“We make a big deal of training here,” said Josh Bigelow, president of Great Dane Heating & Air Conditioning Inc. in Clinton Township, Mich. That statement summarizes how important training is at Great Dane, The NEWS’ 2012 Best Contractor to Work For in the North Central Region. But it doesn’t begin to describe the myriad ways that Josh Bigelow and Great Dane Heating & Air Conditioning Inc. put this into practice.
There are weekly in-house service training meetings that last 1½ hours “where we train our entire staff on how we want things to be done,” said Karak Stephen, a senior service technician at Great Dane. Then there’s the 2-hour in-house monthly installation training. “All of my employees, especially my service staff, get well over 100 hours of paid training per year,” said Bigelow.