The Summer That Never Came: HVAC Business Turnaround Lessons From Stephanie Allen of AirWorks Solutions
“I feel like EOS almost bankrupted us, and I don’t think enough people say that out loud.” That is Stephanie Allen, owner of AirWorks Solutions, a heating, air conditioning, and plumbing company in Ventura County, California, on a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group. It is the rare HVAC business turnaround story told from the inside, by an owner willing to name exactly what went wrong, including her own part in it.
Allen and her husband Kevin started AirWorks in 2010 with a distinctly better-together origin story. Kevin came out of high school into the trades; Stephanie went the law school and MBA route, working as a tech startup CEO and in-house counsel while doing the company books at night. While the couple lived in Alabama, she bought the California contractor exam study guides on CD, Kevin converted them to an MP3 player and studied on job sites, then flew home to pass the exam. Sixteen years later, the company serves the same town they attended high school in, and their kids attend Kevin’s old elementary school.
The dark chapter, and the rebuild that followed, is where the episode earns its keep for every home service owner.
The Overspend and the Summer That Never Came
Allen is careful to say the near-disaster was not really about the operating system. AirWorks implemented EOS coming off several strong growth years, built an aggressive budget, and put leaders in seats to execute it. The failure had two roots, and she claims the first one personally: as the owner, she never set the destination. The team had a bus and assigned seats, but nobody had entered the coordinates.
The second root was executing a plan without operational judgment. The economy was tightening, and the moment called for a strategy shift: from big installs back to repairs, from premium positioning to relational, educational positioning. Instead, the leadership team spent faithfully to the budget, including a marketing budget sized for a market that no longer existed and an insurance premium over-budgeted against payroll that never materialized. Then came the blow no HVAC company controls: the summer that never came. A cool season gutted the busiest quarter, and there was no room left to recover that year.
“It depends if you and your company are ready for that type of structure. On paper they were doing everything right, but they weren’t accounting for external factors in the world.” – Stephanie Allen
What saved the company was not a rescue but a reserve: fifteen years of disciplined decisions, from a strong 401k to real estate investments, that Allen and Kevin could leverage to keep the business. Her takeaway for every owner is blunt: in the good years, turn profit into wealth you can lean on, because business will get hard.
The Turnaround: Cut Deep, Coach Different
The response was surgical. Allen cut marketing spend by 39 percent, pulled expenses from everywhere, and restructured how the company sees itself: five core areas, lead generation, lead processing, sales, production, and back office, where two years ago she would have named three departments. Clear areas mean clear ownership.
She also made the hardest kind of personnel change. The sales leader in place was, in her words, an excellent salesperson and a hard closer, a great player, but probably not the right coach for a team that sells through service rather than pressure. The mismatch showed up as quiet rebellion: no mutiny, just underperformance. Allen now sits in the service sales manager seat herself, coaching to the team’s natural rhythm, and the results arrived fast. The day before the recording, AirWorks posted the biggest residential sales day in company history, and under the company’s profit sharing structure, every employee shares in it. Quoting a line she credits to Dustin Rhodes: “Motivation creates a spark, but momentum creates a machine.”
Sequencing the Second Trade
The same discipline governs the company’s plumbing division, added in 2024 to smooth what Allen calls push and pull seasons and to serve homeowners who already trust AirWorks. She admits they may have jumped the gun. Her rule now, echoing the advice she wishes she had followed: do not stack a second trade until the first has operational excellence. Plumbing currently grows gently from the existing customer base, with cross-selling working in both directions, while the real capital investment waits until the HVAC engine runs the way it should. “Focus is really important for me right now,” she says. “Any trade can stack on top of it once all of those are firing.”
Why Every Employee Owns a Piece of the Win
Todd Baldwin noted that across roughly fifty episodes, no guest had brought up profit sharing before. Allen’s version is deliberate. Every AirWorks employee holds profit sharing units, a structure her legal background helped design. She chose profit sharing over equity for a reason worth stealing: equity only pays when a company sells, which quietly pressures leaders to want an exit. Profit sharing pays every year the team wins, with no sale required.
“I don’t ever want to put a ceiling on anybody and their earning capacity. I love performance pay and I like sharing the win.” – Stephanie Allen
The cultural effect is the point. Team members treat the company as a career instead of a job, hold each other accountable, and celebrate together, because a record day is not just the sellers’ win. Allen talks about the two team members who led the record charge, one saving for a wedding and one for a house, as the legacy she actually wants to build.
The AI Barbell: Going All In, Then Getting It Right
When Allen had to slash expenses, she went full AI, including voice AI running the entire front line. It backfired in a specific, instructive way: customers disliked it, and the company began attracting a different, more transactional kind of customer. So she rebalanced rather than retreating. Today an AI agent named Dane answers live and handles overflow so no call is ever missed, with a human for escalations, and a real person, Liana, making post-visit happy calls that check on customers and invite reviews.
Her adoption playbook came from experiment. Early on, she gave callers a choice on the IVR: press one to try the new AI agent, press two to leave a message. Choice built adoption where force built resentment. And her framing for all of it is the AI barbell: every investment in AI on one side must be matched with investment in humans on the other, then keep doing reps. She is equally clear-eyed about the technology itself: an untrained AI is an average employee at best, because large language models are trained on the internet, and the internet is average. Training takes ongoing investment and guardrails. The payoff at AirWorks is real: live APIs inside ServiceTitan, custom dashboards, and moments like a team member using Claude to instantly confirm that a technician’s record day was his best ever by 31 percent and a five-year company record, analysis that once would have taken days.
Allen now teaches this publicly through Just Start AI, the free community she co-founded with Jennifer Bagley for contractors getting started with AI. Her advice for step one is in the name: use AI personally first, for recipes, bedtime stories, and packing lists, until the superpower feels normal, then bring it to work.
The Lesson: Good Marketing Cannot Fix Bad Operations
Allen dropped the line every agency should frame: good marketing cannot fix bad operations. Her marketing today runs almost entirely on trust: strong organic visibility, a new website already drawing interest through AI platforms and LLMs, a regionally effective Yelp presence with a disciplined follow-up workflow, community anchors like hosting the local park concert series, and a goal she calls Five Mile Famous, being the best-known name within the radius that matters. After cutting spend 39 percent, the leads kept coming because sixteen years of relationships did the work paid ads used to do.
That is the same philosophy the team at Everyday Media Group builds toward with home service clients: marketing measured by revenue rather than spend, organic and answer-first content that earns AI recommendations, and lead handling that never lets a paid-for lead leak away, whether through AI answering, human follow-up, or both. As Allen’s story shows, the modern stack is not AI instead of humans or brand instead of ads. It is the barbell, loaded evenly, with every channel tracked.
Key Takeaways From Stephanie Allen
- Systems need coordinates and judgment. EOS did not fail AirWorks; a budget executed without a destination or operational gut did. The owner sets the vision, and leaders must adapt to the world, not the spreadsheet.
- Share the win every year. Profit sharing units for every employee, chosen over equity so nobody needs a sale to get paid, turned jobs into careers and made a record day everyone’s record day.
- Load the AI barbell evenly. Full AI alienated customers; AI plus humans, adopted through choice and trained like an employee, now answers every call and finds insights in seconds.
About Stephanie Allen
Stephanie Allen is the co-owner of AirWorks Solutions, a heating, air conditioning, and plumbing company she and her husband Kevin founded in 2010, serving Ventura County, California. A law school graduate and former in-house counsel and tech startup CEO, she also co-founded Just Start AI, a free community helping contractors adopt AI. Learn more at airworksolutions.com.
Ready for Marketing Measured by Revenue, Not Spend?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses build visibility that compounds: SEO, answer-first websites for AI search, Google Business Profile management, and lead tracking that connects every channel to closed revenue. 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.
