Ilija Crnobrnja was an exchange student in Massachusetts waiting tables, learning English, and studying agricultural economics. When he met and married his wife, he realized he needed a new job, so he found himself in the HVAC business. He worked his way through almost every role in HVAC. 

Along the way, his love for building science, customer service, and high efficiency homes was ignited. As you'll hear, Ilija's passion is deep. That passion made him destined to be an entrepreneur. He had to create and build a business to deliver on his vision. 

So he and his partner David refinanced their homes and founded SumZero. In their first 6 months, they made $350. That's it. Today, they are a $9M heat pump installer with incredibly happy customers all over Massachusetts. 

Join us for Ilija's insights into:  

• How building science teaches us to look at the home as a system...
• ... and why HVAC is the engine of that system
• Why heat pumps are the future, and if you build a heat pump business today, you'll enjoy it for decades to come
• His impressive approach to training his team
• Why employee compensation in the HVAC industry needs to be redesigned
• Why you should structure your entire business to focus on delivering a Comfort Consultant's promise to homeowners...
• ... and more

Show notes:

• SumZero Energy Systems
• Ilija's LinkedIn
• Corbett Lunsford and the Building Performance Workshop
• Joe Lstiburek and the BuildingScience.com Corporation
• Matt Risinger and his build channel on YouTube

Kevin Brenner started his career as Dr. Brenner, destined to take over the family podiatry business. But he loved to swing a hammer more than he liked being in an office, so he jumped ship and landed in carpentry. His first company, Brenner Builders, started with a $627 job fixing deck stairs. It ended as Westchester County's premier high-end home builder, with an average value of $11M per project and doing $50M a year in revenue. 

Kevin's journey did not end there. He had a passion for high-efficiency homes, so he started Healthy Home on the side, a company focused on whole-home performance contracting with pricing accessible to everyone. In 2017, he closed the doors on Brenner Builders and now focuses entirely on Healthy Home. 

Healthy Home is a mission-driven organization. Kevin has grown his business steadily, adding services, hiring and training his staff, and leaving a wake of happy customers and healthy homes behind him. 

Join us for Kevin's insights into:  

• How building envelope work impacts heat pump design
• His mother's reaction when she learned he was leaving medicine
• What good heat pump installs look like
• Why he does NOT sell to customers who want a heat pump to lower their monthly bills
• What the media gets wrong in their heat pump coverage
• The importance of reading the manual (RTFM)
• Why he has started, stopped, and restarted his HVAC division multiple times 
• How culture and mission are the cornerstone of Healthy Home's hiring and training
• ... and more

Show notes:

• Healthy Home
• The smoking hot Chevy HHR
• The Energy Conservatory's True Flow Grid
• The Building Performance Institute
• National Comfort Institute
• HVAC School
• Ty Branaman
• Craig Migliaccio and AC Service Tech Channel

This episode is a fun experiment for us. At Amply, we LOVE doing ride alongs with our customers. It gives us insight. It gives us energy. It's how our customers turn into our friends. So we tried to capture that experience in a podcast. Ed jumps in the car with Aleisha Stenson, co-founder and co-owner of My Diamond Comfort. 

Before getting into HVAC, Aleisha was in law enforcement and social work. She loved working with kids, but the intensity of working for the Department of Children and Families was exhausting. While out on medical leave for a few weeks, her father brought home a set of CDs from a Weldon Long seminar. She listened to the entire set over the course of several days. Coming out the other side, she knew ductless was the future, and she had a vision for a ductless-only HVAC business. 

That's how My Diamond Comfort -- an exceptional heat pump installer in rural Western Massachusetts -- was born. 

Join us for Aleisha's insights into:  

• Her passion for sales + ductless
• The benefits of a ductless-only business
• What it's like to run a family business
• How to see past what customers say they want and listen to what they need
• Her primary pain points day-to-day and what would make her life easier
• What makes a great distributor and a great manufacturer...

... and more

Hal Smith followed his passion and ignored his teachers' advice by going to trade school. He founded Halco 40 years ago. By listening to his customers and helping them "fix their old homes" in upstate New York, he gradually added new service offerings. From plumbing and HVAC he added electrical. Then insulation and air sealing. Then Solar and geothermal. Windows and doors. Now basement waterproofing and finishing. 

Through trial and error, hard-earned business savvy, and a relentless focus on doing right by his customers, Hal now runs a $40M end-to-end whole-home performance contracting business with 180+ employees, 100+ trucks, and 10,000 annual service agreements. 

Hal does a lot of heat pumps, which is why we're delighted to have him on the Heat Pump Podcast. But he focuses on the home as a system. That gives him insight into what is required to make heat pumps perform well, even in frigid upstate New York. 

Join us for Hal's technical insight on home performance, his business insight on operating a profitable company, and his entrepreneurial insight into how to come from nothing and build a $40M contracting business with wildly happy customers. 

In this episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, Laura and Joe Wood tell the story of how they went from one person in 2008 to over a hundred 14 years later and a successful exit to private equity. When they finished, they had not one but two premier HVAC brands in the competitive Boston market.

They founded Boston Standard in 2007-2008 to be a standard-setting plumbing + HVAC + electrical brand, and they achieved that. Then, while traveling abroad, they realized that the rest of the world uses heat pumps to provide both heating and cooling. To capitalize on that untapped heat pump opportunity, they founded New England Ductless as a completely separate entity. It was a remarkable experiment that paid off. 

Laura and Joe have unique insights from their experience, having personally managed a traditional HVAC business side-by-side with a heat pump-focused business. Their lessons about the differences between these two companies are essential to anyone building a heat pump business and to anyone looking to grow and scale to 100+ employees. 

In this episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, Ed interviews Mike Cappuccio, founder and former CEO of N.E.T.R., one of New England's largest heat pump HVAC contractors, and owner of Dominate Ductless, a training and advisory business focused on educating the next generation of heat pump contractors to build profitable businesses. 

Mike describes his journey from employee to entrepreneur, as well as his journey form commercial trucking refrigeration into residential HVAC. In making that transition, Mike went from profitable to unprofitable. That caused him to look long and hard at his business to figure out what had changed and what was wrong. 

While squinting at his business, he found ductless heat pumps while at a Mitsubishi seminar, saw the beauty and profitability of a heat pump-focused operation, and set about revamping his entire business model. The success of that model is what led Mike to found Dominate Ductless -- so he could share those valuable learnings with other heat pump entrepreneurs. Mike shares some of his most important insights from his Dominate Ductless seminars, which are valuable to anyone trying to build a heat pump-focused business. 

In this first episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, Eric Fitz and Ed Smith interview Matt Scott, one of the co-owners of Dave's World. Dave's World is the largest heat pump installer in Maine, which has more cold weather heat pumps installed per capita than any other state in the US. 

Matt tells the remarkable story of how he first stumbled upon the magic of heat pumps, against the odds and against the advice of a distributor. From there, he describes the entrepreneurial journey he and his partners, Dan and Bob, went on to transform Dave's World from a small appliance store in Dover-Foxcroft to one of the largest heat pump-focused businesses in the country.

Matt discusses the challenges they faced, how they overcame them, and some of the special sauce that makes Dave's World a magical place for both their customers and employees. 

Show notes

• Dave's World website
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Upside of Fear and The Power of Consistency by Weldon Long