Free course · 7 practical lessons
The Profitable HVAC Shop
Build the seven numbers behind a healthy HVAC shop, using your own financials and free calculators. No signup, sales pitch, or purchased spreadsheet.
- Built for 1–10 tech shops
- Free practical tools
- No fluff
Seven numbers every HVAC owner should understand before hiring, growing, discounting, or adding more work.
Most HVAC owners can tell you what they invoiced last month. Far fewer can tell you what they kept. That gap is where hiring decisions go wrong, where price increases get delayed two years too long, and where a company can grow twenty percent and end the year with less money in the account than it started with.
This course closes that gap. Seven lessons, each built around one number, each ending with that number calculated for your company using a free calculator. No spreadsheets to buy, no consultant, no software required.
Who this course is for
- U.S. HVAC companies with one to ten technicians (Stage 1 through Stage 4). Most useful at one to five, where the owner is still doing the pricing personally.
- Owners who are busy and reasonably confident the work is good, but genuinely unsure whether the business is making money.
- Owners currently pricing from a competitor’s invoice, from intuition, or from a price book that has not been touched since it was bought.
- Owners about to hire a technician, buy a van, or take on a bigger job, who want to know whether they can actually afford it.
If you already run a monthly P&L with your bookkeeper, price from a maintained flat-rate book, and track gross margin by job, you will find the first three lessons too basic. Start at Lesson 6.
What you will finish with
- Your real gross margin and net operating profit for a recent period.
- Your monthly overhead, written down category by category.
- The fully loaded annual and hourly cost of one technician.
- A realistic billable-hour figure, not a hopeful one.
- A break-even labor rate and a target labor rate you can defend.
- A discount policy, because the alternative is a discount habit.
- A simple way to see which jobs made money and which ones only looked busy.
Set aside about forty-five minutes per lesson if you are doing the work, and have your last twelve months of financials and one recent payroll register nearby.
The seven lessons
| # | Lesson | The number you leave with | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Busy But Not Profitable | Gross margin and net operating profit | 1–4 |
| 2 | What It Costs to Open the Doors | Monthly and annual overhead | 1–4 |
| 3 | What a Technician Really Costs | Loaded cost per technician | 1–4 |
| 4 | The Hours You Can Actually Sell | Realistic billable hours | 2–4 |
| 5 | When Your Labor Rate Is Too Low | Break-even and target labor rate | 1–4 |
| 6 | The Discount That Costs More Than You Think | A written discount rule | 1–4 |
| 7 | Which Jobs Are Worth Doing | Profit by job type | 2–4 |
One company, all seven lessons
Every lesson follows the same fictional company: Ridgeline Heating & Air, a four-technician residential shop, so the numbers build on each other instead of resetting every time. Ridgeline is invented. Its figures are illustrative and chosen to make the arithmetic clear. They are not averages, benchmarks, or targets for your business.
Before you start
Have these within reach. You do not need them to be perfect. You need them to be real.
- A profit-and-loss statement for the last twelve months, or your bank and card statements if you do not have one yet.
- One recent payroll register showing wages, taxes, and any benefits you pay.
- Your workers’ compensation rate.
- Some way of counting how many jobs you completed and how many hours your technicians were paid for.
If you cannot produce the last item, that is a finding, not a failure. Lesson 4 deals with it directly.
Your course control sheet
Collect all seven results on the free seven-number worksheet. The worksheet PDF fits on one letter-size page, the markup-to-margin card is ready for a price-book binder, and the published Ridgeline CSV exposes every annual total and cross-lesson formula used in the course.
Start the course
Lesson 1: Busy But Not Profitable →
Disclaimer
This course is educational. It is not accounting, tax, legal, or financial advice, and it is not a substitute for a qualified professional who knows your business and your state. All example figures are illustrative. Calculator results are planning estimates based entirely on the numbers you enter.
Editorial status
Published by ClimaCall. Independent technical review is pending. No outside reviewer is attributed to this course.