Jason Pappas invites customers to look over his shoulder while he works. “They can look at the dandruff on our shoulder while they’re watching us work,” he says.
The invitation is part of the job. When a system is down, the customer sees what the technician sees and hears what it means before anything gets replaced. One customer wrote in a Google review that the technician let her stay with him for the whole call and talked through the troubleshooting and the parts quote as he went.
Pappas started Pappas Parts & Service, Inc. in Yulee, Florida, in 2025. By then he had about 15 years in heating and air and 10 or 11 in commercial refrigeration and cooking equipment. He is a Florida-certified HVAC contractor and a CFESA Master Technician. “I worked for some bigger companies and figured I could do a better job,” he says. “Started my own company where we can have the culture that actually retains people and retains customers.”
His route into the trade ran through two jobs. He began in residential and commercial heating and air at a company in Macon, Georgia. He then moved into commercial food equipment service with a parts-and-service company that had been in business for more than 40 years. “That’s where I picked up and mastered my trade,” he says. He compares his time there to a Mr. Miyagi story.
Those two backgrounds explain the shape of the business. Pappas says the work splits about 50/50 between homes and commercial customers. On the commercial side, that means heating and air, refrigeration, cooking equipment, ice machines, walk-in coolers and ventilation for restaurants and other commercial facilities. He says the company does a lot of chain accounts, including 7 Brew Coffee and Ted’s Montana Grill. A restaurant’s ice machine and walk-in don’t follow the weather the way home air conditioning does. “We stay busy year-round,” he says.
At homes, the company installs and repairs air conditioning and heating. It is an American Standard dealer that services the major HVAC brands and helps with manufacturer warranty repairs where they apply. “The brand that we would recommend would be American Standard,” he says. The company is licensed in Florida and serves customers across Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia, from Yulee, Fernandina Beach, Callahan and Jacksonville up to Brunswick and Savannah.
Pappas wants the customer on both sides of a sale. The company will sell and install equipment, he says, but the relationship is the point. “We want them before and after they get the equipment,” he says.
His scheduling rule follows from that. Only the first appointment of the day gets an exact arrival time, and the crew shows up early for it. Everyone else is told where they stand. “We can put you as our next stop,” he says. “Right now, it looks like we’re about 2 and 1/2 or 3 hours. If you want to call somebody else, that’s fine. If you want us to give you a call when we get done, we’ll make sure you still need us.” Then: “We don’t make anybody wait on us.”
The standard for the work itself is plain. “We don’t want to put something in their house that we wouldn’t put in our mama’s house. We don’t cut corners,” he says. That can cost time. “Sometimes it takes a little bit longer,” he says.
The company is independently owned and growing, and Pappas calls it lean. He works beside his technician and says he won’t hand off the jobs nobody wants. “I hope that he’s seen that I’m willing to do anything that I ask anybody else that’s on Team Pappas to do,” he says. “I’ll get in the attic. I’ll do the ductwork. I’ll get in the crawl space.”
Pappas says anyone who calls gets same-day service, and the company takes emergency calls around the clock, subject to technician availability. “If they called at 3:00 in the morning, they would talk to somebody, and if it couldn’t wait, they would be seen.”