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Training and standards help with customer service. Licensing should be more widespread.

It’s not the job of your customers to know industry lingo. How often do you rattle off terms like “AFUE” or “audit” without pausing to explain them? The real question is: After talking to you or your sales staff, do people feel confused and frightened, or educated and excited?

There are just a couple of weeks left for you to enter The NEWS’ Best Contractor to Work For contest. Some companies, those that rise like cream, go further than the norm. They offer a place where employees feel proud to work. Beyond the privilege of having a job, they feel downright lucky to work where they do.

There are quite a few crazy ideas in the HVACR industry’s history, but it’s the future that contractors, manufacturers, and distributors are trying to understand. For the HVACR industry, social and digital media aren’t the future though; they are the crazy ideas of today.

During the summer there was a flurry of press releases from an organization called BeyondHFCs. I pulled a number of them together into a story that appears in this issue. As I noted in the beginning of the story, this is a European-based organization that advocates the use of natural refrigerants rather than HFCs.

Politics is on the minds of a lot of the industry people that I speak to these days. In fact, I cannot remember when I have heard so much chatter for a mid-term election. I suppose that is the result of a still-struggling economy and the polarization of our political discourse.

As often happens, I learned something new while talking to a contractor a few weeks ago. An interesting thing about learning something new is that I also often discover almost everyone else already knows what I am just figuring out for the first time. But, just in case, I thought I’d share some words of perspective from Tim McGuire.

Do or do not, there is no try.

HARDI recently launched www.savehvacjobs.com, a website created to provide a central grassroots portal for the entire HVAC industry to convince federal legislators that extending the $1,500, “25c” residential tax credits before they expire is essential for continued employment and economic recovery.

I know a guy named Joe and I was planning to write a classified ad for him. However, before I do, I have to tell you about a small company in West Texas.