Forty Years In, and the Part That Still Keeps Me Up

This company opened its doors in 1973, out of a truck with a set of hand tools in the bed. Whoever is doing the work, the reason it started was simple: the outfit down the road had a policy of quoting a repair over the phone, then finding a reason on-site that the price had to double. Somebody watched that happen to a widow in Albany and quit that afternoon.

Fifty years later, the thing that still keeps me up is not competition or costs. It's that this trade requires you to let a stranger into your house, at a bad moment, and then trust him about something you can't verify. You can't see a cracked heat exchanger. You can't judge whether a capacitor was actually failing. You are trusting a person in a uniform, on the worst night of your month, about a number.

That's an enormous amount of trust to ask of somebody, and I don't think it should be given freely. I don't want anyone reading this to trust Pace Heating & Air because I said we're honest. Every outfit says that. The word is worthless on its own.

Trust ought to be something you can check. So here's what we make checkable.

We photograph every failed part and the reading that condemned it, and those photos go in your invoice. We write the price before the work, and it doesn't move — if we find something else, we stop and re-quote, and you can say no. We hand you the old part if you want it. Our technicians are on salary and don't earn commission on parts, so nobody at this company gets richer by finding you a bigger problem. Our license number is on every page of this website. Our award record is public and verifiable with the issuers.

None of that is a slogan. Every one of those is a thing you can audit after we leave.

That's what I mean when I say honor. Not a feeling about our own character — a set of arrangements that make it possible for a stranger to verify us. Forty years in this valley and the same phone number. You can check that too.

— John C. Maine