Ken Goodrich held the flashlight on a Goettl as a boy, then bought the company and rebuilt it
A Las Vegas air conditioning technician who learned the trade from his father bought a Phoenix cooling company founded in 1939 and built it into an HVAC and plumbing business in four states.
Las Vegas, NV
After Ken Goodrich bought Goettl Air Conditioning, he sent crews back to more than 300 air conditioning systems the company had recently installed. They checked each one. The work cost several hundred thousand dollars, according to a 2014 report in ACHR News. From then on, installers photographed every job and sent the pictures to management, and Goodrich approved each job himself before it was marked complete.
“I try to share remarks on everything I see — anything from cleaning the dirty fingerprint off the wall to praising them for a job well done,” he told ACHR News.
Goettl was already old when he got it. Brothers Gust and Adam Goettl started the company in Phoenix in 1939, and they collected more than 100 patents on their equipment, according to the company. By the time Goodrich came, it was in trouble. ACHR News reported that he bought it in December 2012. Goodrich has said he bought it in January 2013, and the company uses 2013. The business had $11 million in revenue in 2012, the trade paper reported, and Goodrich said on the Owned and Operated podcast that it was losing $3 million a year.
Over the next decade he grew it into a company with branches in Arizona, Nevada, California and Texas, and sold most of it to private equity along the way. How he did it goes back to a flashlight and to a hard lesson from his first business.
Goodrich grew up in Las Vegas, the son of Duncan Goodrich, an air conditioning repairman. “I was recruited by my father, at the age of 10, to hold the flashlight for him while he worked on air conditioners,” he told HVACR Business in 2017. The first unit he lit up was a Goettl, built for the heat of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. His father installed them, and later became a Goettl dealer, Goodrich said on Owned and Operated. By the time Goodrich could drive, he was running service calls on his own.
He did not plan to stay. Las Vegas roofs were hot, so he earned a finance degree. “When I interviewed for finance jobs, I’d get offers that were half of what I was making in HVACR,” he told HVACR Business. Around then his father fell ill and died. Goodrich bought the family business, Racee Air Conditioning, from his mother.
He was 25. He later told Vegas Inc that he started with “no capital, no plan, no management or administrative skills.” A couple of years in, the IRS notified him that he had not paid payroll taxes. “What’s payroll taxes?” he recalled asking the agent, on Owned and Operated. The mistake nearly cost him the business, he said on the podcast. A friend had given him Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited, about building a small business on written systems. He finally read it and rebuilt the company around documented processes. Years later he co-wrote The E-Myth HVAC Contractor with Gerber.
The rebuilt company drew a buyer, an industry consolidator, in 1997. Goodrich worked for the new owner for a couple of years, then started putting together HVAC companies in Las Vegas and Phoenix. Those five locations sold to the same buyer in early 2008, and he became president of its Western division. Goettl had been one of his suppliers for years. When the Phoenix company came up for sale, he said on Owned and Operated, he felt it was his duty to buy it.
“I’ve bought, sold, and fixed 20-some HVAC companies in my career, and this one was a little different,” he told ACHR News in 2014. He replaced the president, general manager, service manager and operations manager. By 2014 the company had 84 employees and 58 vehicles, and was on track for $20 million in revenue, the trade paper reported.
Not every early call worked. The company briefly ran as Goettl Good Guys Air Conditioning Repairmen, a name Goodrich said the Better Business Bureau pushed on him before it would update the company’s rating for the new owner. “I shouldn’t have let the BBB make my decisions,” he told ACHR News. The plain Goettl name came back.
His operations manager at the time, Andy Ridgefield, described what the photo checks did to the crews. “Nobody wants to get an email from Ken instructing corrective action on a job, and everybody feels good when he says everything looks perfect,” Ridgefield told ACHR News.
By 2017 the company ran on numbers. “We count 22 things every single day,” Goodrich told HVACR Business. When the numbers slipped, he said, the company slowed down its growth until it caught up. The company also documented every repair and installation, with pictures and training material for each, he told HVACR Business, so that “we can bring a guy in who has some experience, and then we’re going teach him to build a Big Mac our way, so to speak.”
The training plan became Goettl University. In 2017 Goodrich closed on a $10 million, 53,000-square-foot building in Las Vegas for the company’s headquarters and training center, according to a company announcement. The plans included mock HVAC systems built into the building for hands-on training, a 100-seat customer service center, and a drive-through where drivers could get their trucks restocked and cleaned. In the announcement, Goodrich said the technicians would be trained to be perfectionists, the way his father had trained him.
He also put money into the schools that feed the trade. In 2008, when the College of Southern Nevada considered cutting its HVAC program, Goodrich created a $250,000 endowment for it, he told HVACR Business. Another $100,000 endowment buys a first set of tools for veterans who graduate from the program.
Growth brought in outside money. In 2018 Baum Capital Partners of Kansas City recapitalized Goettl, and Goodrich stayed on as chief executive and a significant shareholder, the firm said. At the time, the release said, Goettl served more than 50,000 homeowners a year. In December 2021 a group led by Cortec Group Fund VII, a New York private equity fund, completed a growth recapitalization in partnership with Goodrich and his management team. Goettl then had nine branches across four states, according to Cortec.
He hired people from outside the trades to run it. Most of his general managers were MBAs, and one top performer was a retired F-16 pilot, ServiceTitan reported in 2022. “I’m an industry guy, and I believe in industry guys,” he said on ServiceTitan’s Toolbox for the Trades podcast, adding that when he had a chance to bring in someone with deeper experience, he grabbed them.
In 2023 the company promoted its president, Jake Gress, to chief executive, and Goodrich became chairman. In 2025 he launched Kenerator, a home standby generator company built on acquisitions in Dallas and Houston. Goettl, headquartered in Las Vegas, now lists branches in Phoenix, Tucson, Austin, San Antonio, Las Vegas and Reno, and its website names Goodrich as board chair. “I’ve sold the majority interest in it. I’m on the board currently,” he said on Owned and Operated.
Goodrich still tells the story of his father’s advice. “Son, these units are built to last forever. When the time comes for you to buy an air conditioner, buy Goettl,” Goodrich recalled his father telling him, in a 2020 HVAC Insider article.