Diversify. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Adapt quickly to the market change. If contractors have heard this once, they have heard it a hundred times. Still, it doesn’t necessarily make it easy. Sometimes diversifying your company can be as difficult as finding a vegetable in Rosie O’Donnell’s refrigerator.

In conjunction with the HVAC Comfortech show, Honeywell hosted a Residential Products Forward Thinking Conference recently at the America’s Center in St. Louis. Conference attendees were able to preview over a dozen new Honeywell products, including two new product innovations - TrueZone panels and TrueSteam humidification systems.

Who needs carbon monoxide alarms? I guess contractors should be selling their customers cats instead. Jeanie Probst (does her dad host Survivor?) and Chris Ward were tipped off that their furnace was pumping out poisonous gas by their cat.

How comfortable do you feel with your technicians driving around in your company vehicles? Make sure you do a check on their driving record before hiring. The following are actual statements found on insurance forms where car drivers attempted to summarize the details of an accident in a few words:

While we have been getting a few comments posted about these blogs, we want more. And if history is any indication, nothing elicits comments like ladder photos. So with that in mind, I give you these three pics.

Hey contractors, better hope your technicians are not dancing to background music while fixing a unit. There might be an accident that will end up costing your business.

Here are some lessons learned the hard (and funny) way that have been floating around the Internet. Anybody out there have some business lessons they learned the hard way?

The list of idiotic criminals is as long as the list of celebrities that have checked into rehab. Jeffrey Mumani is on that idiotic criminals list. According to the heraldtribune.com, the 25-year-old man needed to be freed by firefighters because he was caught in a CVS store’s ventilation shaft.

Since my last blog entry had a little fun at the expense of President Bush - and since my No. 1 fan Frank enjoyed it so much - I thought I would bring you this humorous fake news release about Al Gore and the global warming crisis.

In a story largely ignored by the national media, The Onion has reported that President Bush has called for the construction of a giant national air conditioner by 2015.