heating and cooling business? Chris: I think the efficiency and the safety built into the systems are incredible. Today, we have remote access, so it’s possible to change your thermostat from your phone. It’ll even email you if it senses trouble or if there is a problem with the furnace. The average furnace is also 33 inches tall compared to some of those big monsters we had to take out in pieces. Those things were like five foot tall by five foot long and three foot wide. Brooke: There’s also been a change from two-way radios to cell phones too. Chris: I look back to when I first started, if you got to a job and you had a question, there was nobody to talk too. You just did your best till you got back at the end of the day. When we got the two-way radios, I thought how did we ever do this without them? Now, there are cell phones. Keith: Our trucks have GPS too, which is great. It’s so much better than trolling around town trying to find a place. MVB: What’s the best part about owning and running your own business? Chris: I look at it as the freedom to choose your own path. There is a good deal of responsibility, not only to your customers but also to your employees as well. We need to keep things running. Keith: That was kind of my driving reason to get into this business. I had other options and I didn’t really like them. A lot of those options were out of town but this business pretty much enabled me to plot my own course. The harder I worked the more I got from it. MVB: How do you handle the competition of this market? Chris: We don’t look at our competitors’ business models or what it is they are doing. We simply offer our services and try to show the value in our company. Greg: I think a lot of our success is that we spend a lot of time training our employees. We want to make sure we do things the right way, the first time. We want our customers to be happy. We have excellent service. I think that’s what sets us apart from our competitors. Chris: I agree, I think a lot of it comes down to service. We have enough people in our office to ensure we can take
care of our customers promptly. When you call, there isn’t an answering machine. You don’t have to wait. Our customers are able to get assistance in solving their problems immediately. MVB: What is your busiest time of the year? Chris: Summer through fall has historically been the busiest time for us. Rolling into winter, new construction isn’t as strong and we have more time to do furnace replacements. Weather extremes really tend to drive business also. MVB: What are the biggest challenges to owning your own business? Chris: I would think it would be the stresses of trying to retain good employees and then keeping enough work to keep them busy. I think that is the hardest thing. We are providing employment for these people so they can provide for their families. When the work tapers off it’s not just a ‘well, go home’ attitude. We work harder to find more work. It’s about trying to keep enough jobs coming through the door to keep everybody busy. MVB: How does Northern Comfort give back to the community? Chris: We’ve participated in Heat Up Minnesota for the past two years, which is a program through Lennox. Anybody can go to the Heat Up Minnesota website and nominate somebody they feel is deserving of a new furnace. Whether that is a single mom with a bunch of kids who can’t afford to fix the relic she has to the service veteran who came home and is having a hard time getting back on their feet. They rely on people to nominate those most in need of a new furnace. The nominations are then sent to us for the people in our area. We will then go out to look at each situation and make sure that they don’t already have a new furnace and that it actually does need replacing. After that it’s basically a drawing to see who gets the furnace. So Lennox provides the furnace and we donate the time and materials to install it. The whole event takes place in one day, the first Saturday of October.
MV
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