job description

[angryk]

Just out of curiosity, Do most of you who do refrigeration, do other kitchen equipment as well? How about a.c. and heating?

[bhrobin]

AngryK -
I know of very few in this area that do commercial refrigeration and commercial cooking, too. The home appliance people generally do all kitchen and laundry equipment and seem to be relatively competent at it. The only guy in Topeka who does both commercial refrigeration and cooking just quit his employer and went to work for a chain of grocery stores just doing refrigeration.
We try to limit ourselves to residential and moderate commercial heating and cooling with commercial icemakers and commercial refrigeration. Our ability and talent gets a bit thin at ice cream machines on one end and steam boilers on the other. We do a lot with radiant floor, heat pumps, zoning and heat recovery in light commercial and residential. We keep our package gas/electric units down to about 20 tons.

[herefishy]

The "catch phrase" of my business is "Medium and Low Temperature Specialists". When people ask me what that means, I tell them, "It means that I'm not going to work on your air conditioner!"

I don't want to lose a customer's Refrigeration business on account of screwing up his air conditioning!... Or his steam-jacket kettle, for that matter.

[angryk]

I feel the same way about specializing in one area, preferably refrigeration. Unfortunately I don't have that option at the company that I work for. Our customers like the fact that they can call us for just about anything. When I first started, I thought it would be a good learning experience. It really is just very stressfull. I like knowing very well what I am doing. Working on such a variety of stuff, its hard to be on top of it all.

[herefishy]

AngryK, you should go to the business/marketing division (in this forumn), and read the thread "specialize"

[bhrobin]

My guess is that the larger the market, the more a company can specialize. This market is about 160,000 people and there are an even dozen shops the size of ours (10 employees) or larger. Only one does just refrigeration (Hussman), the rest combine heating and AC with refrigeration.
Half of the total fold in plumbing and electrical, too. That really would make me crazy!

A former employee bought out his father-in-law's business in West Boondocks, Kansas. There are less than 5,000 souls in four counties. He has three techs total but also has lumber, cable TV, flooring, appliance in addition to PHVAC and E. Yikes! By contrast, a colleage in the Kansas City Metro area does nothing but convenience store fountain drink machines.
Our customers repeatedly ask us to clean drains, fix the deep-fat fryer and maybe the cash register and satellite music, too. The fear is, of course, that they may turn to a competitor for these services and then use them for HVACR as well.

[angryk]

Herefishy, thanks for directing to the "specialize" thread. Very intersting.