“Hot people with babies,” Taylor Rivera says.
That is who calls Cool Fox Heating & Cooling at one o’clock on a Sunday morning, in a place where, as she puts it, “it gets up to 115 degrees outside.” The company she owns with her husband, Matthew, sets no cutoff for calls. “We answer the phone 24 hours a day,” she says. “I think that’s important, especially in this field.”
Cool Fox works out of Glendale and covers the Valley and a handful of Northern Arizona towns, from Phoenix and Surprise up through Black Canyon City to Prescott. Its site lists emergency service around the clock.
Rivera learned the trade inside a family company. Her grandparents started an HVAC business, and she worked there for most of her life. They focused on new construction and new installs, and she ran the service department for years. Then she and Matthew branched off on their own.
She sums up the approach in three words: “relational over transactional.” Homes are the bread and butter right now, she says, partly because residential work makes it easier to get to know people. Cool Fox also services commercial properties, and she says the company has personal relationships with those owners.
In a house, the work starts with a complete inspection, documented with photos. The aim, she says, is to “make sure that the homeowner understands 100% what they’re looking at and what their options are.” The company’s own description of a visit follows the same order: the customer sees the options and the pricing and approves the work before it begins.
The photos count for more where the customer can’t see the equipment. One commercial client, who has two large units on the roof of his building, wrote that Matthew came out the next day as promised and took numerous pictures and videos showing what was wrong and what he fixed. With rooftop systems, the client noted, there is no watching the work for yourself.
Cool Fox pays no commissions. “We take care of our people in house,” Rivera says, and she calls that very important “when creating that environment for people.”
She is blunt about the rest of the standard. “If you don’t maintain that ethical standard,” she says, “we fire just as quickly as we hire.”
The rule she applies to herself is shorter. “If you don’t have integrity, you don’t have anything,” she says. And elsewhere: “I think the way that you do one thing is the way that you’re going to do everything.”
The Riveras are raising a family while they build the company, and she says that makes leading by example matter more. “We’re still very new,” she says. The goal is “to create a legacy that our children can pass down.”
For now, the job includes what she calls “taking calls at one o’clock in the morning on Sundays when you don’t have a cut off.”