When a Sacramento customer calls Perma Services HVAC, the first person through the door is often one of the company’s owners. Instead of sending a technician, Daniel Padilla says, “the owner goes in first and does whatever tests are needed.”
Padilla runs the Sacramento side of a business his father started in the Bay Area. He moved to the valley to expand it. His father and brother, his partners, stay up north. Down here, the first visit is usually his.
He goes first because of a problem he sees across his trade. “People have a lot of doubts,” Padilla says, “because a lot of times the technician doesn’t know how to explain to them what’s going on, and then they cannot comprehend.” So he does the testing himself and works out what is wrong before anyone talks money. “Once we find out what’s happening, we’ll present them an estimate right before they pull a dollar out,” he says. The technicians then follow up on whatever the customer called about.
The work is mostly residential, with some light commercial. Padilla says every hire goes through a background check and has to show proof of experience. The company is bonded and insured, uses genuine manufacturer parts and puts a warranty on its repairs. “We don’t just go in and change a motor and then say, well, we replaced a motor and here we go, you’re on your own,” he says. The follow-up continues after the job, too. He says the company calls customers back to ask whether everything is working and whether they have questions.
The crew meets every week to talk through how the days are going and whether anyone ran into problems or complaints. Padilla’s way of setting the standard is to do the work in front of them. “Always examples, man,” he says. “I gotta prove myself to them.”
He traces that approach to his father. “He seems to think that every client is your neighbor or a family,” Padilla says. “All of his teaching to us is based on that. Everyone, it’s our neighbor.” The idea carries into how the company is owned. Padilla describes it as employee-owned, with every employee “an owner of our company,” an arrangement he says his father wanted so everyone stays in as an owner.
The company’s work has shifted with circumstances. When COVID hit, Padilla says, service, repair and installation slowed. What picked up was UV lights installed inside air duct systems. Their manufacturers claim they kill bacteria and fungus as air moves through the ducts, and Padilla compares them to a filter that kills contaminants. Perma put in a lot of them. “I want to say that’s what kept us in business,” he says.
On the commercial side, Perma has an account with T-Mobile and handles all of its stores in the area. “We’ve been with them for years,” Padilla says, “so I think that proves that our work is legitimate.”
The habit of explaining things has also put him on television. Padilla does segments for Univision, the Spanish-language network, aimed at teaching viewers how an air conditioner works, what to expect when they call an HVAC company and what preventive maintenance involves. The topic changes each year. A few years back, he says, the station began asking the company for help reaching the community. “So we started doing it once,” he says, “and then it followed to a second year, third year, fourth year.”