Growing Your Own Leaders with HVAC Owner Rich Ashton

Rich Ashton is the owner of Tom's Mechanical, an HVAC and plumbing company in Arlington, Texas that he bought in 1988. At the time it was a broken business, two weeks from being liquidated. He turned it around and grew it by promoting the people he hired, most of whom are still there. Today he is the author of Growing Your Own, a book that helps HVAC, trades, plumbing, and electrical companies develop their next layer of leaders.

His short answer for how he ended up in HVAC is stubbornness and arrogance. He began his career in real estate with Trammell Crow out of Dallas, one of the few in the company without a college degree, working around Ivy League MBAs who were very motivated and very smart. He learned about business there and became a partner, but it was ultimately the wrong fit. He had always known he was a small company guy. He wanted to be talking to employees and motivating them, using skills in communication, motivation, and finance that he could not always use in real estate. It is hard to talk to buildings. It is hard to motivate buildings.

After ten years he sold his interest back and began looking for businesses to own and operate. That search took four years. It was fine, but he never found the company he fell in love with. Then he came across Tom's Mechanical. He was on a bank board with the owner and watched the loan go bad. They went to lunch, and Rich offered to take a look at the company. He made an offer, was turned down because the owner had a big tax refund coming, and got a call a year later asking whether he would still do the deal. The answer was not the same deal, because it had gotten worse. He agreed instead to run the company alongside the owner, write a reorganization plan, and deal with some of the vendors.

He took title in 1988 at age thirty nine, dealing with the bank every single day and convincing them that even though he came from outside the HVAC industry, the reorganization plan was solid and there was enough company and enough reputation left to go forward. In his arrogance he thought he could turn it around in about two years. It took five, and he was doing it while the banking system collapsed, fighting economy battles alongside the Tom's Mechanical battles. He was too stubborn to fail, and he did a lot of things then that he would not do today. The beauty of going through hard times is that the good times are so much more enjoyable.

The state of the business when he bought it was severe. Sixty employees. Roughly fifty trucks, though on a good day he was not sure twenty of them ran. The company had a full-time mechanic on staff, which HVAC companies do not normally have, and that alone illustrates how bad the fleet was. Those sixty employees were doing about a million and a half dollars worth of business. Everything was out of whack. There were no financial systems. There were people who knew how to repair and install air conditioners, but nobody who knew how to run a business. The company had lost seventy percent of its business over a three-year period because it was primarily doing multifamily new construction, and that market shut down. They never saw it coming, so they were not prepared, and they held onto employees the billings could not support.

Coming in from outside the trades meant a much bigger hill than he ever dreamed. He thought a business plan was a business plan, and he did not understand the parochial nature of the trades. He would take the plan to vendors who were owed significant money, and they would be very complimentary of it and uniformly say it would never work. That is where the stubbornness came in, and he kept trucking. Inside the company he never imagined he would have trouble selling a vision of excellence, great customer service, and integrity. It was a really hard sell. Because the company was so oversupplied with employees, he knew he needed to reduce headcount, and those who could not buy in or had no interest in buying in did not last long.

Buy-in and character went hand in hand with that decision. Failing companies get a kind of death spiral about them, and he could tell the first time he walked in that the company was in terrible shape. Nobody was smiling. There was no vibrancy, no life, and it was no fun to work in that environment. It takes a really special quality employee to stay on through what those people had endured. There were some very good and very skilled people who stayed, not a ton of them, but they were so easy to recognize that the relationship formed early. He made it clear those were the kinds of people the company was going to support and that they had a place going forward.

It took about six weeks for the optimism to break. In six weeks he went from thinking he was a rocket scientist to thinking he might be among the stupidest people on the face of the earth. He had enjoyed a fast start to his career and a number of successes, and suddenly he could see he might lose this thing entirely. The logical move would have been bankruptcy, taking the immediate pressure off and working things out with the court's help. He was not raised that way and did not like the stigma, so he did not do it, though looking back he thinks he would today. He kept hitting the exact same roadblocks with vendors and employees, and the repetition made it obvious he had to figure something out quickly.

What he did was get transparent, something he learned to do over the years with help from his wife. He decided there was no sense telling employees everything was going to be rosy, because it was not going to be unless certain things happened. He gathered the people he felt the company had a chance with and started sharing information. The company owed a lot of people a lot of money, so outside the controller's office he put a fake banknote on the wall for each of those debts. One said they owed a vendor $460,000. As they made progress he would cross out the 460 and show 440, or whatever the number had become. There were probably a dozen of those notes, most of them smaller.

For the people who were motivated by what they were trying to accomplish, the wall became a real source of pride. When they were in the office they would make a point of swinging by the financial area to see whether any progress had been made. It stopped being just him fighting those battles. The mentality in the company shifted from that being the owner's problem to this being our problem, and not only our problem but one we are part of solving. It is kind of fun to be part of a solution. There was a real risk in doing it. People could have looked at the wall, decided the company owed everybody in the world, and left. He felt he had enough people who wanted to be there for the rebuilding to take the chance, and it happened to pay off.

The first real traction came at Christmas. He had taken ownership on April 1st, April Fool's Day, and he had been brought up in business believing in the importance of celebrating successes. So even though there was not enough money for a Christmas party, they shut the business down one afternoon and had one. Right before Christmas the company had recovered a large receivable from a long-term customer, which helped enormously, and he was able to announce it and make a real celebration out of that small party. That was when he began to feel the team was in it with him. The recovered money let them accelerate debt repayment quickly. He even told the employees that year that the company may have lost money, but it lost less than American Airlines, a company based nearby in Fort Worth that had just posted a huge loss. He did not know if he would ever be able to say that again, but they loved the comparison.

The customer service side got the same treatment, because failing companies fail at customer service too. The company was twenty five years old when he bought it and had once been fairly dominant locally. Oddly, its customer service reputation had not suffered nearly as much as its financial reputation, so they were able to capitalize on people's belief that Tom's Mechanical was still something special, and they reinforced it. They also found early that selling retrofit systems, replacing systems in people's homes, was the fastest cash generator available, so they focused there and built it up substantially and quickly.

To rally people around the customer experience, they did a lot of surveying and followed up with customers by phone. Rich had been in town a long time, so he wrote to every friend he could think of asking them to use Tom's and then send a note or call and tell him about the experience, offering $25 off a future service call. He got a great deal of feedback, much of it from business owners who understand good customer service. That let him say to employees that this was not Rich talking, this was the customer you were with on Thursday, here is what they liked and here is what they did not. These were people who had generally never had anything other than manufacturer training on customer service. The company personalized it, redid the logo, modernized, and changed the way the trucks looked. The Tom's Mechanical people had experienced was suddenly a different and better Tom's, and they recognized it.

The leadership work came out of thinking about the end. Rich decided somewhere along the line that he was going to get old and have to retire or sell. The company had developed a unique culture and he was proud of how they treated employees who in turn treated customers well. He did not see other companies doing the same thing, and he certainly did not think a private equity group would come in and respect the uniqueness of it. So he fell in love with the idea of raising up leaders from the existing employees and leaving the company in their hands, at least for a while.

The first attempt failed. He took eight people and tried to teach them to think like an entrepreneur. He is an entrepreneur, but you do not have to be one to run an HVAC company, and the approach fell flat on its face. He abandoned it and had to think seriously about what training leaders was actually about. He came back with another eight people and a different opening: there is something in each of you that is keeping you from being a better leader, so let's determine what that is and find out where your ceiling is. It was different for everyone. Some had emotional baggage from the way they were raised, or had never seen themselves in a leadership role, or did not think people would respond to them. In a blue-collar industry, a technician does not necessarily think of himself or herself as a leader. They met in a traditional classroom setting roughly every six weeks, and he named what he thought the ceiling was for each person so they could work on it specifically.

One person dropped out early. He did not want to work as hard as the program asked. Rich had told him on the first day that he liked the title of leadership a lot more than the work of leadership, which hurt his feelings at the time. When they talked about it later, he said he thought that was probably true.

The bigger problem was buy-in. Business people talk about business when they get together. They might also talk about baseball or golf or their kids, but somewhere in there business comes up. This group was not talking about business at all, and Rich knew he had to get it top of mind for them. He had always enjoyed writing, so he began writing a blog to the leadership team every other week, about a page and a half, in no particular order, using stories from his own experience and other people's to highlight various leadership principles. They enjoyed reading them and still did not talk about them.

The general manager, who is now the president, suggested that on the weeks Rich wrote one, he would allocate twenty minutes of the standing weekly management meeting to making the team discuss it openly. He was dead right. Not only did they begin talking about the content, they began holding each other and themselves accountable to the principles. One day Rich walked through the company and noticed new white binders on several desks. People were printing out the blogs and keeping them handy so they could refer back. That is when he knew he was onto something.

Rich was deliberately not in those management meetings, on the theory that they would be more productive without him. He saw the effect from the outside. One employee would tell another that there had been a blog about that problem last month and ask whether it had been taken into account, and they would physically pull it out and go through it together. Once the team realized the power of talking about business, there was a reason to do it. He also suspects people began consulting the blogs before their presentations, knowing someone would raise one. The absence of the owner mattered another way too: people were not weighing whether they were about to offend him. When someone did disagree, they would sit down and he would explain why he wrote what he wrote. Leaders generally have more information than the people below them, whether that is a president getting a security briefing or a lonely leader in a small business, and sharing the non-confidential parts usually gets to a point of agreement.

He wrote for two years and produced fifty two of them before deciding he was starting to repeat himself. The team was doing so well that it was a good time to step back, so he handed over daily management to them, led by the general manager, while still coming into the office every day. He read back through the blogs one weekend, liked them, and decided to publish them in book form as a legacy project. The book came out in May of 2025 and he retired on December 31st, 2025, which gave him a business to move into immediately. Now he speaks at trades conferences, conducts workshops, and runs the training course that goes with the book. He is happy not to run a day-to-day business anymore, but he is not ready to be done with business.

He calls the culture at Tom's an employee-empowered culture. The company is only as good as its employees. It does not matter whether you are in the warehouse, out seeing customers, or on the phone, you are interacting with customers one way or another, or serving the people who are. The better you are, the better we are. They start talking about it in the interview process and reinforce it every day, and they are happy to pour resources into employees who want to become more empowered.

The story he often tells is about a dispatcher named Jessica, who was okay at her job and worth keeping but very closed off. The leaders at Tom's make a habit of moving through the company and understanding what makes people tick, and for most people family is the most important thing. Jessica would not let anyone in. Friendly when Rich came by, but nothing past that, and it was not limited to the owner. Then one Monday morning Jessica told him about a weekend where her six-year-old son had committed a penalty in a football game, she disagreed with the referee's call, and she made a spectacle of herself on the sideline. Rich told Jessica he could unfortunately relate, because he had been in exactly that place. That was the day they broke through, and Jessica began breaking through with other people. Within about two years Jessica became the leader of the customer relations department. Had that not happened, the opportunity never would have come.

His rule for connection is to talk about what is interesting to them, not what is interesting to you. If they want to talk about their kids, he waits to be asked before sharing stories about his grandkids. It is always about them. When employees know that Rich and the other leaders care, that they will attend the funeral of a mother they never met because it matters to that employee, visit people in the hospital, or take up a collection when someone has a tragedy, it is amazing what people will accomplish. They do things they never thought they could, and that is better for everyone.

Making time for people did not come naturally. He began as a relatively authoritarian leader, partly because the turnaround required a man of action making tough decisions constantly, and partly because he was raised by an authoritarian father and copied the style. That hardened him. By the time the company was turned around he was in his mid to late forties and not very relational. His wife, who has no interest in business but a deep interest in relationships, is a relationship rock star, and that magic had been sitting there for fifteen or twenty years without him taking advantage of it. He began observing her. She would never consider herself a mentor, but he learned a great deal from her. He also looked at how friends who owned businesses handled similar situations and saw they were all doing a better job with people than he was. The answer, he decided, was in getting over yourself. It was not about him. If he could make employees the focus of what the company was doing, they would make customers the focus of what they were doing. He has always depended on mentors, and it became clear he should start talking less and listening more.

Reading Simon Sinek's Start With Why did not change how they did anything, but it helped them settle on a single sentence for why the company exists: we are in business to provide exceptional customer service through the empowerment and support of our employees. The value of a sentence that simple is consistency in decision making. New software, a different approach to the market, an advertising campaign, a different way to compensate employees, all of it runs through the same filter. Does it make us better at customer service and does it empower the employees? If not, they do not do it. AI is a good example. They use it to streamline internally and it has saved money, and Rich thinks it improves almost by the second, but customer-facing AI is not there yet, so they do not use it with customers.

One chapter is called sometimes you've got to climb a tree. It comes from a story about people stranded on what they believed was a deserted island, doing all the normal things, looking for food, looking for a way off, fighting with each other. Eventually someone got a thirty thousand foot view and realized they were on an uninhabited beach of a very inhabited island. If somebody had climbed a tree to look around, their problems would have gone away. The chapter is about innovation: you cannot get locked into only what you are doing, you have to look at how other people work. It resulted in the warehouse manager and a few other employees touring an Amazon warehouse, probably the most sophisticated distribution operation in the world, and coming back wide-eyed with ideas. You cannot grow as a leader if you do not climb a tree periodically. Giving the warehouse manager two hours to do that was easy for Rich, because he appreciates that someone else runs that warehouse and he does not want the job.

That kind of cross-visiting is less common in HVAC than in some industries because of local competition, though the same vendors service everybody so information gets around. Tom's has taken tours outside its immediate service area with companies it does not compete against, sending people to look at financial systems and warehouses.

Another chapter is titled you don't know what you don't know, about acquiring knowledge. Early in his career at the real estate company, Rich was pulled aside and told he did not know very much about business and needed to start a program of reading. The person who told him was a twenty three year old Harvard MBA with an undergraduate degree from MIT, and he was dead right. Rich began reading the Wall Street Journal daily and five business periodicals a week, and over the following decades expanded that to consuming information at least an hour and a half every day. Reading a book about romance is not the same as reading a book about business, but business is not the only thing you should read either. Psychology, longevity, health and wellness all belong in the mix. His rule is that once he reads a book on a subject, he will not read on that subject again until he has completed four more books. He makes heavy use of audiobooks and podcasts so he can combine exercise with learning. It was one of the pivotal changes in his life, and he is grateful the man had the courage to say it and that he was not too stubborn to listen. Everybody has excuses for not doing it. He considers it unforgivable not to do some amount every single day.

Not everybody has the makings of a leader. Some do not have the ability, and some who have the ability have no desire. Rich uses sports teams as an analogy: in a locker room everybody knows the stars, but the stars are not necessarily the leaders of the team. Sometimes it is the backup point guard everybody gathers around after a game, someone who did not seek influence and is simply a natural leader. When technicians or installers or office staff gather around one person regardless of title, you know who they are, and in a small company they are easy to spot. Those people are almost a slam dunk for future leaders.

The other way to test leadership ability is by delegating. If someone shows even an inkling of interest in moving ahead, Rich gives them a small non-critical task: here is something I think you have a unique perspective on, take a week, get back to me next Thursday, and we will sit down for an hour so you can tell me your results. One of three things happens. They never come back, which shows the interest was not real. They come back with work that is not very well done, and then it is a judgment call whether there is enough to work with. Or they come back having done seventy five percent of it correctly, which means there is something there, and a slightly harder project will reveal whether the other twenty five percent is in them. The biggest surprise in that theory has been how few people actually come back.

One of the book's chapters is titled why delegation doesn't work, because delegation does not work most of the time. It is not that delegation is incorrect. It is that delegators are not very good. The art of it is explaining what you would like done, having the person repeat it back so expectations are clear, and agreeing on a timeline, where Friday means Friday. Most delegation stops right there, and the manager ends up saying they told someone what to do and when to do it and it never happened. The missing piece is the check-in. If it is due Friday and you check in Wednesday and ask how it is coming and whether there are questions you can help with, without giving them the answer, you can break a log jam quickly for someone who is stuck and too prideful to ask. Then on Friday you honor the deadline and actually look at the completed work. Delegation is a circle, beginning with the initial communication, then confirmation of the job, the timeline, the check-in, and finally reviewing what was done. Most of it stops well before the end.

The obstacle owners raise is time, and Rich says he feels their pain. When he began this kind of training he was already working through a general manager, so he had carved out time, and he had personal motivation because he was aware he needed a succession plan. A lot of small business owners do not have that. That is part of why he pushes the book and the training course, because they become a shortcut. The book is really a desktop reference of thirty five principles, chapters about two and a half pages long that can be read in five minutes, so a would-be leader or an owner can deal with a specific obstacle quickly and move forward. Not having time is the number one obstacle he hears, and he understands it. In a seasonal business like HVAC you may not have time five months out of the year, but you probably have some time the other seven, because in some of those months you are looking for ways to keep people busy. It comes back to commitment and desire. If you believe your company will be far better in two years because you invested the time, you are right. It will be.

It takes less time than owners think, but it has to happen more consistently. You could do it in ten minutes one morning a week: go over a chapter, and set up that next Tuesday the person will tell you how they put that principle into play, how it worked, what succeeded and what failed. That is ten minutes a week and it really is that simple. But do it this Tuesday and then skip six Tuesdays, and you have lost it totally. That is the failure point behind what gets called event training, where people go to a two-day conference, get excited and pumped up and full of information, and then never do anything with it consistently, so none of it sticks. The information was not the problem. Habit stacking onto a weekly meeting that already exists solves it, because the rhythm is already there and ten minutes is easy to say yes to. And for someone who will not carve out ten minutes, the audio version of the book played in the truck on the way to a service call works on the same theory as combining exercise with learning. If you are committed to that kind of improvement, the time can be found.

On the shortage of new technicians, Tom's faced it for years, though it is shifting now because data centers require so many blue-collar employees and the trades have become hot, which is keeping trade schools busy. They fought that battle for two and a half decades and finally solved it by forming an apprenticeship program and training their own. Someone coming out of a trade school obviously has practical ability or they would not have completed it. Apprentices go into a four-month program rotating through four HVAC divisions, two installation and two service. At the end they have either demonstrated they are hireable or not, and they have usually shown extra proficiency in one skill over another, so some want to be residential service technicians and some want a couple of years on installation for better grounding. The company gets to observe them firsthand and they are not dead weight, particularly on the installation side, where they become an asset. They get to decide whether they want to stay, and the company gets to decide the same.

They have run as many as eight apprentices at a time, which is too many for the size of the company, so they generally run one or a maximum of two in each division, somewhere between four and six at once. The hire rate after four months is about seventy five percent. The company becomes their first HVAC job out of school, so they learn the culture there, and the ones who are wired correctly do not want any other kind of culture afterward. Are they green? Yes. But over and over, particularly on the residential side, customer service turns out to be a more valuable skill than technical proficiency. You need a certain level of technical ability, but technical proficiency is easier to fake than customer service, so they pour customer service training into these people knowing the technical side can catch up. It has worked spectacularly.

Wired correctly means something specific. A technician whose only goal is getting to six figures as fast as possible by overcharging customers and collecting the commission is not going to work there, because that is not the company and they will not do it. Those people rarely get through the hiring net, and when they are found they are removed quickly. Tom's is a high-touch company. A loner can succeed there, but the preference is for people who get on board with the same direction everybody else is going.

An example of employee empowerment: the service manager, who had been with the company a while and came out of the field, was a new service manager when he entered the training program. He was not much of a manager at the time, but he is creative and loves what they are doing at Tom's. He decided to create a reward for the service employee of the month and said it was going to be special. He came in one day having designed an incredibly gaudy WWE-style championship belt, and it is big. He awards it every month, and office employees can win it too. Then he parades the winner, along with the whole service division, through the company while playing the theme from Rocky on his phone. Heads high, belt in the air, everybody applauding. When you give people the idea that they can make this stuff their own and make it special, those are the kinds of ideas that come out of it, and it is a big deal every month.

JW Marriott is credited with the line that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers and the rest will take care of itself, a simple statement Rich considers a hundred percent true. So they look for special ways to take care of employees. An employee appreciation breakfast was going to be pancakes, which is fine because everybody likes pancakes. Instead the leadership of the company served all the employees, in chef outfits and aprons, with as much bacon as anyone could eat. Nobody went through a line. Employees sat down and the food was brought to them, and if someone wanted four helpings of bacon they got four helpings. The room was decorated. They absolutely loved it, and those things feed on each other. Why would you not do it, is his question. It may have cost $250, and he would be shocked if it did not return an extra thousand dollars of benefit that day alone, never mind the days after.

Asked what internal lessons he had to learn to become the leader his company needed, he comes back to listening. People talk about listening to their customers, but you have to listen to everybody. There is no sense putting a program in place if employees do not see a benefit in it. You can do all the scheming and planning you want, but without listening to employees you will miss the mark virtually every time. The other lesson was connecting with people, which was the biggest change he made in his life. You can say good morning, celebrate a birthday, even know a spouse's name. But going three layers deep with somebody, because they told you before what was interesting to them, is different. If their grandmother is suffering from cancer, simply asking how she is doing because you have not heard in a week is phenomenal in how people respond. That is just being a better person, and it feels good knowing it makes them feel better.

So he looks for ways to have authentic connection. He thinks it is good to be transparent and admit your failings, and he likes to make fun of himself. If you are not confident enough in your own skin to do that, people know. At the end of the day, particularly in a small company where people see you every day, they know who you are. They know if you are a fearful leader. They know if you talk about things and then walk a different life. You cannot hide from that, and the more authentic they know you are, the more responsive they are to you.

You can learn more about Rich Ashton and his leadership program for trades and other service businesses at GrowingYourOwn.net. His book, Growing Your Own, is available on Amazon and in an Audible version.