The Systems Mindset for the HVACR Owner

BY SAM CARPENTER

Here’s the simple starting point for finally attaining the great bottom line and personal freedom you’ve always wanted your business to provide.

It’s about adjusting how you view your operation, and then intensely managing from that new vantage point.

Let’s start with my personal story as an illustration of how this can work for you.

Twenty-two years ago, on the verge of losing my answering service business after a decade and a half of chaotic, crisisladen 80- to 100-hour workweeks (and the related personal health and family challenges), I woke up one morning to realize that my business was, no more and no less, a collection of mechanical, written and human systems (or processes).

In that singular moment — an existential-level personal awakening — I was stunned by the profound reality that had been invisible to me up until that moment. I saw that my business, and indeed my entire life, is a collection of independent systems, each of which executes step-by-step over time to produce a particular result.

Instantly, I grasped that with this more accurate perspective I could manage each of those individual systems so they would each produce perfect results. So that’s what I did. One-by-one, I isolated and then perfected each of the systems of my operation.

Optimizing the most dysfunctional processes first, my life instantly improved. Today? In this same business that I’ve now owned for 36 years, I work maybe one hour a month, and my wife Diana and I have more income than we need.

And you? Are your days filled with killing fires at your company? Is your bottom-line a problem? Do you have employee and customer issues? Do you work long and hard and things never improve? Does all of this affect your situation at home?

Take a moment right now to visualize your operation more accurately. Go “one layer deeper,” to internalize a profoundly simple mechanical reality: in this moment, the condition of your HVAC business is 100 percent due to a collection of constantly executing independent processes, each of which produces a result. (Internalizing this reality — without a second thought — is the “systems mindset”).

Could it be that you have not been precisely managing the systems of your operation; that too many of them have been unfolding randomly?

Once you can see these systems-ofyour-life, you can methodically isolate and repair each of them, one at a time, so you get the exact results you desire!

If you make each of your operation’s systems perfect, will your business as a whole also be perfect?

Actually, yes …

So then, what about your HVACR operation? How do you see it in this moment? Is it a swirling mass of sights, sounds and events? Is it emotionally and financially whip-sawing you and your staff? Is it affecting your home life?

If all this is true, perform this quick exercise to get a feel for the systems mindset: take a deep breath, relax, and right now contemplate your immediate surroundings. If you’re in your office, consider the lighting system, the copier, the computers, the electrical system, the internet and telephone network, multitudes of procedural protocols… the heating and AC system! They are all separate from each other.

Each executing over time to produce a result.

You can do this brief mental exercise anywhere, anytime: driving, walking, exercising, playing with your kids. It’s a pleasant reflection. Comforting. It will keep your mind straight.

See that your business is, bottom-line, a collection of systems, most of which can be intensely managed. Once you really “get” the systems-mindset, the creation of prosperity and peace will only require that you take logical, simple, mechanical steps.

This is leadership in its most potent form!

Seeing your life from the systemsmindset perspective and then acting on it, will quickly change your life. The results you’ve always wanted will come hard and fast. You’ll never go back.

Go ahead. Quietly look around. Go-one-layer-deeper. u

Take a moment right now to visualize your operation more accurately.

Sam Carpenter’s book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, first published in 2008, was released in its fourth edition in February 2021. For a complimentary hardcover copy, email your mailing address to work@centratel. com. The book will be on its way to you the same day. (Postage paid within the U.S., One book per person. Limited to first 500 requests. Offer ends January 1, 2022). For additional information, visit workthesystem.com and thesystermsmindset.com. You can reach Sam at samc@workthesystem.com.