Name: Luther Clemons
Title: Chairman and Chief Operating Officer
Company name: Associated Equipment Co. Inc.
Number of locations: 10
Number of employees: 73
Year founded: 1955
Main lines: Daikin, Amana, Goodman
At age 82 and with 50 years of HVAC distribution experience on his resume, Luther Clemons is still going strong.
Clemons is chairman and COO of Associated Equipment Co. Inc. in Nashville, which serves all of Alabama and Georgia as well as parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, and Mississippi.
Clemons, who originally intended to work on his family’s farm in Northern Alabama, earned a degree in agricultural engineering from Auburn University in 1963. But he got an offer from Alabama Power during his senior year at Auburn and ended up working there for 10 years, becoming a specialist in heat pumps, which the electric utility was promoting.
In 1973, he moved over to Associated, a family-owned company then based in Alabama, recruited because of his experience with heat pumps. In a half century there, he’s seen a lot of changes in the HVAC industry, among them the wider acceptance of heat pumps, which has been a boon for the company.
Clemons and his wife, Jodie, have been married for 60 years.
Distribution Trends sat down with Clemons, via teleconference, this summer to talk about his lengthy career. Here, edited for clarity and length, is that conversation.
DT: You’ve seen a lot of changes in the HVAC industry and in HVAC distribution over these decades. What are some of the most significant changes you’ve witnessed?
Clemons: When I first started in the ‘60s, the contracting companies were small. Usually the guy that owned the place was actually doing the work. Many times, when I would try to call him, there’d be nobody in the office. We’ve moved to the point now that private equity groups are buying these contractors and, you know, bolting them together to make large companies. It’s a long trip from those guys that that we started with.
Those smaller dealers, they were so customer- focused, making sure they provided the service to the customer. With these larger private equity groups, I don’t think the customer is No. 1. I think they’re there for different reasons. So I hope we’re moving in the right direction. I have some concerns if the customer is going to be taken care of.
Probably the second thing that’s really, really changed is the improvement in the equipment. The equipment we sell and install, the quality of it, the compressors, the controls, the heat exchangers, you just go down the list of all the improvements we’ve seen, to the point, I think, we’ve got excellent equipment now. It really doesn’t matter the brand, I just think that the industry has really advanced. Engineering has just really advanced to the point that we offer really good equipment to the homeowner.
DT: Did your role at Alabama Power have some involvement in HVAC?
Clemons: In the mid-’60s, the power company decided they wanted to get very active in promoting heat pumps — central, ducted heat pumps. Nobody else in the country was very active with that, no other utility was, and we were sort of out by ourselves. I was one of the first five heat-pump specialists in the state of Alabama.
A lot of the standards used now, we developed those in the ‘60s. So I was very much involved in heat pumps, in particular, all during the ‘60s and into the early ‘70s.
DT: I take it you brought some of your engineering skills to that work?
Clemons: Well, in that day, we had a lot of units that were installed … incorrectly. So there were two of us in the eastern part of the state of Alabama, there was myself and a guy that was specialized in service. And we would inspect those jobs, and we would determine what was necessary to get ‘em corrected.
And if the unit does need to be replaced, at that time, the power company would pay a third of that cost, the homeowner would pay a third, and the manufacturer would pay a third to get a better unit put in. It was my responsibility to help make those decisions as to how we how we correct it.
And, yes, the engineering was very important because we had do airflow. Very little load calculation information was available; in fact, I designed the duct design chart I think they still use there, because we didn’t have one, and so we had to work through the mathematics of resistance and airflow.
DT: Developments in computer technology have certainly changed things in distribution and in the industry as a whole. How do you see those changes having played out over all these all these years?
Clemons: When I was in engineering school, we used the slide rule. There were no calculators … and a lot of professors wanted us to get it accurate to the third decimal point with the slide rule.
When I started with Associated, we used the Telex machine to communicate. You would print on a little tape, and then you would dial a number and put the tape in and play it back and it would send a message. Now that’s how we started, with a Telex machine, and cardex. We would hand do the cardex every night, to update your inventory of what you what you sold and what you ship.
In the early ‘70s, close to where I was raised, I was visiting my parents and an insurance salesman had a handheld calculator he wanted to sell. I paid him $250 for a little handheld calculator, and they would basically add and subtract and divide, but had no calculus, nothing like that, like they do today.
And then we’ve moved to the point that, let’s say eight weeks ago now, we introduced a totally new system to take care of our accounting and our inventory. We’ve installed a totally new system. All of that is held in the cloud.
DT: What do you see in the near future for the heat pump market?
Clemons: One of the real enjoyments of my long career is that I promoted them hard in the ‘60s. It was tough to sell one and convince a homeowner to do it, and now it’s the asked-for thing in many, many areas. It’s the way of the future, especially the variable-speed versions. Environmentally, it seems to be the thing that most folks would like to see.
My only concern is that they don’t rush ‘em to colder climates too soon, that they make sure that the technicians are trained well — I’m talking about the ducted versions — and that the installation is such that, if you’re going to be in the area where you have a lot of snow, that the installation’s good.
DT: How did you make the transition from Alabama Power to Associated? Did they recruit you because of your involvement with heat pumps, or were you looking for a distribution job?
Clemons: In those days, there were only two manufacturers that produced the heat pumps that would work: General Electric and Westinghouse. And both of those companies were promoting heat pumps because they wanted to sell a generating plant, they wanted to sell a transformer, they wanted to sell the substation. They were in the electrical business.
I was one of the heat pump specialists. And Associated had an opportunity to be the (Westinghouse) distributor in Tennessee. Westinghouse had an excellent heat pump even in the ‘70s, and I was very familiar with it. I knew their system backwards and forwards.
This was a great opportunity for me. I had no experience in distribution other than working with the distributors.
DT: What is your advice to those who are new to working in HVAC distribution?
Clemons: Well, I’d like to encourage them. I think it’s a very strong future. It’s almost like health care, or food or, or transportation: It’s something that everybody’s gonna have, everybody’s gonna need.
It’s better for technical folks. I think my leadership has been made easier by being an engineer, because it’s difficult to manage a company if you’re not familiar with what they’re doing. So I would encourage them to study. That’s one of the main things, I think, is to get all the training you can and not let it get ahead of you. The industry is traveling so fast from a technical standpoint.
DT: Do you have any plans to retire any time soon?
Clemons: (He chuckles.) My kids and grandkids and great-grandkids ask me that regularly.
I was thinking about retiring. In fact, we’d hired my replacement. Really good guy, a PE (professional engineer). He had a resume that was perfect, but he had a little problem and we had to let him go. We let him go in February of ‘20.
Now, remember what was happening in February ‘20. We had this virus that was coming, and we were told it probably would last 90 days at most, maybe 60 days. … I was still here to make sure that the transition was good. We have a lot of long-term employees who’ve been with over 20 years. And I wanted to make sure they were taken care of. I feel like they’re almost my kids.
We sat down and talked about it, and I thought “Well, if this if this virus is going to last 90 days, let me just come back and let’s get through that, and then we’ll hire my replacement.”
We got to a point we couldn’t get equipment. And then we didn’t know what the sales were going to be. We were only getting about 60% of what we got in ‘19, in ‘20, and so then we decided, OK, we might not need the expense of bringing somebody else in if we’re not going to get equipment, and we’re not going to be able to sell if we can’t get equipment.
I’ve been blessed with good health, and (he chuckles) reasonably sane, I guess. And so we’ve just continued on, and inventory started to really get better around the first of this year. We started to get residential inventory; we still have long lead times on commercial products.
At some point I’ll back down, but I love this. So many of my friends retired at 65, and 67, and 68, and they’re all dead.
I used to make three-year plans. Then I started doing one-year plans. When COVID hit, I just want to make sure we get through July now. So I’m not planning a long time out; we were just doing it one month at a time because we couldn’t get equipment.
I wanted to make sure we took care of our employees, and I feel like we’ve got a tremendous responsibility. Our contractors, you know, they depend on us to have the product when they need it. And we struggled to do that the last three years. And so that’s a tremendous responsibility.
As a distributor, your main responsibility is to your employees and their families, and then your customers and their families. And I take that seriously. ... If you do those well, seems like everything else works out OK.