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I have seen and experienced several business cycles in our industry in the last 30 years. None of them have been fun but this time something is different. The residential HVAC market has been sliding for several months, no thanks to the housing market downturn but the industry hasn’t hit the panic button.

Corn futures jumped for a while as everyone and his brother thought ethanol production would be the next Google on the stock market. Now, it’s sweet potatoes making news. A group of researchers at North Carolina State University have found that the sweet potato can out-produce corn by quite a stretch.

Compared to police officers or firemen, being an HVAC service tech should not be a dangerous job. In fact, if a tech follows proper safety procedures he or she might find their jobs to be extremely safe. But sometimes things get out of whack and a tech has no control over a situation he/she finds himself/herself in.

I am a fan of Rick Johnson, founder of CEO Strategist and a veteran of the wholesale distribution industry. He recently sent me an e-mail, discussing the topic of behavior and its importance. It’s worth repeating here.

This week there is legislation being voted on by the U.S. Congress which, if passed, could create a patchwork of regional or state standards for air conditioning and heat pump equipment efficiencies. The NEWS has written about this before, but the blog today is because the timetable has been moved up.

No news is good news. Now please don’t misinterpret that tired cliché. Before some smart-aleck replies with an “Are you saying that no NEWS is good news?” - let me nip that in the bud. If there were no NEWS, I wouldn’t be writing this blog for your amusement. There must be NEWS in our lives because I need to make a living and you need to be informed by the best publication in the HVAC biz.

Read an interesting article recently concerning the purpose of having performance reviews. First of all, as a boss or manager, do you even do performance reviews for employees? If not, you really should. This author was rather skeptical of how performance reviews are accomplished overall.

I’m sure there are many employers reading this blog (wishful thinking) that would like to put a tighter grip on their employees, denying them some of the freedoms that employees seem to expect today. In light of that comment, I present this humorous look at a different kind of employment contract.

I was struck by something while attending another annual Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute (ARI) meeting (I attended my first in 1983). There are a lot of great people in this industry! Not because of what they do but because of who they are.

The first step toward even having a chance to win the lotto (if you have one) in your home state is to actually purchase a ticket. Without entering, there’s no chance in you-know-where to take home the prize pot.