From First Female Graduate to Third-Generation Owner: Woman Owned HVAC Business Lessons From Jackie Sorensen
When Jackie Sorensen enrolled in the HVAC program at Southeast Tech, nobody in the lab wanted to be her partner. She was the only woman in the class, and for a while, the only woman who had ever finished the program. Then the instructor graded the first assessment exam, went around the room test by test, and ended at Sorensen, sitting alone in the corner with the highest score in the class. She had no trouble finding a lab partner after that. In 2010, she became the program’s first female graduate, and today she runs a woman owned HVAC business that has served Sioux Falls, South Dakota for more than eighty years.
Sorensen told her story on a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group: a third-generation company founded in 1943 by her grandfather and great uncle after they returned from World War Two, rescued by her father in 1986 when the family nearly closed the doors, and finally purchased by Sorensen in 2023 after a standoff she cheerfully calls her hostile takeover.
A two-time college dropout turned tech school honors graduate, Sorensen spent eighteen years in the trades doing service and installation herself before taking over. The episode covers the succession fight, the price war reshaping her market, the community marketing only she can do, and what still has not changed for women in the trades.
The Hostile Takeover
For the first decade of her career, the company was just Sorensen and her dad, and she wore every hat: answering phones, booking calls, running the calls, collecting payment, doing deposits, invoicing, reconciling the bank account, and preparing taxes. She was running and growing a business, carrying an owner’s stress, on wages she notes are more commonly below market in family businesses than above it. The breaking point gathered slowly: burnout from being on call around the clock, a first pregnancy during the height of COVID, and a struggle to get maternity leave from her own father.
“He said, I don’t think you’re ready. And it just got this rage in me. If I’m not ready, then that’s your fault, because you’re the one that’s been training me for the last fifteen years.” – Jackie Sorensen
The resolution took an ultimatum: sell the business to me, or I start my own. Her parents chose to sell, and even then the deal took a year of attorneys and paperwork, plus a detour around SBA financing complications because her dad wanted to remain an employee, solved with creative private banking. Sorensen tells the story with humor and hard-won perspective, and the throughline matters for every family business: the second generation nearly closed the company, the third nearly walked away from it, and both times the family found a path through.
Leading a Different Way Than Dad
Sorensen describes her father’s leadership as the authoritarian style of his generation: do as you are told, because I said so. She runs the company on the opposite premise, shaped by reading Extreme Ownership early in her leadership journey. When an employee makes a mistake, her first question points inward: did I provide the training, the tools, the availability? Transparency about processes, openness to employee ideas, and what she calls servant leadership define the culture, along with genuine care for her team’s families and mental health.
The team itself is a family portrait: Sorensen, her husband as primary installer (they met in that same HVAC class, which she jokes made it “like having your own episode of The Bachelorette”), her mom in the office, and one non-family technician she teases is the little brother she never asked for. The dynamic makes hiring harder, since every candidate effectively needs the whole family’s buy-in, and her dad’s old warning finally landed once she had employees of her own.
“Management is not about being good at your job. Management is about being good at people.” – Jackie Sorensen
The 10:30 PM Cancellation Text
Sioux Falls is feeling the same shift as the rest of the country: homeowners moving from replacement to repair, and price becoming the only deciding factor for a growing share of buyers. The moment that crystallized it came a week or two before the recording, when a customer texted her husband at ten thirty on a Wednesday night to cancel a Thursday morning installation because they found someone roughly two thousand dollars cheaper.
Her answer to the price war is education, starting with a rule of thumb she wishes every homeowner knew: roughly eighty percent of an HVAC system’s lifespan comes down to proper installation, about fifteen percent to maintenance, and only about five percent to the brand. Consumers shop it exactly backwards, obsessing over the brand name and treating the installer as an afterthought, then wondering why the equipment fails early. She points to the quiet tells of a quality contractor: all-inclusive estimates with electrical allowances and inspections built in rather than nickel-and-dimed later, and equipment warranties actually registered, which she says most companies skip.
She also borrowed a negotiation lesson from a local realtor: the best time to buy is when you do not have to. A homeowner replacing a functioning fifteen-year-old system on their own timeline can vet contractors properly; one whose furnace died overnight takes the cheapest and fastest. And Sorensen no longer plays the undercutting game she once did. After an early business class delivered the line that changed her pricing forever, she raised her rates and never looked back: raise your prices, and the only customers you lose are your worst customers. Thorsen is now among the more expensive contractors in town, deliberately, backed by an eighty-year reputation for honesty.
What Is Working Now: The Only Contractor at the Women’s Expo
Sorensen’s marketing is almost entirely organic, and her sharpest move is positioning. She skips the home shows, where fifteen contractors with elaborate booths make a four-person shop look, in her words, like peanuts. Instead, she books the women’s expos, veteran vendor fairs, and community events where she is the only contractor in the room, showcasing a woman owned company with female technicians to an audience that often prefers exactly that. Many of her service customers are women home during the day who request her specifically.
The community flywheel runs deeper. Every spring, the company’s Hot Mama Giveaway installs a complete furnace and AC system for a mother in need. Fall brings trunk-or-treat events. And the content engine is deliberately generational: heavy TikTok and Instagram presence aimed at younger homeowners, with the happy discovery that the boomers are on TikTok too, including her dad. A content company edits and posts from her raw photos and videos, and the social activity crosses over to keep the Google Business Profile fresh. Low cost, high impact, and impossible for a big competitor to copy.
On the technology side, the eighty-year-old company runs a modern stack: Claude, ChatGPT, and Zapier automations handle follow-ups, appointment reminders, and review requests, and customers get a photo of their technician texted before arrival. Her line in the sand is the phone: for a small family company, she believes callers still want a human, and an AI answering machine risks more backlash than benefit today.
The Lesson: Community Brilliance Deserves a Digital Engine
Sorensen grades her own digital presence honestly. SEO is handled in-house after a disappointing agency experience, and she admits it is probably not great right now. The company’s seventy-six Google reviews accumulated largely without a process, and a review-request system with technician incentives is only now getting started. Paid digital has barely been touched. Meanwhile, her community marketing, positioning, and story are stronger than companies ten times her size.
That combination is the most fixable gap in home services, and it is the work the team at Everyday Media Group does every day: SEO and answer-first content that gets a business recommended when homeowners ask Google and AI platforms who to trust, review generation that turns eighty years of goodwill into visible proof, and lead tracking that shows exactly what every channel returns. As Todd Baldwin noted on the episode, businesses with strong reputations and reviews are precisely what AI search rewards, which means a third-generation company with Sorensen’s story is sitting on unmined digital equity. The community work builds the trust; the digital engine makes sure every homeowner searching in Sioux Falls can find it.
Key Takeaways From Jackie Sorensen
- Educate past the price war. The 80/15/5 rule, installation, maintenance, then brand, flips how homeowners should buy, and all-inclusive estimates expose the nickel-and-dime competitors.
- Raise your prices. “The only customers you’re gonna lose are your worst customers.” She stopped price matching, priced for value, and let an eighty-year reputation carry the difference.
- Position where you are the only one. Skipping home shows for women’s expos made a four-person shop the most memorable contractor in the room, a move no bigger competitor can replicate.
About Jackie Sorensen
Jackie Sorensen is the owner of Thorsen Heating & AC, a third-generation residential and light commercial HVAC company serving Sioux Falls, South Dakota since 1943. The first female graduate of Southeast Tech’s HVAC program and an eighteen-year veteran of the trades, she purchased the company from her father in 2023 and leads it alongside her husband, mother, and team. Find Thorsen Heating on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn or visit https://www.thorsonheatinginc.com/.
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Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses convert decades of trust into digital visibility: SEO, answer-first content for AI search, Google Business Profile and review management, and lead tracking that proves what every channel returns. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the owners behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation or connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
