HVAC Evolution: Upgrading The Building Management Industry Through Innovation

This is it is straight straight straight out of Crumpton with your host, Greg Crumpton. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Street out of Crumpton, I'm Greg Crumpting your host. Glad to be with you. Looking forward to a good conversation today. I hope everybody is out having a good day or a good night whenever you happen to be listening to this. Today, we're flying solo, so you won't hear Gabby or Tyler or anyone today. So it's just me and a guest who I've been reading about, and I hope I should get the man on and let him tell his story. Today, we have Tim Distasio with us, and Tim is the President of Comfort Science Solutions LLC, a North Carolina based company, and we share a little bit of North Carolina because I was in North Carolina for twenty five years or so. And he even has a three three six area code on his phone, so I recognize that it's Greensboro. So without further ado, welcome to the show, my friend. Thanks. Good to be here. So you and I connected over LinkedIn because we're both HVAC nerds pretty much. But tell us a little bit about you how you got to be, where you are, why you're passionate about HVAC. Give us one of the bad story. So I've been in HV pretty much my entire adult life. I was born and raised in Greensboro, which is sort of in the middle of North Carolina. And when I was in high school, my there was a little I'd say like a vocational school that worked with the local high schools there that they would bus students in and out of, and they started offering some trade class, electronics, in HVAC, and I got in on the HVAC on the very first year. So that was when I was seventeen years old. Because it was the first year, they had brand new equipment tools, all kinds of stuff that needed to get set up, and the students that was part of our class was to start setting up all this equipment. And so I was trying to decide whether I was gonna pursue a career in HVAC or electronics. I knew I wanted to be into trades, and I credit my parents for that. Because they recognize that even then, even though the mainstream idea was to send kids to college, they knew the student debt that would be involved. They knew even some of the other changes that college can make to a person's morals and their their upbringing, and they were really worried about that. So they encouraged me to pursue rear of the trades, which would pay well, which did not require me to go get a four year degree and incur that debt and some of the other challenges that may come along with that. And so I really fell in love with HVAC. I love the fact that you had to learn things about electricity, electronics, plumbing, piping, mechanics, just all the other skills that are involved in HVAC. And I just realized that I I wanted to do this. So I've been in HVAC since I was seventeen years old. I went and got an associate's degree at the local community college. And because I take in those high school I was able to place out of a lot of classes in the community college. I got a two year degree fairly quickly, and then got a job in a pretty large well known commercial industrial company, and that's where I spent the first twelve years of my career is in commercial industrial working on hospitals and manufacturing. So we're talking about the late nineties, and that's in North Carolina as in a lot of the states in the south, manufacturing was sort of on its decline. You know, during the sixties seventies, eighties, early nineties, there was in North Carolina textiles was huge. Tobacco, furniture, all those all that manufacturing was huge. And the company that I worked for, that was their bread and butter. On the late nineties after some legislation passed that allowed these companies to go overseas. Manufacturing really took a hit in the south and a lot of companies struggled. Well, they struggle to retool. They almost went out of business. They had a bunch of layoffs back in two thousand two was right after nine eleven and economy kinda took a dip right there too. But I was able to survive the layoffs just because I was an apprentice. That was already doing technician work, but still getting paid like an apprentice. So they almost couldn't afford to let me go. So I stayed on, and they retooled, they started doing more data center work, and pharmaceuticals started coming into the state, and so I got trained on working on chillers and data centers and just big commercial industrial stuff and I absolutely loved it. Well, sometime around two thousand ten, I started thinking about having my own business, and I was going back and forth. I said, well, The the first step is to become licensed in North Carolina as a contractor. So I started taking prep classes and learning what I needed to ignore the passive test, and I started learning a lot about HVAC design because part of the test is understanding ACA manual j, manual s, mingled d, and I realized that there was a part of my knowledge base that I had missed, and that's the building envelope and the the house or the building that we're putting this HVAC system in. I was always just fixated on the actual equipment itself, not really thinking outside the box. And so that really opened up my eyes, and I realized, man, I think that HVAC and building science, I didn't really know that's what it was called at the time, but I I realized that these two were interwoven. And I I never really realized that. Well, I got my HVAC license, and I ended up starting my own business. And some of my commercial industrial customers followed me because I had taken such good care of them over the years. But residential work just fell in my lap. And I wasn't really expecting to get into residential work, but it just sort of happened. And I started to learn more and more about building science and home performance. Now we're in two thousand twelve. We think about it. We're in the middle of the great recession. There's a lot of government money that has come down on the pipe and is funding weatherization program. And so all these green programs are up and running, home performance contractors are popping up. And I realize that most residential HVAC contractors were only thinking about replacing equipment. Whenever there was a problem, there was always a solution that came in a little box and they didn't really understand building science. And so I realized that I would make a pretty good living being in a niche where I could pursue these home performance contractors use building professionals and the the HVAC guy that speaks their language. And what they told me was I was a breath of fresh air. And that's how I built my business. And so I ran my business for about ten or eleven years. It grew to about nine employees, you know, still pretty small, but everything funneled through me. And what I found that was doing less and less of the science and the work that I love, the HVAC learning about building science that I loved, and I was doing more administrative things going back behind employees and technicians that weren't doing a good job and things were just starting to get out of control. So, and my business wasn't even profitable after a while and I started thinking, you know, I was better off when it was just me. So I made some changes. I realized what part of my business, what little department was not it was the problem. And the kind of work we were doing a lot of energy star, new work, and that was very low margin. And I just decided to shed the stuff that wasn't working. And so I got my business down to about five employees and we started being profitable again. I was still pretty stressed out, but then I get contacted at the blue from a local business broker. Now, I've been contacted before by people that wanna sell your business and they seemed a little sketchy. They want a lot of money up front and didn't seem like that I would have a lot of leverage to, like, what if they didn't find a buyer? They would just keep your money and and what there was no incentive for them. Well, this one was a little bit different, and they It just seemed legit. They were a local company also. So they said they were looking to sell small to medium size HVAC companies. They had buyers lined up. And I just went through the process. I mean, this is during the pandemic. In fact, I got the call when I was on the way to my first vaccine. So we're talking about spring of twenty twenty one, I think, is when I first got the call. And I just sort of let it happen and to see where it went. And by February twenty twenty two, I had sold my business to another kinda up and coming entrepreneur that was trying to glow grow a heating and plumbing business. And he was doing that by looking for owners that were looking to exit their business and then he would take over their customer base. I worked for him for a year, but I saw this as my ticket to because I had to sign a non compete and I couldn't practice HVAC in Greensboro on my own anymore, I decide to, well, if I gotta move, then I'm gonna go to the North Carolina coast because that's where my wife and I had vacation, and we just loved it. And we were looking for a way to get over here, and that's how it happened. So I moved in just a few months ago in February, twenty twenty three here to Southport, North Carolina, which is on the coast. And I've set up just a little one man consulting design and service company, Comfort Science Solutions, LLC. And I focus on I do a lot of design work for firms and people around the country when they have those specific, you know, a one off house of something that they don't really maybe trust their local HVAC contract to do the design work, and then a lot of times they'll contact me and I'll go through the whole manual j s d process produce a set of deliverables that look like a construction set of drawings with details and wiring diagrams and hand it over to them and then their local HVAC contractor can put it in. And I've really now had the time and the bandwidth to understand building science more, to understand indoor air quality. And so now I'm a student of both of those things, incorporating that into my local consulting side of my business where we do, you know, comfort consulting into our quality problems. And you have a weird problem that maybe your HVAC company hasn't seen to be able to fix, then we apply building science and we find the solution to it. So that's where I'm at now. Wow. What a what a whirlwind trip? I relate to to a lot of that. Your your journey and and we talked before we hit record, but we're similar in that. We grew up in the trade and and then we built a business and exited the business. And I totally get the administrative part the insurance, negotiations, all that stuff that you have to do as an owner of a small company that really distract you from serving customers. You know? I mean, it's gotta be done, absolutely, because you wanna be above board and protected. You and your employees and everybody else, but, man, it could be a drag. So I I totally get the the whole when when you were reflecting back on taking your state exam So I'm taking three exams. I've took to North Carolina. I'm unlimited here, AC, whatever. There's three of them certification, AC one, two, and three other things. Did that, took South Carolina unlimited there and took Georgia, unlimited. And man, I believe that somewhere there's a tall cell between North Carolina and Georgia on the difficulty scale, but that was not an easy test. I agree. That was the when I took it there were two parts of the test. There was the sort of the HVAC side of it, which was like three hundred questions, and you had a fair amount of time to to find them But then there was another part of it called with the business administration, and that was fifty questions in sixty minutes, and it came from a book was about two hundred pages thick. And so you had to either know the answer from heart or you had to know exactly where in the book to find it. And the prep classes that I took really, really helped. But at the very end, I am I've got a minute left, and I've got ten questions that I haven't answered. And I just I've always heard that forty percent of the answers are c. And so for those last ten questions that I'd the really, really hard ones I left behind, like, I wasn't and they do stuff to trick you on this test. They put the really hard ones upfront to make you waste time on them. And then and they'll put trick questions in there instead of CFM at CFH, just to try to throw you off, which is not cool. But at the very end, I had ten really hard ones where, like, man, I don't even know where in the book this is gonna be. It's gonna take me ten minutes to find each questions. I just went right down the line. C c c c c c c all the way down, and I I passed it the first time. And very few people, I think I think they It's a ninety percent failure rate on the first time for the North Carolina test, but man for yeah. That's what the prep class teacher at the time had told us and I I just devoted eight months of my life to study study for that test. I was in my mid twenties. I didn't have any kids. Every Saturday afternoon, that's what I did. And I just studied the books and took practice questions and scheduled it and made it happen. But it that was the hardest test I've ever taken for sure. Which I really I like that. I like having quality testing for contractors because if you are licensed and I know you have a North Carolina license. You know I have one, so we have a mutual understanding of a knowledge level as a baseline, which is always comforting when you know I don't know what kind of coffee you like, but I know that you pass that to us, so we have a lot in common as far as mostly tenacity, probably. So I I passed it the first time as well. I didn't know I didn't know that failure rate, but No. I'm just passing off what was told me. Maybe that's accurate. Maybe it's not But I know a lot of people that have failed it the first time a lot of people and failed it the second time. It's a commitment. Yeah. It is. So No doubt. Well, tell me, man. Not just you you stoked a lot of memories there for me. I remember one drip leg question on the gas portion. What's the minimum drip leg? And I took the test along with this fellow named Frank, and we were driving because you had to go to Raleigh to take it when I when I took so we're driving back to Charlotte from Raleigh, and we were debating these and he said, you missed that one. I'm like, nope, I didn't. It's twelve inches. That's what it says in the book. It has a minimum drip leg on the dirt. And he pulls over on the Sada Vienna state, cracks his trunk open and a Honda Accord pulls his book out, and I hear him back there, cousin, and slam the trunk. He gets back in the car and never says another word. So it that's what it is. It's it's a twelve inch triplet. Wow. I've gotten away with, like, putting three inch triplet legs because we're putting them in crawl spaces, man. We about twelve inches. But you gotta bump the trick is to bump up, but you're defeating the purpose of the drip leg if you bump it up. But anyway, Exactly. Yeah. It's You know, send them both. So that's what I remember right away. But the the company that you worked for, I I'm familiar with them, and I have a friend who is their operations manager over there now. And man, what a storied group of people that is, of everything that they've been through. But so I moved to North Carolina in nineteen ninety seven, and that was kind of so I moved up here with a big company called McKinney's big mechanical contractor, and they were into commercial real estate high rise developments, what they did. But the touch style market and the furniture market and cigarettes and all that stuff were really I mean, I was I was watching the thing deteriorate. Right? Before me. Yeah. I remember that company having a lot of work in the Greensboro area with a big property management company. This owned by some political influenced families up there. And they really had to go through a a, you know, a personality change to to retool the company. And that's difficult, you know, once you become accustomed to it. But anyway, I'm curious about people in your career that that have been influential and you know, you were talking to him about when you were in high school, you went to the community college for a half a day. I did the same thing. We called it. It was called Opec, o p e see. It was like open campus or something where we went to the community college. They had a metal shop. They had welding shop. They had electronics, I believe, and they had Mason and auto bodies. There's five disciplines you can learn. And that man, I'm telling you that saved me. Finding that piece of education where I could focus on something I really enjoyed. And my teacher over there, my instructor was a welder, an iron worker from Des Moines, Iowa. And I remember this guy to this day. You know? He was he was solid. He was a welder by trade, so he wore blue denim we've done a pants all the time, but the the college made him wear a tie. Now the guy's running a grinder and a welder, So he bought a red clip on bow tie, and that's what he wore every day. But his collar is hanging off the side of his collar. It wasn't buttoned up. Like, it was it was so we all we all got a kick out of that. It just shows you how goofball policy can be, you know, risking again. Well, yeah. Exactly. Sometimes, academia just needs to step out of the way, and it's well intentioned, but they just don't understand. A nine inch side grinder would snatch that thing and and probably choke him out. But how about you? Who who's influential that you reflect back on and think, you know, without them, I may not be where I'm at. Well, my my HVAC instructor was a guy named Hank Berlu, and he he was a service manager and pretty he's a bigwig and one of the competitors of the company that I end up going to work for. They were the a large train to dealer that had two distributor supply houses in Greensboro. He was a service manager for years, and he'd already made his living. He'd already retired. He was his portfolio was well diversified. He owned a couple of gas stations. Like, this guy didn't need to go work for a high school, and he did it for the trade. And that just really impressed me. It's like, this guy doesn't have to do this. You know, he's in his late sixties, and he's he's out here teaching a bunch of rowdy high schoolers. And so that really impressed me. I ended up going back and teaching at the local community college off and on throughout the years also. And I think that's one of the reasons why is because just being able to give back was was important to me and I still try to do that I just do it with a different media now. I do a lot of post a lot of content on social media. Just trying to help people understand building science and HVAC and how they mesh together. But I would say more recently, Have you heard of the dunning I think it's called the dunning kruger graph. It's sort of like this graph that's got a line that peaks up and then it also dips down, then there's slow climb back up and it's really the journey that people take where they first start learning a trade and they very quickly think they know it all. And the peak that peak is called the mount stupid. So mount stupid, hon. So tell us a little bit about that. Yes. So there's this thing called the Dunning Krueger effect, and you can look it up. But it's this graph that really shows the journey that a lot of us take when we start learning something new. And there's this really fast process where we learn very little, but we think we're learning a lot and we get to this peak of confidence where we think we know it all, but we don't know. We don't know. And that peak is called Mount Stupus. And I think we take this journey multiple times. I've taken it multiple times in my HVAC career because I've had like two or three careers going from industrial to provincial to building science. But I would say back in two thousand seventeen, I was on one of the Mount Stupids thinking I'd kind of one of the best there there ever could be. And then I discovered the HVAC school podcast and the the content that Brian Orr puts puts out. And I realized how little I knew. I realized that the work that my company was doing was slightly above average only reason why I thought we were that great is because the bar is so low in the wild west of the south. Yeah. The standards are so low that you know, we were well above that. But as far as what really industry standards were, I had a lot to lot to learn and a long way to go. So I was on Mount Stupid. I Discover HVAC school. I discover Brian Or and so I I blame Brian Or for shoving me off him out stupid and into what it's called the valley of spare on the Dunning Kroger effect. And that's where you realize and it happens very quickly once you start educating yourself and how little you know. And then you start this slow climb that's called the slope of enlightenment. I think that's where I am now, where I started absorbing more and more content from people like Jim Bergman and Bill spone, Alex Mimi. Some of the real pillars of where the rubber meets the road in our industry. And some of these educators, Ty Branham and Alison Bales. My goodness. You know, he just came out with a great book that's teaching building science at a at a layman's level, and I'm starting to learn that. So that's where I'm at here. I probably those people that I mentioned are probably the biggest people that have influenced me. There's some great practitioners out there that are already doing it. There's Genary Garcia. He's in Miami. There's Michael House. She's in Ohio. Nate Adams is also in Ohio that's really doing some great work. And people like that following their content has just been amazing, and I'm learning from all of them, and taking the best parts of all of them, and that's where I'm at now. So I credit all those people who have pioneered to make this industry better. Well, I I definitely appreciate that. And I I applaud you because whether it be HVAC or life, I think we all hit not stupid on some on watches. So I'm a Mount stupid superior in my marriage because After thirty eight years, I'm still learning a lot. So I'm continuously on the on the enlightenment slope my marriage. So I really you know, this sounds crazy, but I don't think guys and I'm talking I I can say this because I are one. I don't think we can really think to worry about thirty three, thirty four years old because we get we're really oblivious from the time we're seventeen till we're thirty four, somewhere in there. We're just walking around this cloud, and we think we know a bunch more than we do, and we're scared to admit it because somebody might find out we don't really know it. But they already know we don't know it, but we don't let on. It's really rewarding to hear, you know, you, first of all, recognize those excuse me. Recognize those guys who have have you know, been out there earning their stripes, and I've got the same cast of characters in my life on different names, but same same kind of genuine appreciation for what they do and some of the same. It's just amazing. You you mentioned something that really bothers me though, is the bar is so low in the south that it's scary. But, you know, I'll work for a company. We're national. I I would go on record and say the bar is pretty low everywhere, not just in the south. What's what's wild to me, Tim, is that we don't require certification or any kind of certificate to do service work. I mean, we have to be conditioned air contractors to permit a placement or a new job. But we can go to this building or this house or this hospital or that data center with zero accredited credential. It's totally up to the consumer to vet us, which is a shame. Because they don't know. They I mean, they see a bright shiny truck and a guy with set of tools or or related with a set of tools, they think they're getting what they pay for. So that that's always it's team lacking to me. Yeah. And the reason why I sort of picked on the south a little bit, and it's nothing I mean, I was born in North Carolina. I'm I'm proud to from the south. But at least up north, you have more of a union presence, and I know there's a lot of flaws with union. There's not a perfect system out there. They're all flawed But at least there is some kind of vetting process where you start out as an apprentice and you don't get to call yourself a journeyman until you have so many hours in the field you pass a test. Now it's not perfect. In Canada, you can't legally touch a gas line without getting a certification. Gas period. And here, Any like you said, anybody can walk up to a gas line of a high rise building, and they can there there's no certification. There's nothing preventing them from servicing that gas line, cracking it open, replacing part of it with PVC and walking away, and blowing the whole building up. And if they've legally blown up the building, I mean, yeah, they're their codes and there's other standards that they they haven't followed by doing that, but nobody knew that they didn't know what they were doing when they walked up. There was there was no certification. At least in other places, they've attempted to take some of that out of the equation. But here, you know, in I think in Texas, there's not really anything barring somebody from building a house are calling them a general contractor. Even here, I mean, you have to pass a test to be a general contractor, and you have to have so much money in the bank. But, you know, anybody can pass a test they start if they if they study hard enough, and there are so many mistakes. Exactly. So it's You're dead on there. You know, So we own fifty six companies across the country and about half are union, half are non union, and I grew up in a union shop. So I appreciate the the apprentice journeyman relationship. It's amazing to me that the whole human humans are amazing to me because of how different we all are. And there's eight billion of us and none of us are alike, which is a whole another comer. Station for another day. But, you know, I just always think about that and and so I've got a RV, and here's how I relate it. So I got this RV. I know a lot about I know a lot about the electrical mechanical system dot yada yada, but I'm not a hundred percent RV tech. And if I call an RV company, and they send someone out there, I'm totally at the mercy of that person who shows up to to work. That's how I think our customers sometimes feel is that we don't have you know, like, the automotive guys have ASME Chevron's on their on their sleeve of what they're comp competent and So I don't know. Just to just something to think about. But thank you for continuously educating yourself and others. I think that's that's what I'm trying to get Yeah. I I mean, there are organizations like Nate and other certification organizations that I think are trying to be like that ASC certification for automotive, and we should have something, but it just doesn't seem like the industry has you know, come together and settled on one. And so you have a lot of smaller organizations that are doing some great work, but they're just not recognized as the authority. Like, you don't know what you're doing unless you have this certification, and it's it's sad, and it's dangerous. Well, I know that Nate is highly focused on residential, but for commercial work, you know, like, you focus your early career on. And like I'm in twenty four seven, there's no real credential other than the guy rolling up in the in the truck and you you kinda roll the dice. But anyway, maybe maybe, you know, the dots all connect one day and we get some kind of universal code that we feel confident and competent and somebody that has this earmark is good to go for kinda property. But that's that's probably an old another podcast. You mentioned something or I saw you mentioned something yesterday, the ceiling fan, the diffuser, And the only thing that I can figure out was condensation. You were trying to break up the stratification. What were you thinking? Yeah. So stratification, I'm trying to break up. So my house is on the coast. We're predominantly cooling the climate. And the way my house is I've got cathedral ceiling on for the living room in in case and IE could not easily run a duck up and over that cathedral ceiling or routed around it. There was just no good way. And so I needed to make sure that I delivered air to the other side of the room. I could get registers on one side of the cathedral ceiling on that slope part but not on the opposite its side. And so this is where, again, having disa knowledge of the standards that have been in place for a very long time, but very few of us are actually aware of them. Aca publishes a a standard or not a standard but a sort of a guideline book. It's it's manual t, and t stands for termination. And I haven't or terminal, but I haven't gone through it in detail, but what it does and makes us aware of the need to understand how air is thrown out of a register. And so a register the typical registers that you would get from residential supply house are just stamped metal, and they do find but there's not really a lot of test data on them. And when you need to throw air a specific length across a room, which is what I would need to do here, then you need really need to think about not only the register selection, but the size of the geometry, do you go with the six by ten or four by twelve? End of velocity, I would assume. And the velocity is huge. So I knew how much air I needed to deliver into the living room between two registers. And I I looked up, a heart and coolly makes a great register. They make more commercial grade registers. But commercial grade, that's more important because you're usually trying to throw air into a larger room. So these commercial registers have the the data, the test data. And I found one that would throw the amount of air that I needed to throw the distance that I needed to with the velocity from the I ended up going with the six by twelve. And so, essentially, I am throwing air at this curved blade commercial grade register in my residential house. And we're gonna use a coanda effect, which is a sort of a scientifically understood effect that air likes to hug ceilings and walls, another And so we're gonna throw this. And between all that data, I know that I'm gonna be able to throw this air at least to the peak of that cathedral ceiling. Yeah. And then I've got the sealant fan that's just gonna turn very slowly and mix that air throughout the whole room. And so Alison Bales has had a few articles, great articles about Select ceiling fans. And so you wanna select one that the the bigger the blade, the better. You wanna select one that doesn't have to that, first of all, has a DC motor because those are more energy efficient. And they're actually more efficient as far as CFMs of air moved, her watts of power consumed if they move at slow speed. And so essentially, I'm throwing this air up to the peak of the ceiling, and then I've got a ceiling fan that's just slowly churning up that air -- Mhmm. -- removing any kind of stratification. Now in our short winters, the opposite will happen that I'm gonna throw that heat up there and that heat's gonna wanna stratify, but that ceiling fan, if it's just moving very slowly, it's not like I'm gonna feel air moving, but it's gonna mix that air around in that room instead of getting stratification because with high ceilings, stratification is as most of us know a a big deal. So I would just I posted that just to kinda raise some awareness that we can strategize how we throw air into the room. In my office, I have a similar thing where I am throwing air from an interior register from the interior wall out towards the window And again, I've kinda done the math and and and looked at the register data and where I don't have air blowing directly on me because I'm gonna be sitting right by that window in my office. And I don't wanna have air moving across a microphone. So I'm gonna have the register throwing air way away from me, so the velocity of air has time to slow down. And so again just being aware of some of the finer parts of HVAC design is just gonna make a contractor a technician better. And so those are the kinda nerdy stuff that I post just to make technicians think about things. And then, you know, they can learn more about it on their own like I did or ask questions like I used to and or that like I still do and and learn more and be better. Well, I'm glad I got it right. I was gonna I was gonna reply, but, man, I'm I've got this kidney stone thing going on, so I haven't been a hundred percent. So I looked at it last night, and I said, he's trying to make sure He hasn't stratify and maybe not have condensation on that grill as well. Yeah. I'm not really worried about condensation on the grill. Just because I'm gonna have a dedicated dehumidifier that is gonna control the dew point. And so the the dew point, if as long as everything's mechanically operating right, will always be lower than the temperature coming out of the air. But again, understanding the psychrometrics and dewpoints really important, especially in the humid environment. So I've got a a Santa Fe dedicated dehumidifier that will be drying the house out. So my intent is to make the house maybe forty five to fifty percent in the coastal environment, that's hard to do. And be able to raise temperature a couple degrees because it'll be comfortable between that ceiling fan kinda mixing some air in the summertime. I'm hoping maybe I can even be comfortable at seventy eight, maybe even eighty degrees and forty five humidity. We'll we'll see. But if my math is correct, I think I'll I'll be there. I know that we're geeking on this stuff because we both like it, but I'm gonna tell you the older you get. The more temperature you can tolerate, because my life and I are both much more susceptible to being cold nowadays than we were when we were younger. Oh, yeah. Tell me I'm I'm really curious. You know, you you're you're a young man, been successful in in edgely in one business and moving and getting set up and having your as you said, a one man consulting firm and having fun with that. What does the next little run look like for you. What's the next chapter? How does this play out? I would like to be a get my name out there a little bit more in community here to be a the guy that people run to in coastal North Carolina when they can't control their humidity and indoor air quality. I don't think there's many of us out here in this market. And that's sort of a lesson that maybe your listeners that are small contractors or aspiring contractors can be is that every market needs a building science, home performance, HVAC practitioner, and you can be that guy. And that's what I wanna be in this area here. Right. The design work, I'll always have that. I've got a great relationship with Jeremy Bagley. He does a lot on LinkedIn. Also, we work together doing a lot of design work. And I'll always have that, but I really enjoy being in the field and I want to build that part of my business. And then the once I kinda get settled there, I do wanna build the Tim De Stazio HVAC brand just a little bit more. So because I think, again, I've taken a journey that I think a lot of technicians and small contractors have taken or are in the middle of or would like to take. And that's from going from being the average run of the mill technician or contractor that just thinks about the equipment and expanding and and thinking about total home or building performance. And I wanna get that education out there and so building my my social media brand and who knows what other platforms that I might build up wanna do that. I wanna get the word out there so that guys can realize guys and gals can realize that, hey, I can be that one or two total performance HVAC contractor in my market and there are customers in every market that will flock to you. And you can stay above the fray and you don't have to worry about trying to cater to people who just view their home and their HVAC system as a box as an easily replaced box like a toaster that when it breaks, you just go to Walmart and you get the cheapest one there. You can stay above that. There are people out there that educate them sales. And with AI and chat GPT, people are becoming a lot more educated on very much very easily on building science and they're they're gonna realize that there's a lot of companies out here that don't know what they're doing. And if you can get your name out there as being the guy that fixes the problems the right way, you can build a heck of a business. I've done it once and just proof that you can do it. Subject matter experts, you know, I think that every industry has them and it takes somebody who has been on Mount Stupid to realize that they probably need a subject matter expert at some point. Because, you know, let's face it. Ninety nine percent of the people you don't wanna work for anyway because they don't appreciate the value you bring or your knowledge. They're looking for low price, whatever, quick response, low price. That that's not who you wanna work for anyway. And I think by building that brand that you're speaking of and having a educationally, foundationally built business is just so sweet. I love that. Somebody asked me the other day, how much mechanical work do you think you've sold in your lifetime? And my answer was probably not much. Because I'm not a really good salesperson, but I've had a lot of people that wanted to buy after I was able to educate a little bit about what the problems were. I just you know, a friend of mine, he says he's an author Gidimer, Jeffrey Gidimer, and he says people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. And when I think about that of what people feel like in on our in the street, they don't wanna be sold the nine ninety five tune up. They want have somebody and again, this is our proper people we wanna work for. People want to feel like they're getting their money's worth from a profession And we're we're all consumers. We buy stuff every day. You know, I use the RV example a while ago. I know what it feels like when somebody rolls up and they're professional and knowledgeable. And you you just get that it's a feeling, and you want to exude that feeling when you show up at your customers play. Yeah. And so because the HVAC industry has had such a bad reputation of people upselling and just, you know, mistreating customers, taking advantage of the fact that when you're at the as you said earlier, you're at the mercy of the technician comes out there. And if you already paid the service he tells you you need a new unit, you're faced with, okay, well, I'm gonna buy the new unit from them, or I'm gonna have to pay another service fee for another person to come out and potentially tell me the same thing. And then I will have waste my money. So people were kinda faced with that. And because of that, when I started my the residential side of my business, I wanted to stay so far away from that sales mentality. It was almost to a fault. And so even my technicians, I did not reward the I did not want them selling units. They were just gonna pass leads to me just like you would in commercial. A technician that goes and works on a large high rise building is not gonna sell a new rooftop unit. He's gonna realize that, okay, this unit's got a lot wrong with it, and he's gonna have a conversation with the person in charge. And he's gonna pass that lead on to a salesperson We took that model. I wanna say so far away from that sales mentality. I to a fault, and I think there's somewhere in between this. There's nothing wrong with sales It just has to be done ethically, and you wanna make sure that when you tell the customer something that it is technically sound. And there is a lot of sales pitches, and I've heard with my own ears, sales pitches from technicians that I cringe when I listen to that because they are bald faced lies. And either the technician doesn't realize they're a bald face light or he doesn't care. And so there's two different types of residential HVAC business owners, and maybe you can extend that to HVAC business owners. There are people that are cut they're more worried about the business side. Maybe they've never been on the technical side. And so they're running a business. They wanna do things that are the most approval that bring that drives the most revenue. And then there are people like me that really wanna be technical technically sound, cell technical excellence, and let the sales come organically. Now people that want to get into high performance HVAC and doing it the right way, your probably not gonna build an empire because this system is sorta created to reward people that sell the wrong way. They they're the ones that build empires and that's how the consumers have been trained with marketing and media. But if you don't wanna if you're okay with not building an empire retire retiring a billionaire, then you can build a very nice business and be able to sleep at night. If you're that kind of person, you can do it the right way, but don't think it's very people that can actually build an empire running a business the right way, the ethical way, and worrying about the science first. It's just it's very difficult to do. Some people have done it. But that's what I think is a problem with the residential side of the industry is that technicians are trained to be salesman first. And that's where the concentration of their weekly training goes into is how to overcome objections. And that's important, but it's it's understanding people and understanding how to No. That's important. But you cannot do it at the expense of the technical knowledge. And when you ignore one to concentrate on the other, that is unethical because you're showing up in a uniform in a marked truck with a phone number calling yourself a a service technician when in reality you're showing up to be a salesman that's misleading, that's a bait and switch, and it's wrong. But that is how the majority of the larger companies out there operate and I just I have a problem with it. You know, I ran my business to be so far away from that and I was a breath of fresh air to a lot of customers, and the right kind of customers flocked to me. And they ran away from companies like that. Well, the good book says you can't serve two masters. I I guess you and you and I are are similar in that we both are more technically minded in how we run our our Tim Distasio, great fella, great business, love his his outlook. Tim, you've you've been just a kind of a breath of fresh air for us too. So I appreciate that. But Thank you. When people wanna learn more about you and building sciences, what's the best way to get in touch with you to learn some about what you got going on. How how can we get you? The social media platforms that I host HVEC Professional related content is YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and LinkedIn as well. But my candles on YouTube Facebook and LinkedIn is at tunedistazio HVAC. And then on LinkedIn, you can just find me Tim Distasio or Timothy Distasio. I'm I don't think there's another one on LinkedIn So yeah. So last name is d e s t a s I o. Well, there you go. And so Just for the program. At Tim DeStasio h b a c or Tim De Stasio on LinkedIn? Well, I appreciate what you're doing, what you stand for. I appreciate the subject matter expert mentality and the excellence. You mentioned that word. Trust is the word that we talked around. We didn't say it, but that's what we're delivering is enabling trust with our consumer and our customer. So Tim, I I just wanted to say thank you. Appreciate you taking a close to an hour out of your life that I can't promise you'll ever get it back, but hopefully, we'll just a good conversation starting from it, nonetheless. But It was totally worth it. Thank you, Greg. I'm glad you I'm glad to be on here. Well, folks, that is a wrap for another episode of straight out of Crumpton. We're coming up on the about number one hundred episode. So I'm not sure exactly where we are, but we'll have to do the math on that soon. But we'll have a big celebration for for one hundred. So if you want to learn more about HVAC, about people, about the whole deal that, you know, straight out of Crumpton is all about. Go to greg crumpton dot com. You'll see different ways to get in touch. You'll see some different things we're involved with. And one thing forgot to mention Tim, you'll get a kick out of this. As July first is the inaugural HVAC icons day. And that's something that I started because I want to have a way for people, including myself, to get back to our founding fathers and the people who were of influence. So we're we're pulling this together. If you go to my LinkedIn page right now, Greg Crumpton, I'm on LinkedIn. Ten to the top of my thing, you'll see HVAC icons, and what you're gonna be able to do is to go on to this website and list out your heroes of the HPAC industry just to pay homage or memorialize some who have already passed, but I just thought that was a cool way for us to get back a little bit to the people that made our industry what it is and continue to do so. So look for that coming up soon too. For now, thanks, Tim. Thank you all for taking time to listen to us. I'm Greg Crumpton, and we will see you next time on the radio. This is it is straight straight. Great out of Crumpton with your host, Greg Crumpton.