This year, we have had to take a long look at everything in our budget. It was necessary for us to make some of the most difficult decisions we have ever had to make in my career in the business.

I had an interesting experience a few weeks ago that speaks to the issue of integrity. As I thought about it, there are a number of ways integrity is important to us in our business. As such, I think the experience definitely relates to all of us and the way we operate our businesses.

If we are going to attract the best and brightest into our industry, we have to improve the image of our workers. I believe that we have greatly improved the image of the HVAC contractor. But while we have improved the image of the contractor, I’m not sure that we have sufficiently improved the image of those actually performing the work.

A foreman of ours came in and said he had heard on a jobsite that we were going out of business or were selling to another company. Now I had heard rumors like that about almost every other contractor in our area, but it had never gotten back to me that stories like that had been going around about us.

I may be the only person who even occasionally writes for a national publication who has not yet written an article about green. Part of the reason is the fact that although I definitely believe in the concept of green, trying to understand exactly how it applies to us as HVAC contractors is not that easy to determine.

I believe that for many of us in the heating, air conditioning, and sheet metal industry, these are some of the worst times we have seen. That said, times like these also present for us a number of opportunities that we may not be able to address when business is flowing well.

My wife and I recently celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary. Besides being a very exciting and happy occasion, it also called my attention to the fact that I have now been full time in this business for 45 years. It was graduation, wedding, honeymoon, and start to work.

As we finish our “non-summer,” the impact was not as severe on us as it was on many of our competitors because of the strong emphasis we have on maintenance agreements. So once again I am going to make a strong pitch to encourage you to have a very extensive maintenance agreement program.

OK, I think it’s time someone wrote an optimistic piece in this periodical. However, that’s not going to be easy. It’s much simpler these days to write about all of the negative things that are happening. Let’s face it, it can be pretty difficult to be optimistic when you are surrounded by negative occurrences - especially when you have virtually no control over these occurrences.

As contractors, we count on people buying from us for our company to be successful. Hopefully, with that in mind, we make the process of buying a pleasant experience. The concept becomes a little frightening to me because of experiences I have recently encountered in making a couple of purchases.