Culture, Daily Huddles, and Data: HVAC Company Growth Lessons From Zane Fonseca of Landry Mechanical
Ask Zane Fonseca what he learned from twelve years of owning his own plumbing company, and he does not hesitate: “Culture is gonna eat strategy for breakfast every single day.” It is the line that anchors his entire approach to HVAC company growth, and on a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, he explained exactly what it looks like in practice.
Fonseca is the general manager of Landry Mechanical, a plumbing, HVAC, and electrical company based in central Massachusetts, about forty-five minutes outside Boston. When he joined the company four and a half years ago, it was doing somewhere between five and seven million dollars with about twenty-five people. Today Landry Mechanical runs roughly eighty employees, five office locations, and eighteen million dollars in annual revenue, with a plan to reach thirty million within three years.
His path there was anything but typical. A kid from a small town in upstate New York with no college degree, Fonseca went from stocking shelves at a local hardware store to running service calls for a Roto-Rooter franchise to building his own three million dollar plumbing company from his garage. That owner’s perspective is what makes his playbook as a GM so practical.
The Real Challenge: Growth Outrunning Process
Landry Mechanical caught the post-COVID HVAC wave, when homeowners were investing in their houses and installation was practically an order-taking business. That boom launched the company forward, but it also exposed a familiar problem: a small company that grows fast does not have the processes of a large one.
“Because you’re a small company, you don’t have processes built like you do at a large company. So the last couple years, that’s just what we’ve been focusing on.” – Zane Fonseca
Fonseca knows the cost of slow, unstructured growth firsthand. His own plumbing company took the better part of twelve years to reach the three million dollar mark. When he weighed starting over in Massachusetts, the math stopped him. He did not have another decade to give to the same climb, so he went looking for a company that could use an owner’s expertise to reach its next stage. That search led him to Ray and Tasha Landry, and the partnership clicked: Ray is the data-driven operator, Fonseca is the culture and relationship builder.
Todd Baldwin noted on the episode that plenty of home service companies stall around the five million dollar mark, because five to ten million is a different world, and ten-plus usually demands a full reorganization. Landry Mechanical pushed through both walls. The rest of the conversation broke down how.
Lessons From Twelve Years of Ownership
Hire for Culture, Not Just Skill
Fonseca’s first principle is hiring according to culture and fit. Landry Mechanical shares more performance data with its team than most companies would consider comfortable. He admits they overshare on purpose, because employees who see the real numbers understand what it takes to run a responsible business. The people who cannot handle that transparency and accountability usually walk themselves out the door within ninety days. The ones who stay are already bought in.
Respect the Numbers
By his own account, Fonseca did not focus enough on business metrics during his ownership years. Watching Ray Landry run the company on data taught him how much discipline the numbers deserve. Between Ray’s analytical instincts and Fonseca’s people skills, the two cover each other’s blind spots, and he credits that pairing for much of the company’s momentum.
What Is Working Now: The Fifteen-Minute Daily Huddle
Every morning, every manager in the business stands up in front of a TV: warehouse, install, service, call center, sales, the GM, and the owner. Ray Landry runs the meeting himself. The agenda never changes:
- Yesterday’s scoreboard. Booking rates, cancellation rates, membership counts, completed install and service revenue. Wins get celebrated. Misses get a quick, honest explanation, because excuses are not accepted.
- Today’s commitments. Specific numbers, stated out loud. Ten thousand dollars in service today, twenty-five thousand in install. If there is no commitment, there had better be a good reason.
- Real-time load balancing. If install has a last-minute cancellation and HVAC service is overbooked, installers pick up demand calls the same day. Nobody sits idle while another department drowns.
The huddle targets fifteen minutes, though it stretches to thirty when the team is fighting through challenges together. It has also evolved. The team used to celebrate what was sold rather than what was installed, and even split multi-day installs into daily fractions of completed revenue. They killed both habits in favor of honest numbers, and Fonseca says the sharper version of the huddle has driven noticeably more traction in recent months. Win the day, win the week, win the month.
Engineering a Five-Star Experience
Landry Mechanical treats the customer experience as a designed system, not a hope. A live person always answers the phone, with AI handling overflow and routing. Dispatch keeps homeowners updated every few hours, so nobody wastes a day waiting at a window. When the technician arrives, an agenda card sets expectations: a thorough evaluation of the whole system, not just the reported problem, followed by three to five options ranging from a band-aid fix to upgrades the homeowner may not have known existed.
Technicians walk the home, ask questions, and record what they learn, from the equipment serial numbers to the family’s names and preferences, so the next visit picks up the relationship where the last one ended. The goal, as Fonseca puts it, is a customer for life, not a customer for this call.
The results show up publicly. Landry Mechanical has built roughly 3,700 online reviews at a 4.9 rating, and Fonseca is adamant that review velocity matters as much as the total. Reviews drop off over time, so the number only holds if the company keeps generating new ones. That reputation now precedes them, bringing in both customers and job applicants.
“People come to you because they hear it’s a great place to work. People come to you because you guys do excellent work, you stand behind your work, you really mean what you say you do.” – Zane Fonseca
The Lesson: Marketing Is a Lever, Not an Expense
Landry Mechanical will spend roughly 1.5 million dollars on marketing this year, and Fonseca thinks about every dollar in two buckets. Brand plays, like sponsoring the WooSox, the Triple-A affiliate of the Red Sox, build awareness in growth markets even though the return cannot be measured directly. Performance channels, like Google Ads, Local Services Ads, and lead aggregators, can be quantified, tracked, and turned on or off as the day’s call counts demand. That is why he calls marketing one of the few levers a home service business can pull directly.
He is equally clear about what he wants from the agencies pulling that lever with him. Generating leads is table stakes. What he values is a consultant: someone who reviews spend against revenue every week, recommends where to shift budget, and is willing to talk about what happens after the phone rings, including how well the call center is booking the leads. As Todd Baldwin pointed out during the episode, slow months are usually blamed on marketing when the real gap is often follow-up and lead handling. Closing that gap takes an agency and an operator looking at the same data, which is exactly the consultative relationship Everyday Media Group builds with the home service companies it serves, from tracking return on ad spend down to the call recordings.
The next frontier is AI search. Fonseca is already positioning Landry Mechanical to show up when homeowners ask ChatGPT and other AI platforms who to call, and the company’s review credibility gives it a head start, since large language models weigh reputation signals heavily. Websites are not going away either. As Baldwin explained, they are shifting toward answer-first content structured for the questions people actually type into AI tools.
Key Takeaways From Zane Fonseca
- Culture is the growth engine. “Culture is gonna eat strategy for breakfast every single day.” Hire for fit, share the real numbers, and let the wrong hires walk themselves out early.
- Measure honestly, daily. The huddle only became powerful when the team stopped celebrating sold revenue and daily fractions and started celebrating completed revenue. Win the day, win the week, win the month.
- Demand consulting, not just leads. The best marketing partnerships review spend against revenue weekly and dig into what happens after the phone rings, including call center booking rates.
About Zane Fonseca
Zane Fonseca is the general manager of Landry Mechanical, a plumbing, HVAC, and electrical company serving central Massachusetts from its Millbury headquarters and four additional office locations. A former plumbing company owner with more than two decades in the trades, he partners with owners Ray and Tasha Landry to scale the business toward its thirty million dollar goal. Learn more at landrymechanical.com or find Landry Mechanical on Facebook and Instagram at @LandryMechanical.
Ready to Turn Marketing Into a Growth Lever? Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses treat marketing the way Zane Fonseca does: as a measurable lever, with SEO, Google Ads, review generation, AI search visibility, and the consultative data reviews that connect spend to revenue. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the operators behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation at or connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
