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Can’t Find Good HVAC Technicians? He Stopped Waiting and Built a School
You’ve got the calls, the trucks, and the demand. What you can’t find is enough good technicians to do the work, and it tightens every year as the trade ages out.
Derrick Conyers stopped competing for the same short list of experienced hires and started making his own. He’s run Su’Coy Heating, AC & Duct Cleaning across Washington, DC, and Maryland since 1996, and he founded a training school alongside it. This episode is about how he did both.
Su’Coy Heating, AC & Duct CleaningAbout the guest. Derrick Conyers owns Su’Coy Heating, AC & Duct Cleaning, one of the largest Black-owned HVAC companies in Maryland, serving the DC and Maryland area since 1996. He also founded the Su’Coy Community Learning Center, one of the state’s largest HVAC training schools, where students train with grant support through Prince George’s County.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- 01The trait that predicts a good technician, and it isn’t the one most owners screen for on a résumé.
- 02Why the labor shortage is a training problem. Building your own pipeline beats fighting over the same experienced hires.
- 03How to keep a crew for years, not months, from someone whose people have stayed.
- 04How to survive the early years. Derrick went four years without paying himself a salary before the business turned.
- 05Why reputation compounds. Hundreds of five-star reviews across three profiles didn’t happen by accident.
- 06What AI will and won’t change for the person in the attic and the homeowner in the living room.
What Makes a Great HVAC Technician?
Students at Su’Coy come from everywhere. Some hold English degrees, some trained as engineers, some ran an appliance repair shop or sold cars. Ages run from 18 to the mid-fifties, and Derrick meets hundreds of them.
The ones who make it share two things. They’re curious, and they’re driven. They ask how to build a website, how to find their first clients, and where AI is taking the trade, which are not the questions of someone looking for a job.
For an owner hiring today, that’s the signal worth screening for. A sharp résumé matters less than somebody who wants to learn and keeps asking questions after the interview is over.
The next good technician in your market might not have a résumé yet.
Watch How He Trains ThemHow Do You Keep HVAC Technicians From Leaving?
Derrick keeps people by treating them like family, which sounds like a poster until you hear what he means by it. He learns where someone came from, he shows them grace when a day goes wrong, and he makes the work something they want to come back to.
That’s why his crew stays. In a labor shortage, holding a good technician is worth as much as hiring one, and it costs less.
The lesson for owners is plain enough. Culture isn’t what’s written on the wall in the shop. It’s how you treat the person on the truck when the job goes sideways at four on a Friday.
Will AI Replace HVAC Technicians?
Derrick isn’t worried about robots taking the trade. As he puts it, they can’t tie their own shoes yet, let alone climb into an attic in August to swap an air handler.
The part no machine copies is trust. A homeowner needs a person who’ll look them in the eye and explain why the new system costs $17,000, and then be reachable when something goes wrong with it. That conversation is the job.
Where AI does change things is how the work gets found. Homeowners now ask AI tools which contractor to call, so the companies named in those answers win jobs the rest never hear about. That’s what HVAC AI search optimization exists to solve, and it’s where the next decade of competition is going.
Built something nobody else in your market would have tried? That’s an episode.
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