Well, I am happy to report that I made it through the dangerous first year.
Most businesses fail within their first year, so surviving it is something to celebrate.
That doesn’t mean I can let up for one second ,or reset on my laurels, because things don’t get much easier from here on out. The successful first year was based on market research, and an educated guess that the small town had a whole lot of work that needed to be completed by a certified HVAC technician. I had one full time guy that handled the bulk of the work, but another local girl who was taking HVAC classes in online school, and I hired her part time as an assistant. She was very grateful, and thought I was doing her a favor, but really I was helping to guide her into being my second full time HVAC technician. I had come to realize that we had a lot of local women who were single, or at the very least alone with their kids during the day, and would feel more comfortable with a female HVAC tech in their house. Although the HVAC industry is male dominated, it shouldn’t be, as women are just as capable of this kind of work as men are. She works about 20 hours a week now, mostly riding with the HVAC tech and assisting him while carefully studying what he does. After a year of this I will pay for her to take the HVAC certification test, and then hire her on to help my company grow