In 2007, Jose Cedillo went to a supply store for a part. He had just started his own heating and air conditioning company, and a man at the store had something to say about the timing. It had to be, the man told him, the worst time to start a business.
Cedillo knew the timing. It was the reason he had started. “Everything was going downhill, so I lost my job where I was working at, and I decided that I never wanted to work for someone else at that moment,” he says. Since then, he says, the company has run on customer service, respect, honesty and affordability.
That decision still shapes how he talks about the work. A job that goes well and a customer who is happy are rewarding, he says, but for him it comes down to freedom: the freedom to make the decisions he believes are correct for his customers.
The company, Cedillos Mechanical HVAC Inc, earlier known as Cedillos Air Conditioning & Heating, is based in San Bernardino. It covers Rialto, Fontana, Redlands, Chino and Riverside, and works across San Bernardino and Riverside counties. “It hasn’t been easy, but we’re still kicking,” Cedillo says. “We’re still out here.”
Most of the work is residential service and repair, about 80 percent by his count. Commercial jobs make up the rest. He replaces units and takes on some new construction.
Much of how he handles customers came from a man he once worked for, who became a friend. “You gotta be straight,” Cedillo recalls him saying. “You cannot lie to your customers.” He credits his family’s emphasis on honesty, too.
In practice that means not selling people what they do not need. “Don’t replace something that you don’t need to replace,” he says. It also means doing exactly what was promised. “If we say we’re going to put two grills, we’ll put two grills,” he says, rather than deciding an old one looks good enough to leave in place.
He keeps parts on the trucks so a repair can often be finished on the first visit. “We got parts on our trucks, and we can take care of it right away,” he says. If something goes wrong afterward, “we don’t run away from the issues. We try to resolve them.” He does not pretend the work is flawless. “As much as we want to be 100 percent perfect, sometimes it’s impossible,” he says. He checks back with customers after a job to ask how the equipment is running, rather than finishing with an “I’m done, I’m out of here.”
One customer, who had called about dust in the house, described Cedillo taking his time, going under the house and checking every vent.
Cedillo runs much of the company himself. “I answer the calls,” he says, and he works in the office as well as in the field. For the field, he brings in a few helpers. He has tried doing it all alone, and he says keeping up every day is hard, especially on hot days of 100 to 110 degrees. “You need help,” he says. “We always need help.”
Over the years he has given a lot of young technicians a start as they come out of college or technical school. “I help a lot of kids,” he says. “Once they kind of learn a little bit, they just move on, which is okay. That’s the way I think it should be.” Keeping good people is still hard, he says.
He leads by working alongside them. “I ask employees, ‘Hey, we’re going to be here early in the morning,’ and I’m there with them,” he says. He does not send the crew off and tell them he will see them later.
He wants the company to grow past him. “I don’t want to stay where it’s at,” he says. His plan is “a couple more trucks, get a couple employees, get some in the office where they can do it, and me kind of step back a little bit.”
Asked what he is proudest of, he does not name a job. “I’m proud that I’m still in business,” he says. And the man from the supply store is still around. “I still talk to the guy,” Cedillo says. “He’s still working in the spot.”