It’s a legitimate question that every participant in the HVACR trade should ask themselves and eventually answer. Take entry-level technicians for example. Do they want to be installers for the rest of their lives or would they rather get into service and repair? Maybe management is their final destination, or possibly they are aiming to be business owners running their own shop. With HVACR, the sky’s the limit, but it is important to set some initial goals.

Once those initial goals are reached, it is necessary to define new goals. If ownership was the goal, now that you are an owner you have to decide how far in this endeavor you would like to go. What volume of business and management responsibilities are you reaching for?  If you are happy being a one-man shop, then instead of focusing on growing your business, it might just be time to concentrate on improving your skills and certifications. Maybe you are interested in being a 10-man shop or perhaps a franchise. The more I work in the industry, the more I am convinced that it doesn’t really matter how large your company is, there is room for you in the diverse HVACR market. Cue the bigger is better and much more reliable argument in the background. Of course there are some crooked one-man shops with terrible business practices giving other HVACR contractors bad names, but there are crooked multi-million dollar shops operating under the same crooked practices as well. Bigger is not always better.  

There are tradeoffs to every level of being an HVACR contractor, so you have to ask yourself, “Just how much success can you handle?”