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The Install: The Candidate Offer Stack in an HVAC Company
This week’s teardown found a dental practice losing about twenty two thousand dollars a month to one empty operatory. This Install walks The Candidate Offer Stack into a residential HVAC company, where a tech does not have one week but two, so the layer everyone writes vaguely is the one that has to be printed on the board.
A parked truck is a number nobody has written down. Here is the stack at work in an HVAC company.
Northfield Heating and Air runs six trucks, residential service and replacement, a little over two point four million dollars a year. Its best service tech left in May for a shop across town that paid more, and the posting has been up ever since. Four people applied: two never had a license, one stopped answering, and the fourth took another job before anybody called him back. The sixth truck has not moved since the middle of May. A composite built from real shops and real 2026 data, not a client.
Price the Parked Truck
Price the hole before you price the raise. A Northfield truck bills about sixteen hundred dollars a working day, and this one has been parked for about ninety working days: one hundred and forty four thousand dollars of billed work. The role was posted at twenty seven dollars an hour and the shop across town pays thirty two, which is five dollars an hour, forty hours, fifty two weeks: ten thousand four hundred dollars a year, about eight hundred and sixty seven dollars a month. A parked truck costs about thirty three thousand six hundred a month in billed work. The raise that felt unaffordable is two point six percent of it, and those two numbers had never been in the same place, because one is on the payroll report and the other had never been written down anywhere.
Rebuild Layer Two
Then change layer two. Monday said name the exact week. In this trade there is no single week: there is the ordinary week, and there is the week you carry the phone, and every tech with five years in has worked for a shop where on call was shared, which meant it landed on whoever said no the least. So write the rotation down, by name, and put it in the offer: on call is one week in six, in the order printed on the board in the shop, owner included. An on call night you are called out pays a flat bonus plus your hours. From June through August the week is capped at fifty hours, and when the shop hits the cap the job is booked for tomorrow and the owner calls the homeowner himself.
Fund It, Post It, Keep the Promise
Fund the number without pretending the money appears: ten dollars on the diagnostic fee across about four hundred and twenty service calls a month is four thousand two hundred dollars a month, which pays for the raise almost five times over before the parked truck turns a key. Put the offer where the techs are: the HVAC program at the local trade school, by calling the program lead rather than emailing the general address; the supply house counter, where every tech in town stands before seven in the morning; and your own techs, with a referral bonus paid at ninety days. Then keep the promise: fifteen minutes on the calendar every weekday, before dispatch, and a yes or no inside forty eight hours from a person, including the no, written once so it never has to be composed at eight at night.
The Candidate Offer Stack is inside the free Small Business MBA.
Five layers on one page, written once so every role you post after it comes out of the same document, as a fillable page in the app, not a download you have to print. It is free, it is not a trial, and every tool this season lands there.
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