveland area. And we did. And he had his own conference room. So we went there and it got us off site and focused, just totally focused on things. And he just ended up being a have a very nice personality, being smart, being in the military, which people who are ex-military or in the military tend to appreciate this process aspect.
He had a good way of absorbing information and helping us along the way. So it was very critical. You have to like the implementer and they have to like you and what you're doing.
00:47:58.180 — 00:48:13.300 · Speaker 2
Does the implementer feel like a business coach guide a facilitator? Because I read the book and we've done some of it, we haven't done an implementer. So I'm actually genuinely curious, what do they feel like when you interact with them?
00:48:13.300 — 00:49:05.380 · Speaker 1
It's like they have a workbook, just like any seminar. But this is a seminar over two years with quarterly meetings. Here's what we're going to cover. We're going to introduce you to things. We're going to help you revamp your organizational chart. We're going to help you start to create processes, understand what they are.
We're going to give you some tools to write job descriptions, to run personnel reviews, and just start to implement all these little systems in the company that we use today. So it takes a long time and you have to come back through and report every quarter. People will walk away with assignments and they have to work on them in the interceding 90 days.
And those are rocks. So the process of learning iOS is iOS in a way. So you're breathing the same air.
00:49:05.420 — 00:49:11.260 · Speaker 2
Whenever you talk about iOS. In the past you've brought up almost every time. Get it, have it one.
00:49:11.260 — 00:49:13.740 · Speaker 1
It gets it once it has a capacity to do it.
00:49:13.780 — 00:49:16.980 · Speaker 2
GWC, I was close. Can you tell us about that?
00:49:17.020 — 00:50:49.430 · Speaker 1
Sure. That's something I talk about for every role in you interview people to get into a role using GWC and you evaluate them using GWC as well as aspects of the core values. That's another thing. As you create the core values, you don't just feel like, hey, we're good. It's let's go through a process and really create them.
I'll talk about that in a minute. But the GWC gets it. Once it has a capacity to do it gets it is you talk to someone and through either your coaching or training their background, you explain. Here's what needs to be done. You can turn around, walk away and feel no strain, no tension at all. I know they understand what needs to be done.
Once it is, I want to work for this company. I want to perform in my role because I see the bigger picture. I want to be part of this and that comes through. Some people are good at hiding it and some people can pay lip service to it. But for people who really want it, you can tell by the dialog that you have with them.
The capacity to do it is you have some things where you have innate skills and some learned skills. So the capacity, the C aspect capacity to do it is people may need some training, some coaching. So that's the one where you go. All right. They GW but they don't quite see we're going to help them see. So that they can be functioning at a high level.
Gets it once it has a capacity to do it.
00:50:49.430 — 00:50:50.110 · Speaker 2
Very helpful.
00:50:50.110 — 00:52:15.430 · Speaker 1
And then going back to the core values, what the process was. And I think this is true for any US implementer is in the workbook. Let's think of yourself as I recall. Think of yourself stranded on a desert island. Write down three people you absolutely want to be with and the qualities that person embraces that you want to be with, you want to have with you.
And then we went around the room and just kept on adding to the list on the board. I think we had 78 characteristics of things we admired in people. And they said, but not just like Abraham Lincoln. Some of you work with somebody who's in your church and somebody who's in your family. It's like there's got to be this real connection.
And then we came together with four core values that we felt embraced what we'd like everyone at the company to have. And again, it's we interview against the core values, asking situational questions that should lead you to believe this person does the right thing, or this person is a team player, or this person is attentive to detail.
Those are some of our core values. So we try to do that in interviewing and then also in reviews say like where you've shined and fallen short and on the core values.
00:52:15.430 — 00:52:16.270 · Speaker 2
Very cool.
00:52:16.270 — 00:52:44.510 · Speaker 3
So powerful. It's like you're using all of these systems. But thinking about the core values in particular, you're using it to attract or repel people that are coming into your business. You're figuring out whether they're performing, whether your questions around retaining those employees and that they still continue to fit with the culture, and that ultimately then becomes the foundational fabric for the business, the culture, the system that you've created going forward.
And it's just that's like a positive feedback loop. That's so cool.
00:52:44.550 — 00:53:25.000 · Speaker 1
And I like to say anybody, any place in the company, you come across a problem, a situation. And so what do I do? It's like the core values will tell you what to do. You don't even need to ask somebody. Just perform according to the core values. Now it's up to everyone else in the team and leadership, especially to make sure the core values are understood and they're spoken.
We actually now we just started we have level ten meetings. We just start every L10 meeting. Somebody reads the core values. Somebody in the room reads the core values. They're posted on posters around the offices. It's really hard to miss the core values.
00:53:25.040 — 00:53:42.600 · Speaker 2
We just launched a new version of our website and we put ours on there. And three weeks ago we had our annual on site. So the team was all together. And one of the exercises we did was we pull up the core values and we asked, are we living up to these? What do we think? And I thought it was surprisingly helpful. Borrowed from EOS.
00:53:42.680 — 00:54:04.120 · Speaker 3
And I love that idea of saying them out loud on a regular basis in front of a larger audience. It's just like doing the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school. It's just this thing. It becomes just part you. It's just embedded in your brain and your body. It's just like you wake up in the morning, you go to school, you pledge of allegiance, you start your day.
It's like, same thing with a company, core values. That's very cool.
00:54:04.160 — 00:54:25.920 · Speaker 1
And we have a core values bulletin board where if an employee spots another employee exhibiting a core value, they write them up on an index card and stick it under the core value on the board. And then every quarter we draw all those names and the person who was exhibiting the core value, they win a gift card.
00:54:25.960 — 00:54:27.960 · Speaker 2
That's awesome. I can't wait.
00:54:28.000 — 00:54:38.400 · Speaker 1
So the desire there was to help connect between somebody who sees you doing it and you doing it. You don't report on yourself. Somebody reports on you. Hey, I saw you doing that.
00:54:38.520 — 00:54:42.040 · Speaker 2
I can't wait till we have enough of a team size that we can do stuff like that. Eric.
00:54:43.320 — 00:54:47.000 · Speaker 2
Right now, we're just trying to white knuckle this thing with Teva.
00:54:47.400 — 00:55:09.680 · Speaker 1
Anybody listening? If you want to see our core values, what are. The other thing is you have 3 or 4 uniques about your business. And then the purpose and niche, which is like vision and mission. Those are all on the trutechtools.com/about or about us page. They're all listed right there. You're looking at the same thing that we look at on a regular basis inside the company.
00:55:09.720 — 00:55:24.690 · Speaker 2
That's awesome. We've gone right up to the top of time because we had so many questions and enjoyed this so much. I don't want to let you off though without a quick plug for better HVAC. What is it? And if folks wanted to learn more or participate, where would they go?
00:55:24.730 — 00:57:08.090 · Speaker 1
Better HVAC was a phrase that was floating around from, let's say, maybe 20, 21, 22, 23 different people were using it as a hashtag and saying, there's a better way to do things and there is no nexus for it. So Kevin Hart, who's a Canadian, not the comedian from Haven, Iirc, he and I got together and stuck with us, and it has the same way.
There's a lot of good resources out there. There's great events like the HVAC school Symposium where knowledge is transferred, projects are shared. There's a lot of learning, there's a lot of striving for excellence. And then people go back to doing everything the same way. What if there were a way for this group of people to stay together.
To be in one place and be found by customers. Because the more business they get, the bigger and stronger they'll get. And the more of this work will get done. So what can we do to do this? So we narrowed it down to a directory. We look for where there was a gap. We don't have certification. We don't do training.
We just make it easy to connect all the dots. So it's like a LinkedIn for HVAC and building science and IQ professionals. It's about the pro, not about the business. And nobody gets put in the directory. You join the directory by making a pledge to learn continuously, do ethically, and share openly. Going back to that leadership by sharing examples, that's part of me being expressed through better HVAC.
So it's better HVAC
00:57:09.130 — 00:58:18.540 · Speaker 1
to join The problem we're trying to solve is trying to get these contractors who are doing better work. We don't want them to leave, feel frustrated, go out of business, have struggle. We want to feed them with customers and clients. So you join just by go to the website and there's a join button. Your credentials will be reviewed.
You get to post things in the directory, and we've already started to hear of consumers using the directory, even though there's less than 300 contract pros. We call them pros in the directory. Some people are using them. I'll see things online and social media and somebody will say, hey, my cousin needs somebody in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Let's go to the directory. And so every time you're saying go to the directory, go to the directory. And if somebody who's in the area ask them to join the directory. So right now we have badges for Rewiring America and BPI credentials. So you can link as a pro the evidential credentials you have to your profile.
Something that we're working on right now. They'll be added shortly is projects, so there'll be a place to showcase the work you've done in solving problems for homeowners. We're really excited about that.
00:58:18.540 — 00:58:26.100 · Speaker 2
That's awesome. Bill Spohn, thank you so much for being on our board and for joining us on the Heat Pump podcast. We are honored.
00:58:26.100 — 00:58:30.500 · Speaker 1
Very pleased to work with you guys and happy to do this interview. Really happy to do it.
00:58:30.500 — 00:58:32.140 · Speaker 3
Thanks, Bill. That was fun.
00:58:35.300 — 00:58:57.660 · Speaker 3
Thanks for listening to the Heat Pump Podcast. It is a production of Amply Energy and just a reminder that the opinions voice 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 in 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. No .com just dot energy. Thanks a lot.
