Tommy Carpenter, patriarch of the Kerrville family that founded San Antonio-based Atlas AC Repair in 2020, likes to say that Atlas is “an insource company, not an outsource company.”
Atlas AC first found success when it brought its marketing in-house. Carpenter’s son and Atlas co-founder Kenneth Carpenter began creating YouTube explainers that pulled back the curtain on what is typically an opaque industry. They became surprise hits.
The company also chose to offer up-front and transparent pricing on its website, including a “build your own AC” tool, bucking the industry trend of declining to offer quotes until a technician is inside your house.
Those efforts have led to swift growth, the Carpenters say, with the company expanding into Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. But that growth has brought with it another challenge: finding enough qualified employees.
Even though several schools in San Antonio offer HVAC training and certifications, the Carpenters say that training can’t keep up with the frequent advances in AC systems. Meanwhile, more experienced technicians, often come from companies where they received ongoing training — but in sales, not skills.
“We’ve had to institute a skills test as part of our interview process,” said Terri Carpenter, Kenneth’s sister and Atlas AC co-founder, who serves as chief people officer, “because too many people think they know stuff — but then when they put their hands on the machine, it’s a different story.”
The company now insources its workforce training, and is expanding its scope with a helping hand from the City of San Antonio and Ready to Work.
Pressing need for training
Last year, the company hired Nathan Peterson, a master electrician and journeyman plumber who’s spent much of his career in HVAC. He oversees Atlas AC’s nascent but growing training programs.
To help defray costs for the effort — trainees cost the company money when they’re being paid to follow more experienced technicians and installers — Tommy Carpenter went looking for grants.
He found San Antonio’s first-of-its-kind workforce development effort, Ready to Work, which recently rolled out two programs to help employers pay for on-the-job training for new employees and “incumbent” worker training for employees already on the job that need new skills.
Atlas AC applied for and received an incumbent worker training grant, which will pay up to $5,000 to train six existing employees.
“Investing public dollars in small businesses like Atlas enables them to grow their workforce by equipping them with the skills they need in order to expand and grow their business,” said Mike Ramsey, executive director of the city’s Workforce Development Office, which oversees Ready to Work. “That is a mutually beneficial arrangement for both the worker and the company.”
The rollout of taxpayer-funded employer subsidies did not come without pushback from some City Council members, who worried that too many large businesses, like Holt and Avanzar, received the lion’s share of the training money.
Ready to Work committed $3 million for the first round of grants to 31 companies, which have committed to train 1,387 workers. Grant funding is capped at $100,000 per company. City Council approved another $6 million for additional on-the-job and incumbent worker training subsidies for fiscal year 2025.
Atlas AC also applied for a City of San Antonio grant for so-called “second stage” companies, defined as those with between $1 million and $50 million in revenue annually, between 10 and 99 employees, that provide products or services beyond the local area and meet other requirements. Atlas AC has about 50 employees, Tommy Carpenter said.
The city’s Economic Development Department, which oversees the grants, recommended last week that City Council approve $50,000 each for Atlas AC and two other local companies, Integrated Business Technologies, Inc. and Modern Day Concrete, Inc.
The grant money can be used in a variety of ways, but as a sign of how pressing the need is, all three will use at least some of the money for workforce training, according to the department’s recent briefing to a City Council subcommittee. Atlas AC plans to cover part of Peterson’s salary, plus curriculum development and the purchase of equipment for its training program.
At Atlas AC’s San Antonio headquarters in a light industrial park just west of Shavano Park, Peterson now uses a corner of the warehouse to stage HVAC equipment for training, and brings technicians into his tiny office a handful at a time each week to review the photos they take as part of every job.
Peterson said it‘s gratifying to take technicians from “barely being able to talk to a customer” to “being able to fill out a full analysis of the system and make a recommendation, to tell them what needs to be done immediately versus what can wait.”
He said he’s not worried about showing the city a return on its investment, as the grants require. As technicians become better trained and more confident in the field, he said, “It’s not even hard to see. It shows up immediately on their sales numbers and their conversion numbers.”
‘Wild wild west’
The Carpenters used to run a commercial LED installation company before pandemic lockdowns vaporized millions of dollars in contracts practically overnight. Kenneth Carpenter had already begun researching recession-proof companies by then, and had zeroed in on the heating, ventilation and air conditioning industry.
At first the family looked at buying an existing company, but finding them “way overvalued,” the family — Tommy Carpenter, Kenneth Carpenter, Terri Carpenter and their brother Timothy Carpenter — chose to start Atlas AC Repair.
Pretty quickly, Kenneth Carpenter said, it became apparent that their outsourced marketing budget wasn’t sufficient to grow a brand-new business. He began making YouTube videos, pulling back the curtain on the ways the industry leverages customers’ lack of knowledge.
“It’s the wild wild west,” he said of the HVAC business, comparing it to buying a car before the internet made pricing more transparent. His videos are opinionated and meme-filled, with titles like “Why AC companies are scamming you!” and “What HVAC contractors don’t want you to know” along with more straightforward explainers.
The videos have taken off, garnering tens of thousands of views. One has been watched 1.4 million times, and has 2,721 comments. Kenneth Carpenter said the videos lead people to the company’s website, where metrics show many visitors “spend hours” reading guides and playing with the “build-your-own AC” tool. “It’s crazy,” he said.
Today there are dozens of videos on the company’s channel, including tips for technicians and clips showing the company’s goofy and familial culture.
That’s intentional, said Terri Carpenter, as Atlas AC does everything it can to attract potential employees.
“We have such a strong need, it’s really an all-hands approach” to reaching potential employees, she said. But whether they’ve just come out of trade school, want to switch careers or have some experience under their belt, they almost all need additional training, she said.
Creating a career path
Unlike plumbing and electrical, HVAC doesn’t operate under an apprenticeship model in which entry-level employees are mentored on the job by experienced hands, logging a certain number of hours plus attending classes to earn state licenses.
Technicians who go to school to earn a certificate are taught the basics, Peterson said, but once hired, their ongoing training is too often focused on how to close a sale rather than keeping up with changing technology and regulations.
“The industry is in a really bad cycle now,” he said. “We need to get this thing revitalized and get these guys back into knowing what they’re doing and having a career path.”
When he and the Carpenters spool out their training vision, it includes creating a standardized apprenticeship model that could eventually come with state licensure. Tommy Carpenter imagines out loud what Atlas AC could do if it found enough grant funding to create a nonprofit school that offered free training for participants.
Ramsey called apprenticeships “the gold standard” of employer-led workforce development. Ready to Work received a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to help businesses expand and establish apprenticeship programs.
“There’s nothing more employer-led than apprenticeships, because they don’t function if the employer is not taking the lead,” Ramsey said. Ready to Work “can definitely help” Atlas AC develop such a program, he added.
While Tommy Carpenter generally finds himself suspicious of politicians and government programs, he sounds a lot like Ramsey when he envisions what Atlas AC could achieve.
“Producing men and women who could leave here and earn $25, $30 an hour,” he muses. “You can buy a house on that, right? You can raise a family on that. It’s not the greatest in the world, but it is pretty dang good.”
