Discover why HVAC contractors are switching to 3C Connect

Hi, my name is Shannan Kiblinger and I’m the CEO of 3C Connect.

I’ve been involved in the HVAC industry for over 35 years.

In that time, I’ve done everything from calling on contractors as a distributor—winning dozens of sales awards along the way, to contracting and technical training and everything in between.

It goes without saying, I’ve seen and experienced the challenges and roadblocks contractors like you face when it comes to managing, running and growing your businesses.

So I’ve spent a lot of time training technicians and owners to implement best practices to make contracting easier. A lot of these practices and ideas have been built into 3C Connect.

I started 3C Connect with my co-founder Shaun Cartwright over 10 years ago. He also happens to be the President of AAA Heating & Air Conditioning in Kent, Washington and the driving force behind our product.

Instead of telling you all about the features and benefits of 3C Connect, I’ll let Shaun talk more about how it’s helped his contracting business…

“Before 3C Connect we tried several of the popular HVAC programs out there.

One of the biggest downfalls was the sheer size of them and the amount of time it took to get set up, get trained and actually use them on an ongoing basis.

It wasn’t abnormal to fly office managers and head client care specialists out of town to Florida for several days of training just to get familiar with the program. That was just to get them to a point where they could come back and train the rest of the team.

So it could take many weeks, sometimes even a month or more to get someone trained on some of those programs.

And over time as they got bigger, the quality of support went down. So we’d wait days if not weeks for responses.

While those were some of the pains associated with the last two programs that we tried at AAA, this has also been my experience at other companies too.

I’ve been involved in the HVAC industry for over 34 years. In that time I’ve tried almost all of the software solutions out there.

And none of them really did a great job at what we needed, so we set out to develop something that was more specific to HVAC contractors and overcome some of the pains associated with existing solutions.

Firstly, we wanted to solve the training challenge, staff turnover in the HVAC industry is high, so reducing the amount of time it takes to train someone was important.

Secondly, we wanted something that would allow us to spend more time operating the business and not get caught up in things that weren’t so important.

We needed to communicate from the customer to the office and to the field quickly and efficiently.

We wanted a way to manage customer sites and equipment files, history and probably most importantly, maintenance and service agreements.

Finally, we really wanted accurate reporting. Some of the other programs are fully automated, which sounds nice, but it often leads to inaccurate reports, so it’s difficult to make decisions based on all that inaccurate information.

We designed 3C Connect with all of this in mind. It’s been built specifically for our industry and the way we run the business.

Now, we can train people in less than a week and the way the maintenance agreements are managed has allowed us to grow our maintenance base quickly and efficiently. In the office we have all the information we need to manage that ongoing relationship and all the ongoing maintenance schedules.

We went from just over 1000 agreements to about 5500 customers because of the way we sell, manage and retain them through 3C Connect.

And as AAA has gotten bigger, it’s reassuring that anyone can look at a report and they can trust that it’s accurate, so this has also really helped grow the business significantly.

Operationally, we’ve done a complete 180 from before. Back then, we’d spend the entire day just to make the company run using the software we had.

3C Connect is more of a management system, it doesn’t run us as a contractor, we run it, and we only spend as much time as necessary using it. So we’re able to focus on the business, customers and coworkers.

That’s probably the reason why the revenue and operating profit is where it’s at now, simply because we were able to run a contracting business and not just live and breathe inside of the daily operating system.

With the previous programs, we were stuck at that $800k to $1.5 million for about 3-4 years, which is a pretty standard dollar amount for a small contractor, and that’s normally a wall that most can’t get past.

Since we adopted 3C Connect, we’ve grown to a point where we are on track for $15-16 million in 2022.

And that’s just revenue, typically when a contractor grows their revenue quickly, it’s usually their profit that suffers, but in that same time we’ve also more than doubled our net profit.

The industry average is between 1%-2% net profit, but at AAA we’re in the region of 20-22% net profit.

I’m obviously biased, but the results we’ve been able to achieve at AAA with 3C Connect have been quite literally award winning, in fact we’ve been awarded with the “HVAC Dealer of the year Award” for 4 consecutive years from our largest HVAC Distributor.

We’re achieving revenue and profit numbers that are generally unheard of in the industry and a lot of that is due to the way 3C Connect allows us to run the business.”

Now we’d love to help you too, so read more about our program on this page and when you’re ready, book a demo because I’d love to show you what we could do for you.

Best wishes

Shannan