A Thriving Enterprise: Commercial Contractor of the Year

Fans of the television series Star Trek™ know that the mission of the starship Enterprise was to "boldly go where no man has gone before." The mission of Contracting Business.com magazine's 2011 Commercial Contractor of the Year, Enterprise HVAC Service and Control, is to boldly solve comfort and energy efficiency challenges that no one has solved before.

The company, based in the Cleveland area suburb of Twinsburg, OH, occupies a rarefied niche in the commercial HVAC world: Enterprise does no new construction work, and the focus is never on selling equipment. Instead, the company operates exclusively in the existing building service market, and assesses and analyzes customers' needs before presenting the solutions that will address them.

"We know the steps our customers need to take to get their buildings to where they want them to be," says Richard (Dick) Starr, LEED AP, president of Enterprise HVAC Service and Control. "We always know the next step, and we're there for our customers when they're ready to take it."

The company prides itself on taking a "360-degree view" of a building, thanks to expertise in three key areas: mechanical systems, controls, and air and water distribution.

"What we've seen is that most contractors simply rush to address the one area they know," Starr says. "We like to think we bring all three together, like a fine orchestra."

Bad Baseball Leads to Big Break
If an orchestra is only as good as its conductor, the music being made by Enterprise definitely springs from the baton of Starr, who is referred to by almost everyone as a forward thinker, or even a visionary. If he sees himself that way, it doesn't show: the modest Starr doesn't ever forget his big break came only through his ability to sell season tickets for a very bad baseball team.

Prior to graduating from Cleveland's John Carroll University in 1970 with a business administration degree, Starr learned that the local branch of a large national controls company was seeking sales engineers in its building controls group. As part of the interview process, Starr took mechanical aptitude tests and was ultimately paired up against another competitor for the job in a role-playing scenario. The two men were assigned to attempt to sell something to each other.

"The person I was paired with tried to sell me radiation mitigation technology for televisions," Starr recalls. "I thought the people doing the hiring would be very impressed because it was a technical product and they were a technical company. When it was my turn to sell him, my presentation was the sale of season tickets to Cleveland Indians baseball games. At that time, the team had been bad for 15 years and there was little hope for improvement."

As it turned out, the interviewers were impressed by Starr's ability to sell a challenging and intangible product, and he got the job. He spent three years with the company in Cleveland, then accepted a promotion to branch manager and moved to Toledo, OH. Family ties brought him back to the Cleveland lakefront, and he worked for two years as president of the systems/service division of a large Northeastern Ohio mechanical contractor.

Time to Lead
By 1977, Starr knew that he wanted to run his own company. His experiences in the commercial HVAC systems and controls world had helped him identify the niche that needed to be filled, and provided him with a vision of the quality work he wanted to provide. That year, he purchased assets of "a little snot-nosed $50,000 company," called Enterprise Heating and Air Conditioning.

The company provided mostly residential and some commercial services. After attempts to sell the residential customer list were unsuccessful, Starr simply liquidated the residential side of the business so that he could focus on building the company he wanted.

Three Turning Points
As with any company, there were a number of milestones along the way, some compelling, some challenging. Starr points out three significant events in the company's history that shaped Enterprise into the company it is today.

"The first was the decision to get out of the plan-and-spec market and focus entirely on service and controls," he says. "The second was becoming a certified air and water balance contractor, which provided us with that '360-degree view.' The third was getting out of the manufacturer-specific controls market, and educating customers about open protocol platforms."

Enterprise is a certified testing, adjusting, balancing agency in both forced air and hydronic systems, with the National Environmental Balancing Bureau (NEBB). The company is a Tridium-authorized systems integrator, and has been a LINC Service® Contractor since 1998. In addition, Enterprise has been designated as both a STAR® and a GreenStar contractor by the Mechanical Service Contractors of America (MSCA). Enterprise is one of only 38 companies in the nation to hold the GreenStar designation for environmental stewardship.

The company won a Contracting Business Design/Build Award in 2001, for its work at a 650,000 sq.ft. office and manufacturing facility — a project that focused on control system integration and air balancing, to solve the customer's energy efficiency and comfort challenges.

A Foundation of Loyalty and Expertise
Enterprise HVAC Service and Control is far from being the largest commercial HVAC company in the market: the company had sales of $5+ million in 2010 and has 28 employees. But it's sized to be flexible and agile, and boasts a tremendous amount of diversified expertise. That expertise has been built over the years by the loyalty that Starr engenders in his co-workers, and the team environment that permeates the company.

Success here is built both from the bottom up and from the top down.