Blake Harrison’s HVAC sideline grew into a Montgomery crew of almost 20
Blake Harrison ran his heating and air company on the side for years, then built a crew of almost 20 that he means to leave to his sons.
Montgomery, AL
Blake Harrison got into heating and air by doing a favor. A man who was a friend of the family needed help on a job, and Harrison went along. “I went and helped him swap out a compressor,” he says, “and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
For years, that was about as far as it went. Harrison Heating & Air has existed since 2003, according to its Better Business Bureau file, which lists it as a sole proprietorship with Harrison as owner. For most of that time it was a sideline. “It was just kind of a side thing that we didn’t really care about,” Harrison says. “It was just there making money, and it was just me and one other guy at that point.”
Then he started putting his effort into growing it. “We’ve gone from two people to almost 20,” he says. The Montgomery company now has branches in Auburn and Orange Beach, and one of its pickups is wrapped in camouflage, with the Daikin logo and the state license number on the utility bed.
It also has a plan that runs against the way his trade is moving. Heating and air was a niche business once, Harrison says. “Now everybody’s hopping in it, and private equity’s all over it.” His sons work in the business, and he is building it for them.
The company’s staff page shows how far it has come from two people. Below Harrison’s name come an operations manager, a service manager and an accounting staffer, then the branch managers, Jaron Craddock and Luke Moody, then a long row of technicians and lead technicians. Two of the portraits are of dogs. Blue is listed under payment acquisition. Cane is the morale officer.
“We do it all,” Harrison says, and the company’s list backs him up: installation, service and repair, duct cleaning, mini-split systems, refrigeration and blown-in insulation. The insulation is the loose kind. Most people picture long pink rolls, the company notes on its website, but this goes into attics and walls by machine and packs into gaps and corners the rolls miss. The company works on homes and businesses. It installs Daikin equipment and calls itself one of the few Daikin-certified professionals in the Montgomery area. It offers service around the clock with no diagnostic fee, though the office itself wraps up at about 5 p.m., Harrison says.
The website’s pitch is plain: local people making an honest living, with no tricks or gimmicks. The service area runs from Montgomery out to Pike Road, Prattville, Wetumpka, Tallassee and Millbrook, and east to Auburn, where the company keeps two technicians.
The jobs customers write about tend to be small and specific. One man who had used the company for about eight years wrote that after a repair that included a new control pad, he could not make sense of how the controls had been set up, and when the weather turned cold he could not get his heat to come on. The crew came back, set them up the way he wanted and did not charge him for it. On a routine tune-up, technicians found a capacitor that was about to fail and showed the homeowner how they knew. Another customer, whose system was 18 years old, wrote that the alternatives were explained and there was no hard sell to replace it. She replaced it anyway, and the crew had the new one in quickly. A longtime customer wrote that she can text the office instead of playing phone tag, and that on one visit the technicians showed up within a few hours of her text and brought her trash can in from the street.
Harrison still goes out on calls himself. One customer wrote in a Google review that the owner came out quickly on a Sunday to fix the unit and did a great job. Two technicians, Cole and Barrett, came back the next day to finish the job. Two more customers wrote that the company came out on a holiday. One had wondered whom she could possibly call. The other apologized to Harrison for making him work that day.
Harrison has made a couple of deliberate choices about how the company runs. The first concerns the slow stretches. “We do not lay anybody off for the winter, and we do not cut their hours or anything,” he says.
The second is pace. “I’m not going out of my way to get more work, but we’re not going to turn it down, either,” he says. He would rather protect the standing the company has earned with its customers. “I don’t want to grow too fast,” he says.
Some of the company’s work happens a long way from Alabama. Every year, the team travels to Mexico with Yugo Ministries to build a house for a family in need, the company writes on its website. To help pay for the next build, the company has organized a charity golf tournament, Tees for Keys, at Cottonwood Golf Club in Montgomery. Full Moon BBQ and Nancy’s Italian Ice signed on as sponsors.
Harrison runs the company without a partner, and he has already settled who comes after him. “One day, they’ll take over,” he says of his sons. Selling is not part of the plan. “Definitely not trying to sell it,” he says, “just trying to build it, make it something awesome.”