Ruth King

The co-founder of Women in HVACR – The Foundation reflects on the changing landscape for women in the skilled trades. 

I recently ran a 5K on runway 26L at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Although a 5K race isn’t as intense as a full marathon, training for and completing this race will no doubt help prepare me for something bigger down the road. 

If you face this situation, you must ask yourself: Are these civil or criminal charges? An example of a civil charge is when you give your bookkeeper check-signing authority and he or she steals.

Bob Barnes, the owner of Western Heating in Boise, Idaho, has been my client for six years.

There are now more than 2 billion monthly Facebook users according to data released by the company earlier this year. This means that it is getting harder and harder to get attention on Facebook.

Should your dispatchers and customer service personnel sell maintenance contracts over the telephone? Or should your service technicians get the first opportunity?

Did you “try marketing” this year? If you did, you probably wasted your money. Here is what usually happens: You saw a television or radio ad for a competitor or received one of the company’s postcards — by mistake.

A technician diagnosed and made a repair, collected payment, and went to her next call thinking that everything was OK with that customer.

I wish I had come up with this phrase. I didn’t. It was given to me by small-business expert Mike Ratchford, who says that the purpose of good direct mail is to stop recipients so they don’t do the typical “left hand, right hand, trash can.”

You never truly know about a person’s abilities until he or she gets in a truck and goes to a customer’s home or office to perform work.