The license isn't the hard part
Getting licensed, EPA 608 certified for refrigerant handling, insured, and equipped — mechanical steps, well documented elsewhere, and not where a new heating and air conditioning business actually succeeds or struggles. The decisions that determine whether the business you start this year is still healthy in year three are a shorter list, made early, that get expensive to undo once customers and cash flow are built around them.
I've worked directly in HVAC operations — running dispatch boards, managing crews, and living through the seasonal swings this trade runs on — before moving into coaching. The patterns below are the ones that show up every time a new shop has to relearn something the hard way.
Price for margin, not for your first ten customers
Underpricing to win early jobs doesn't just cost you on those specific calls — it sets a customer's expectation for what your work costs, and raising prices later on an existing customer is a much harder conversation than pricing correctly from the start. Know your real cost per job — labor valued at market rate (not $0 for your own time), parts, truck costs, insurance — before you quote anything.
Build the recurring backbone from day one
A shop running entirely on one-off calls re-earns its entire revenue every single day. A shop with a real maintenance-agreement program has a base it can plan payroll and inventory around, and it smooths out the seasonal demand swings this trade runs on — busy in summer for AC, busy again for heating, thinner in between unless agreements fill the gap.
Set the agreement structure up now, correctly — real terms, a scheduling process, a renewal process — rather than retrofitting it onto a customer base used to being billed call by call.
Set up systems like you'll still be using them at ten trucks
Whatever you use to schedule jobs, track customers, and invoice, the habits built in year one are the habits the business runs on at higher volume, with a higher cost per mistake. Two things worth getting right immediately: a real way to see which jobs and which technicians are actually profitable, and a dispatch/routing approach that holds up once there's more than one truck running at a time.
What changes as you grow
The specific leak points that eat margin in a growing home services business — scheduling density, parts markup, membership configuration, overhead allocation, labour productivity — are covered in detail in the field guide to the seven EBITDA leaks. Worth reading now, before any of them have had years to compound.
If you want the vocabulary of margin — gross profit versus gross margin, markup versus margin, EBITDA — before you need it for a real decision, the Numbers Primer is free and takes about ten minutes.
IronMargin's paid coaching and the ServiceTitan Operating Audit are built for operators already running $1M or more in revenue — that's not where you are yet, and that's fine. The free resources above will still be useful on the day you get there.
This is IronMargin operational education, not legal, accounting, tax, or employment-law advice. See the disclaimer.
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