That sounds great, right? In theory, radiant barriers do seem useful for reducing the heat load during the summer. Theoretically, that would reduce your power bill. However, there is a lot more to air conditioning than keeping buildings cool, and radiant barriers can pose unique challenges to your comfort. Other problems may arise from improper installation.

If you plan to include radiant barriers in a new construction home (or already have them in your home), you may want to learn a bit more about them. This article will explain how they work, why improper installation renders them ineffective, and the challenges they pose for your HVAC system.

WHAT A RADIANT BARRIER DOES

Before we can understand what a radiant barrier does, we need to understand what heat is. Heat is the energy that causes molecules to move. Whenever you have something that has a temperature over -460 degrees Fahrenheit, there will be some heat. Heat moves in three different ways: conduction, convection, and radiation.

Conduction is how heat moves between two objects that are touching each other. When you hold a cup of hot coffee, your hands will start to warm up; that’s conduction at work. The thickness of walls and attic insulation help control heat in the attic via conduction.

Convection happens when heat transfers within a fluid (vapor or liquid). If you’re boiling water in a pot on the stove, you can hold your hand over it and feel warm. That’s because heat is traveling upwards through the air via convection. We can control convection in our homes by sealing gaps and cracks between rooms and unconditioned spaces (like the attic, crawlspace, or outdoors).

Radiation is what happens when heat travels on electromagnetic waves. The heat that comes in through glass windows has entered our home through radiation; the heat has passed through the glass via the sun’s electromagnetic waves, and we call it radiant heat. Radiant heat can either be mostly reflected by lighter objects or mostly absorbed by darker ones. The sun is just one example of radiant heat transfer; our bodies also radiate heat, as does everything around us.

Radiant barriers consist of a highly reflective material to control radiation; the idea is that heat will be absorbed into the dark roof tiles and be reflected by the barrier. Your roof will get hot, but the attic will be cooler than it would have been without the barrier.

WHAT ARE THE UPSIDES OF HAVING A RADIANT BARRIER?

When installed correctly, radiant barriers keep your attic cooler and significantly reduce your energy expenses during the summer. In a warm and sunny climate like ours in Central Florida, you could see a 5-10% reduction in your cooling costs (per the U.S. Department of Energy).

Also, if you happen to store things in the attic, you’ll be able to keep them cooler. Your attic won’t be climate-controlled (compared to a storage unit), but it won’t be nearly as hot.

That’s pretty much where the benefits end.

WHAT ARE THE DOWNSIDES OF HAVING A RADIANT BARRIER?

When radiant barriers keep your attic cooler, the duct surfaces get closer to the dew point. The dew point is the temperature at which water vapor in the air starts to condense and become water (like dew). The air at night tends to be cooler than during the day, and it can’t hold as much moisture; at night, objects radiate their heat and cool down, so the water vapor in the air around those objects condenses and becomes the dew that we see in the mornings.

We can get very high dew points in the summer, and if the attic air is cool enough to cause duct surface temperatures to drop below that dew point, then your ducts will start sweating.

Sweating ducts result in a wet attic, and fungal matter thrives in moist environments. So, you could very well get mold growth in your attic if it doesn’t stay warm enough during the summers.

That is the downside of having a correctly installed radiant barrier. What about those that incorrectly installed ones?

IMPROPER INSTALLATION: WHEN RADIANT BARRIERS ARE NO LONGER “RADIANT”

For radiant barriers to work properly, they need to face the source of radiant heat and have an air gap between the barrier and the source.

If the radiant barrier is sandwiched against the surface and doesn’t have that air gap, it becomes a means of conduction. The foil also happens to be a highly conductive material. As a result, it can transfer heat INTO your attic very effectively! Instead of reflecting radiant heat away from your attic, the barrier will conduct heat into the attic and achieve the opposite intended effect.

So, when radiant barriers are installed incorrectly, you could have even HIGHER cooling costs because of your hotter attic.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While correctly installed radiant barriers can yield some energy savings, they may also lead to fungal growth when the dew point is high. Mold can negatively impact your health. So, unless you have a dehumidifier in your attic (which uses energy and costs money to install and run), a radiant barrier may cause more trouble than it’s worth.

Radiant barriers aren’t necessarily bad, but they do raise a set of challenges in our climate. Unless you are willing to mitigate those challenges and know how you’d like to do that, a radiant barrier likely won’t be a worthwhile investment.

The post Radiant Barriers: Pros and Cons appeared first on Kalos Services.

We’d be wise to pay extra attention to air changes, especially in places with high volumes of people, such as auditoriums and churches. Areas with high odors due to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and waste, such as warehouses and barns, are also areas of concern.

WHY VENTILATE?

Although ventilation doesn’t have an effect on heat gains and losses in a space, it’s a critical element of indoor comfort AND health. 

We consider ventilation in building design because some building codes require a certain amount of fresh air to circulate through commercial buildings. Proper ventilation also reduces odors and dilutes harmful contaminants, including bacteria and viruses. To learn more about indoor contaminants, check out our article on indoor air quality (IAQ).

Air changes are an indicator of the ventilation required for a commercial space. For example, a barn would require LOTS of ventilation due to the byproducts of animal activity. Those include increased CO₂ (from breathing), bacteria and fungi (from food and waste), and odors. So, it makes sense that a barn would require more frequent air circulation than a boiler room. 

But how do we determine how many air changes a building or room needs hourly? 

IT’S ALL ABOUT VOLUME

The amount of cubic space an object takes up is its volume. To find the volume of an object, you measure length x width x height. 

If you took a box that was 20 inches long, 10 inches wide, and 10 inches tall, you would find its volume by multiplying those dimensions.

 20 x 10 x 10 = 2,000

The box’s volume would be 2,000 cubic inches (in³).

To find out how much air can fit into a room, we’d need to know the dimensions of the room. If a room were 10 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 10 feet tall, we would multiply those values together:

10 x 10 x 10 = 1,000

So, the room would hold 1,000 cubic feet of air. So, how do we find out how many times we would replace all 1,000 cubic feet of air per hour?

HOW MUCH AIR DOES THE HVAC SYSTEM SUPPLY HOURLY?

When HVAC contractors determine how much airflow needs to go to a space, we rely on a value called CFM, cubic feet per minute. 

If the HVAC system were to supply 100 cubic feet of air per minute, you can find out the air volume delivered hourly by multiplying the CFM by 60 (minutes).

100 x 60 = 6,000

The HVAC system would be supplying 6,000 cubic feet of air per hour.

FITTING THE VOLUME INTO THE CUBIC FEET PER HOUR

Now that we know how much air our HVAC system supplies to that room hourly, we can use it and the room’s volume to determine how many air changes happen per hour.

We simply take the cubic feet per hour (6,000 ft³ per hour) and divide it by the room’s volume (1,000 ft³) to find out our air changes per hour.

6,000 / 1,000 = 6

So, a 10x10x10ft room with an HVAC system supplying air at a rate of 100 CFM would get 6 air changes per hour.

OTHER VENTILATION FACTORS TO CONSIDER

Many of the recommended ACH values are mere rules of thumb, as there are many factors to consider when designing a building.

For example, we already consider floor area in our volume equation. However, the floor could give off VOCs, which may be harmful to our health and should be diluted with air. Some finished wood floorings contain formaldehyde, which is a notorious VOC that can harm us.

The number of occupants in a space is also something to consider. When lots of people gather in a busy dining room to talk with each other and eat, they give off a lot of CO₂. That CO₂ can be harmful in large amounts, and it would be wise to use ventilation to dilute it. The same can be said of airborne viruses; during the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned that upgrades to building ventilation systems could slow the spread of SARS-COV-2 viruses indoors (CDC).

Moreover, if we already know of or can expect certain amounts of contaminants, we can factor those pieces of information into a ventilation strategy; the concentration of contaminants in a given area will surely affect the recommended air changes per hour. 

ACH AND AIRTIGHTNESS

We can also use air changes per hour to measure a building’s airtightness. All we need to do is conduct a blower door test.

In a blower door test, a contractor determines how leaky a building is by replacing an exterior door or window with a blower door. The blower door is then connected to a device that measures pressure, a manometer. There is a fan on the blower door that brings the building under negative pressure (usually 50 Pascals). That fan causes air to escape the building through cracks and other unintended openings.

When we measure ACH under the blower door test conditions, we call the resulting value ACH50. You simply take the CFM value calculated during the blower door test and multiply it by 60 (minutes). Then, you take that value and divide it by the volume of the tested space.

Higher ACH50 values indicate leakier buildings, and lower ACH50 values indicate tighter ones. In general, construction standards have evolved to make buildings tighter over time. So, it’s hardly a surprise that a commercial building built in 1950 would be leakier than a brand new structure.

So, this is all to say that air changes are important for several reasons. ACH is a design standard that maximizes the comfort and safety of commercial buildings AND a building performance staple; it can help us determine how much air infiltrates a structure.

The post Air Changes in Commercial Buildings appeared first on Kalos Services.

There are three means of transferring heat: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction refers to the transfer of heat via direct touch. If you touch a hot pan, you’ll burn yourself because it transferred its heat to your hand via conduction. Convection relies on a fluid (like air) to move heat. Some of you may have convective ovens, which cycle warm air through the oven to heat your food. Radiation happens when heat “rides” on electromagnetic waves. For example, the sun’s radiation can pass through a glass window and heat a room.

All bodies radiate, absorb, and reflect heat to some extent. Theoretically, fully reflective or absorptive bodies may exist, but we don’t see them. So, everything in a building gives off heat, especially our bodies. When we wonder why our homes and businesses get so hot, we may have to think about radiant heat and its sneaky effects. Once we understand how radiant heat works inside buildings, we can understand how a building’s design affects our comfort. Then, we’ll be able to figure out how to get the most out of the HVAC equipment in our homes and businesses.

HOW HUMANS GIVE OFF HEAT

Just as we absorb heat from everything around us, we also give off heat via conduction, convection, and radiation. We also transfer some of our body’s heat to our sweat, which evaporates off our bodies.

Of all those heat transfer methods, radiation makes up about 60% of the heat we transfer from our bodies! That’s why you start to feel very warm in places with lots of people in a building, such as a church service, a large gathering with friends and family, or an indoor concert. When all of those people radiate their heat in a small space, it can start to feel warm and stuffy inside.

However, we can use our bodies’ heat to our advantage when it’s cold. Have you ever heard of a space blanket?

They look like giant tinfoil blankets and are a bit of a fashion disaster. But when we wrap them around our bodies, they reflect most of our heat back towards our bodies. They’re a must-have in cold environments with poor heating!

HOW A BUILDING’S DESIGN AFFECTS RADIANT HEAT TRANSFER

We’ve already covered one way that heat enters buildings: through windows.

The sun gives off several waves, including visible light and UV. Those waves travel to the earth and can slip past windows. The windows may reflect some of the heat and light, but most of it passes right through the glass. So, rooms like lanais heat up very quickly because they allow light and heat to pass through easily. That’s the same reason why curtains and blinds can keep a room cool; the curtains or blinds help reflect or absorb heat before it passes into a room. (If you have dark curtains, they can get pretty warm!)

Insulation also affects radiant heat transfer in buildings. Buildings with reflective insulation (like the radiant barrier in the picture below) don’t allow heat to pass into the building easily.

The barrier looks like a giant space blanket! Radiant barriers reflect the heat attempting to enter the building because they have low emissivity. Emissivity refers to the ability of an object to absorb and emit radiation; objects with an emissivity of zero reflect all radiation, and objects with an emissivity of one absorb all radiation and emit lots of it.

Radiant barriers have a very low emissivity, as do space blankets, tinfoil, and aluminum. Humans have an emissivity of around 0.95, and polished aluminum has an emissivity of around 0.05! Many houses in Florida have a wooden base, and wood has an emissivity of 0.86-0.9. On top of that, drywall has a similar emissivity, so there’s a lot of heat absorption and radiation going on within the structure of a building. So, a radiant barrier beneath the roof decking can reflect heat and prevent it from getting into spaces like attics and crawl spaces. (Although it doesn’t work if the radiant barrier has no air gap.) When a home has a hot attic, that heat can transfer into the occupied space, which isn’t very comfortable.

WHERE DOES THE A/C UNIT COME IN?

So, since radiation is a major source of heat transfer in the home, then the A/C unit must do something to control it, right?

Actually, the A/C unit does pretty much nothing to control radiation! It only controls heat transfer via convection, which is when heat energy moves via a fluid like air. The way in which an A/C or fan moves heat energy may make us feel more comfortable. After all, the evaporation of your sweat has a cooling effect on your body. In fact, ceiling fans don’t cool the space down at all! They just move the heat towards either the top or bottom of a room, depending on the direction they spin.

But where is most of the heat in a building coming from? It’s coming from radiation, whether the source is the sun, your body, or furniture. The best way to combat the sneaky effects of radiant heat transfer is by adding reflective insulation into building designs and making the HVAC system work with the design’s strengths and weaknesses.

The post Radiant Heat Transfer and Its Sneaky Effects on Comfort appeared first on Kalos Services.

Managers need to set expectations and lead a team through the entire duration of a project. Good ones are committed to the project and their team. Bad ones miss deadlines, exceed budgets, and foster unsafe working conditions.

I’ve asked Ron Milejczak to share his thoughts on what makes a good construction project manager. He is Kalos’s lead project manager for the Walmart division.

Construction project manager managing expectations

A good construction project manager can successfully manage their expectations. A manager must understand a project’s budget, scope, and schedule.

As great as it would be to have tons of money to burn on projects, it just doesn’t happen. Even mega-corporations have limited funds. Good managers understand finances, and they know the cost of supplies and labor. They will not underestimate their expenses and go over budget.

It’s up to the manager to ensure that all parties know exactly what a project entails. They also aim to understand the client’s perception of the scope. The manager can explain the procedures and goals in a way that the client understands, aiming to reduce the risk of confusion wherever possible. They ensure that everyone understands their roles. When everyone knows the scope, all parties can keep realistic expectations.

Scheduling requires time management and organization skills. Managers must make sure that tasks get completed on time. On top of that, they have to keep track of who works on those tasks. It’s overwhelming for an incompetent manager. However, good managers organize their workforce and commit to their deadlines.

Communication skills of a construction project manager

The manager is the point of contact for all parties: employees, subcontractors, and the client. As such, the manager keeps everyone on the same page throughout the project.

Communication skills go hand-in-hand with leadership skills. The manager must maintain constant communication because everyone needs to know what their role is at all times. By extension, a manager must also learn how to communicate with each team member.

Everybody understands instructions differently. A good manager makes sure the directions are clear to everyone. For example, a manager can accommodate employees with impaired hearing by making the procedures accessible in a written or visual format.

Effective communication skills also keep morale high. Social skills come into play here. Managers must be diplomatic communicators. Nobody wants to work for someone who demeans them, so many construction teams benefit from having a manager who respects and encourages them.

Ron Milejczak believes that the coaching leadership style is most effective. Nurturing your workers’ strengths is vital in project management. Still, you can’t lower your expectations. Good leaders focus on growth and stay positive, but they don’t forsake education or safety standards in the process.

Safety

A manager who doesn’t care about safety is a bad manager.

Safety is one of those things you can’t worry about as issues arise. A manager needs to be able to tackle potential problems before anybody gets hurt. Education and training are the top priorities of good managers. They make sure their teams are aware of hazards and equipped with the knowledge and tools to handle them safely.

Managers are also responsible for making sure everyone has the proper PPE. They also enforce safety procedures and assess risks on-site. Sharp observation skills and a willingness to be present are necessary.

As a manager who works in Walmart stores, Ron Milejczak thinks about the safety of his workers and the shopping public. Workers will be aware of hazards from their training and everyday work, but the shopping public won’t be. You can’t train the public, so a manager can only reduce risks to keep everyone safe.

Building subcontractor relationships

We’ve touched on client relationships, but we shouldn’t neglect the subcontractors.

It’s up to the manager to communicate the project’s scope to subcontractors. The key is to convey information as clearly as possible. A good manager leaves no room for confusion. They do this by providing proper training and addressing misunderstandings quickly and with tact.

As with any team effort, a partnership mentality builds strong relationships. A manager must relate to subcontractors and “speak the language” of their trades. Most of it comes down to understanding the subcontractors’ work and being considerate. Good managers have the social skills to make and maintain strong subcontractor relationships.

A good construction manager maintains standards and communicates clearly from start to finish. They make proper training and education a priority, and they build up their teams on knowledge and encouragement.

A subpar manager will be overwhelmed by the responsibilities, and they may lack the character traits needed. Good leaders and managers have the trifecta of people skills, communication skills, and organization skills to get jobs done promptly and safely.

The post What Makes a Good Construction Project Manager? appeared first on Kalos Services.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel on YouTube or our Blog for automatic updates

Links and Items Mentioned In This Video

• How Kalos Services, Inc. was started
• Why we are named “Kalos Services”
• Our company values
• The vision for our next few years and beyond

Do you have questions? We can help! Fill out the form below:

[contact-form-7]

Transcript

All right, so today we’re going to do Kalos 101. We’re going to be talking about the founding of Kalos, some of the areas of growth or vision that we’ve seen as we’ve gone on, and then our vision moving forward.

I thought it would be an interesting thing because a lot of times, as you go grow the business, obviously, you think that everyone knows everything about who you are and how you got to where you are, but a lot of times, as you go grow and as you hire employees and get more customers and expand your scope a little bit, sometimes, some of your founding principles can get lost, and sometimes people don’t know the whole story.

Let’s start by talking about where we came from and how we got started. In 2005, I was still working with the largest residential HVAC contractor in the Southeast, and my job at that business was to hire and train employees for the service department. I hired experienced technicians, but primarily, what I did was I hired and trained people who had never done air conditioning before to do air conditioning and to apprentice their way up through. We had run a fairly successful program there, but the reason why I really wanted to start my own business was that I had a real desire to build a business from the bottom up—the way that I thought we had been successful in building the department that I was a part of, which was to really hire people for who they were from a character standpoint, what they really believe, and then training them to skills. Most of the industry does it kind of the opposite. You hire people for their skills, and then you hope that they’re who you need them to be from a character-integrity standpoint. So, to me, that was kind of my vision all along when I started Kalos.

Now, from a logistic standpoint, I could have never started Kalos by myself. My father, Robert, had been in the industry—well, not in the HVAC industry, but in the construction industry—for, I don’t know, as long as I can remember. So, I guess probably prior to that, maybe 30 years or 25 years, and so he actually has taken a little bit of a hiatus from construction. He was doing private independent home inspections and also commercial properties as well, and he thought about getting back into the business because he had his contracting license as well as his electrical license, as well as my uncle, Keith Huntington, who’s probably one of the best tradesmen I’ve ever meet from a hands-on standpoint. He had a lot of experience in commercial, electrical, and construction, and he actually had been in the home inspection business for a while as well.

So, it’s a pretty broad range of skills that we had, and in our initial couple of meetings that we had, we were talking a lot about serving the real estate market, especially local realtors because my dad had a lot of connections with local realtors, and he thought, “Well, you know, there seems to be a real lack of service providers that tailor themselves to the local real estate market.” So, that was the original vision. We’re gonna start this, we’re gonna work for local realtor connections that we already have and just kind of go from there. So, I went and got my state contractor license and obviously spoke to my previous employer, and there was a good relationship. I left with their blessing and started Kalos.

Now, the original iteration of what Kalos was, was me, Keith, and my dad doing whatever it was that someone wanted us to do. So, if a realtor had a garage they wanted to be painted, then we would go paint a garage. That was one of the first jobs that I did as a Kalos employee—painting a garage—and I’m not a professional painter by any stretch of the imagination, but I just made do, and we made it happen. So then, we got into summer. We actually started the business, I believe, in September of 2005, if I’m not mistaken, and so it kind of started in the bad season, and so I didn’t really have very much A/C work, but I started getting to the summer and started doing small service realtors, just me and my work pen, and we started getting a few change-outs, which is sort of problematic because I didn’t really have anyone to help me do them and I was, at that time, probably about 30 pounds lighter than I even am now. So, you know, doing anything that required a lot of lifting and things of that nature by myself wasn’t really easy, but I just sort of brought Keith in or sometimes my brother-in-law, Jesse, who would help me do some things if he could. So, it was very limited, obviously, to what my abilities were. But we got more and more into commercial. We actually were able to break in and do some work for someone at Dixie and do some decent-size projects that I could do, and it actually led to some further success where we were able to actually make a profit, which is a difficult thing for a small business to do. We did a lot of residential remodels and renovations for people who were close connections of ours within Clermont, and so that led to us actually being able to grow a little bit.

The next step that we had was to hire someone else full-time in service, and so the first person who I thought of was my brother, Nathan, who was also working at the company that I left. So, after a lot of talking into, I got him to come and work for me and work with us, and we actually had a few guys who we used part-time. My other brother-in-law, Tim, worked with us a little bit, and he was formerly working with my dad in his home inspection business. So, I made do with what I could in order to get labor and in order to get the jobs done that I was able to get.

At that point, I did essentially no advertising. In the beginning, we really did zero advertising. After 2005, especially as we got into 2006-2007, which is kind of where we already are here, the housing market started to crash. And when the housing market crashed, the regular realtor-type customers weren’t moving houses like they were before, and there certainly wasn’t money in it anymore, so we really found ourselves in a position where that market wasn’t gonna work for us. Commercial construction was starting to pick up. We’re just trying to get some more work for customers, but our regular mainstay, what we decided to try to found the business on, that customer was sort of starting to dry up. But in the process, we made a couple of connections with some decent-sized customers and in the short-term vacation rental market, one of them being Liberty Vacations Homes, which is still one of our best customers, one of our largest customers down in that market. And we started Kalos off by actually doing electrical. We started off by doing emergency lighting for them. So, we would go in and install emergency lights because that’s required in short-term vacation rental homes in most counties because it’s sort of pseudo-commercial occupancy.

So, we were going to do that, and then we kept marketing ourselves. You know, we do air conditioning, and we will do pool heating. Well, I have done pool heating before. I mean, I have repaired pool heaters, but not to any great extent. So okay, we will give you one. Do you do gas pool heaters? Oh, I can. You know, so I’ll look at it and I actually started to become self-trained when it came to pool heating, which is experiencing it and working with it. The first time someone asked me to work on a pool control system, I was really in over my head. It’s the pool/spa actuators. You turn the dial, and the water all goes to the spa and it makes the bubbles and all this. I’m not a marketing guy, so when someone asks me to do something I’ve never done before, I’m not this super confident guy that says, “Oh yeah, no problem, sure, sure.” That isn’t my personality at all. My personality is to just tell them the blatant truth, which is, “Nope. I haven’t work on it before, but if you like me to look at it, I can try.” I can figure out most things, so I just started working on them and kind of just sorting my way through them, finding literature and reading up, and come to find out they’re really not that difficult. You know, you just have to understand what they’re about. So, we started getting into a little bit of pool automation, just simple pool heating automation for the short-term vacation rental industry.

So, what we found pretty quickly was that we had a pretty significant edge in that market. So, we hit that stride where we realized that this was a really good market for us, so I actually started reaching out to that industry. I joined their association and started meeting people. What’s interesting about it is that because I’m not a marketing guy, I’m not the guy who goes to meetings and says, “Hi, I’m Bryan. This is what I do.” That isn’t me. I just stand there and talk to people who come near me and get to know people. But what’s interesting is that the last time I went to one of those association meetings, I realized that I knew probably 80% of the people there, and a good portion of them are my customers now, and it didn’t happen through marketing. It didn’t happen through me pushing Kalos on them. It happened because we found a niche market, and we found a way to serve it to the best of our ability.

So, that forwarded to where we’re going today. We’re finding more and more niche markets. We’re finding ways to serve your regular residential homeowner better and better as we go trying to find ways to make our services more clear so that there is less confusion, better communication, quicker turnaround time, and better after-hour service. Those are all the things that your average homeowners are looking for, and we’re trying to find ways to serve them better as we go forward.

Okay, so I want to rewind back to that kitchen table conversation where my dad and I sat down and decided that we’re going to start a business. And even the search for the name of the business was an interesting endeavor because, let’s face it, our last name, Orr, is kind of a boring name. I mean, you could make a pun out of it, “Up A Creek without an Orr,” you could do something silly like that, but it’s cheesy. And then we thought, well there’s always the obvious thing. You know you could do comfort air, comfort services, or whatever, but the issue is that from the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to be a multifaceted business. We didn’t really want to limit ourselves. We didn’t want to be XYZ air conditioning, XYZ air, or XYZ construction because none of that really represented who we were and we were relying on the fact that we were really joining forces in order to make this happen. It wasn’t something that either of us was going to either have the willpower or the financial stability to do without each other.

I sort of provided the youthful interest in growing the business, and my dad definitely provided the experience, the wisdom, and the financial side in order to actually start a business, so we really kind of needed each other. But we wanted to start Kalos off all together, so what’s the name of the business like that? Well, you could call it South Lake Services. Well, that’s too geographic. You’re limiting yourself. So, what we decided was that we literally just opened up a Greek Dictionary, and we just started flipping through it, and we thought, okay, why Greek? I mean, I guess that’s the first question, why Greek? No, we’re not Greek. I’m mostly Polish. My dad is mostly Scottish. There is a little bit of American Indian there. You know, there’s no nationality that would equate to a Greek certainly, as you can tell by my “olive” complexion. So, the reason why it was a Greek Dictionary was that we recognized that there is a sort of richness to the ancient languages, especially the languages that the scriptures are written in. So, it’s because for us, really, the principle of doing all things heartily as unto the Lord is what we’ve always said. When going through a Greek Dictionary, we wanted to pick a word that had a little bit more fullness to it. That was not just to say “integrity services,” which we could have said that, and that would have been fine. But sometimes, you say words that we’re all familiar with, and they almost become trite and lose their value. So, we were picking something that people wouldn’t necessarily even know. That’s what we were trying to do; to us, it just seemed interesting. So, whether it was right or wrong, that’s what we decided to do.

So, we just went through and fell on the word Kalos. KAY-los is how we pronounce it, but really it’s more like KAA-lows. I think that’s the correct pronunciation; we don’t really care. We thought, “We’re ‘Muricans.” So, we fell on Kalos because the idea of Kalos is about completeness, wholeness, integrity. If you ask someone who speaks Modern Greek, they’ll say that it’s really just kind of good, you know, just good or some will even say beautiful or handsome. But really, what we’re looking for is the idea of integrity or fullness, completeness, and what I really struck on was the word integrity. You know, integrity is something that is basically to say that there’s an understanding of a higher purpose there. There’s an understanding of something that’s beyond yourself because you can’t really have integrity to yourself because what does that mean? You know everyone has their own thing, and to me, integrity means that there’s something that is of much greater importance than just the thing that I do. There’s something that is full and whole that dictates the decisions that we make and the things that we do. So for me, of course, that’s God. That’s doing things to honor God, doing things that please him, and making decisions in that direction.

So, for me, Kalos represented that idea the best of any of the words that I saw. Our job isn’t like evangelism. It’s not like we’re going out to every person and sharing the gospel. But it represents a fullness of our lives that if every other word coming out of our mouth isn’t scripture, the idea is that we’re bringing in the fullness of who God is through the way that we even interact with people and the business decisions that we make and the ways that we decide to do things. So, for both of us, that was really an attractive concept.

Now, our initial tagline was “Providing professional service, one customer at a time,” but we’ve simplified it to “Simply great service,” and the idea with providing professional service one customer at a time or simply great service is to say that it’s not about us. That’s the idea.  It’s that simply great service or providing professional service one customer at a time isn’t about us being of the highest quality. You could say that we’re, you know, the best quality service. Well, the problem with that is that it really is subjective, but really serving people because the idea of service is serving, providing great service, is all about focusing on that person, and so when my dad came up with the idea of providing professional service one customer at a time, the idea of one customer at a time is not focusing on what it is that you’re going to get out of this but really focusing on the object of your service and really providing them with what it is that they need. And it is a fine line. We just talked a lot about ideas when we were starting the business, and one of the ideas that I’ve always rejected is the idea that the customer is always right. There’s that saying within service where we say, “The customer is always right.” You know, that really is just a cop-out because if you say that the customer is always right, then you can just repeat that, and then that kind of recluses you from really making good decisions. You said, well, the customer is always right. Well, no, the customer isn’t always right, but that doesn’t mean that the customer isn’t always important. The customer is always valuable, and so I think it’s important to realize that when you’re looking at these things.

So, providing professional service one customer at a time isn’t doing whatever anyone asks me to do every single time. You see, that’s very different because doing what anyone asks you to do at any single time is may be really bad for them and really bad for your business, bad for your employees. So, that isn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to look at the business and say, “What is the wise choice?” (The wise choice meaning the choice that is really what’s best overall; there’s a lot of decisions you can make in a business that may be what the customer thinks is best for right now.) We have a lot of cases where customers will ask us to do things to their air conditioner because they want the very cheapest option or whatever that we are just not willing to do because it isn’t effective, safe, or wise. So you could say, well the customer is always right. Well, that would dictate to you that you do what it is that they ask you to do, but sometimes, what’s wise and what’s best isn’t what you’re asked to do. And so, for me, trying to kind of figure that out even in this tagline that we use and in the way that we named the business was a really important thing.

So, going through and understanding what is really important to us, what are we going to build the business on, and then it’s coming to the growth side of things or how we are actually going to make this happen. And like I said, initially, where we thought things are going to be, were not what they ended up being in the long run: thinking that serving the real estate market directly, that was gonna be sort of our niche and we were gonna stick with that. It didn’t really pan out, but being able to pivot based on the principles was really important for us—being able to say, “Okay, can we serve this customer?” because that’s a really valid question, and this is something that I think is really important when it comes to the idea of Kalos.

The idea of Kalos also means that I don’t tell people that I can do things that I really can’t do. You know, for example, if there were something that I really wasn’t able to provide a good competitive service on, I just couldn’t for whatever reason. Then, if it’s in the customer’s best interest, I tell them that, and we do that all the time. There are lots of things that come up that really we’re not the best option, but we get called because someone sees an ad or here’s a friend, our friends tell them about us or whatever, and they’ll call us and say with the air conditioning, you do this and that. And really, just so we know that it’s not the most effective option for them, and so part Kalos is being able to say, “Okay, well, maybe we can move and start to do that in the future or grow.” But a lot of times, the best thing to do is just say, “No. Here’s someone who we would refer for this.” So, that’s all part of what Kalos is.

But when it comes to this next step, I’m gonna get right into the vision of what Kalos is and how I think we can really make something that’s exceptional and grow something that’s exceptional. It goes back to the initial reason why I wanted to start my own business in the first place, and I think it’s easy to lose sight of that because what happens in any type of business is you get so caught up in doing business, fixing air conditioners, doing construction jobs, cleaning your van, talking to customers, collecting payment, ordering parts, doing warranty claims, and all those things that we do that you lose sight of what it is that really differentiates us and what it is that’s really going to make all the difference moving forward. And really, it’s people. That’s a simple way of putting it, but it’s people, and it’s having the right people.

One of the things that I think about most often in business is that I read a book called Good to Great, and in Good to Great, it talks about that the most important job that you can do when you’re running a business is, first of all, get the wrong people off of the bus. Second of all, get the right people on the bus before you decide where the bus is going to go, and there’s a lot of truth to that because you’re not going to go where you want to go with the wrong people. You’re not going to go where you want to go until you have the right people, and you shouldn’t even decide where you want to go until you do. And the reason for that is obvious, but that isn’t how business is played out day in and day out.

Day in and day out, what happens throughout corporate America is that decision-makers make decisions about what it is that they’re going to do. Is it going to make money or help the shareholders or serve their customers better? They make a decision, and then they send down the edict, and the edict says, “This is what we’re going to do, and there really is no concern for whether or not they have the right people to even do that.” It’s sort of like we’re going to make ourselves do this particular thing, and I think that’s the wrong way because you can do a lot of things with process. You can do a lot of things with administration, but the thing that you can’t do with either of those is actually make people good at their jobs. You can’t. You can keep them from making huge mistakes. Now, that’s what McDonald’s does when they sit a high schooler in front of a keypad that has pictures of the food, and they hit the picture of the food and then they have these timers for everything that says how long to cook everything. Really, what they’re doing is they’re not building a system to make a tremendous product, although some may argue that McDonald’s fries are a tremendous product. But they’re not building a system to really excel where their employees can actually be more than what the system is. They’re just trying to control it so that errors aren’t made–someone’s knocked dead scalding coffee again. That’s really what they’re trying to do, honestly, and it’s not that it’s wrong. It isn’t wrong. It just is what it is. It isn’t who we are.

Who we are is a business that wants to develop people to be bigger than the process, to be able to make Kalos more than a system, more than just a set of words in a book or a class that I can give. You want to be in a position where any single employee is better at doing their job than I could be if I did their job. That’s a really good place to be because what that means is that every person can excel and grow where they can grow—where their skills and inclination take them.

Here is the challenge:

The challenge is that everyone gets tied down to doing their job day in and day out. I do. I mean, I get totally overwhelmed at times just doing the daily tasks that I have to do. You come into the office, and you do this work you do. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s good. It’s good to have work to do, and I’m really very thankful and blessed to have work, to have jobs that feed our families. But growth, vision, and purpose are all about continuing to progress. The Japanese have a concept called Kaizen. I’m probably botching that pronunciation, but the idea is continuous improvement. The idea is that there is nothing that you should do that you just say, “Now it’s done.” There really isn’t anything in life that is that way. I mean, you look at raising children and relationships and sports. Anything that you do while you’re in your car, your car stereo, you know, whatever it is, there is always something you can improve. There is always some way to grow, and if you just try to get to a place from a professional standpoint where you say, “Oh yeah. I’ve reached this place that I always wanted to be, and now that’s fine.” It may be fine. So, you may say maybe this is the position I should be in. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. You may say, “This is all the money I need to make anymore.” That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. You may say this is the only other company I want to work for. I don’t want to work for another company. I’ll say that’s fine.

But to say, “I don’t want to improve anymore,” that’s very dangerous. To say, “I’m where I want to be, that’s dangerous because that isn’t a mindset of continuous improvement. Just in the same way that if we don’t work out our muscles, our muscles start to atrophy and deteriorate. Our minds and our personal progressions start to deteriorate and atrophy. So, there’s nothing that makes me more concerned about someone than when I hear them talk about something that they’ve just given up on—a part of who they are, they’ve just given up on, and I do it too. I may say something like, “Oh man, I am just not an installer. You know, I try to make something level with this. This is the case. I’m a service guy. I like to fix broken things, but when it comes to making something look level with an eyeball, my eyes just betray me.” And I could just say, “Well, you know what, forget that.” No, the answer isn’t, “Forget that.” The answer may be, “Yeah, I’m never going to be good at seeing things level naturally, but they make a tool for that. It’s called a level. So, I don’t need to give up on being good at something.” I should just say, “All right, I need to adjust, and I need to grow, and I need to learn how to use the tools that I’m given better.”

When I hear someone say, “Technology just isn’t for me.” Well, I hate to break it to you, but it kind of is because if you lived in a horse and buggy days and you said, “Technology is just not for me,” that means you wouldn’t have been driving a Model T, and you would have been left behind by industry. That’s just the reality. So, to say, “I struggle with technology,” well, that’s honest. You know, a lot of us do, [struggle with] different aspects of technology, but to say that it’s not for me, you’re putting a damper on yourself. You’re putting a cap on yourself that’s artificial, and when it comes to personal development, that’s one of the mindsets that you can’t really train. You can encourage it, and you can hire for it, but you can’t really train it because so much of it has to do with who you surround yourself with, even outside the work.

If you’re hanging out with negative people who say things like, for example, “Well, it is what it is.” You hear that all the time. Yeah, that’s the solution. I mean, well, it is what it is, and I say it too, but if that is the tone of a person’s life who you spend time with all the time, that’s not a Kaizen tone. That’s very, “Nothing you can do about it; the world happens to me, I don’t happen to it; it just is what it is, right?” Well, that’s not true. It isn’t true at all. The only real person who can directly affect who you are day in and day out is yourself, and who you are will dictate the opportunities that come your way, and whether or not you continue to grow or not. And for me, continuing to grow is honestly enough. It really is, even for Kalos. To me, things can happen. You know, the economy can turn down. You know, you can have people who you hire who didn’t turn out to be who they thought they were. Well, those types of things happen. You can get sick. I could break a leg tomorrow. Those things happen. You can’t do anything about it. But to me, for myself and for Kalos, I want to see people who are interested and continuing to grow and improve their lives.

I almost said to you that life gets better, but I want to be careful because even that, that doesn’t mean easy. Things happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t mean easy. It means that you know that you are where you’re supposed to be, that you know that you’re in the center of God’s will. It’s the way that I would put it; you’re growing towards who it is that you were made to be and what your purpose is and that you’re continuing to improve in those ways.

For us as a business, that looks like recognizing opportunities and then hiring and developing people who have the proper character to meet those opportunities, to meet those things that I see out there, and it’s difficult always for me because my nature is very—I don’t want to say “visionary” because that sounds like I’m saying that I’m a visionary—but my nature is to look in the future. For me, I’m not nearly as concerned about what happens a month from now or how many checks we gather in as I am about what Kalos will look like 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now when some of my children are maybe working here. That, to me is what’s very interesting, and don’t ask me why.  It’s just the way I’m wired, but for me, I want to develop people now who can be the divisional leaders 5 years from now, 10 years from now, and it isn’t because I want to be really rich or I want to have Kalos be in a big building. I couldn’t care less. It really doesn’t matter to me, all those types of things. What matters to me is the idea of seeing development in others. It’s what I love about my job more than anything else, what I loved about the past job that I had more than anything else is seeing people grow, seeing people grow in wisdom, making better decisions, and perspective. There’s nothing better than talking to someone about a technical idea or really any kind of idea and seeing the light go off in their head where it’s like, “Okay, I understand that.” That is very rewarding for me. So, hiring people who have those abilities and seeing them develop is really important.

I want Kalos to be a place that provides you with the opportunity to make it what you want it to be, and I’m going to start to hire people who want it to be something that’s really great for our customers. It isn’t getting that next big contract that’s going to make Kalos something special. It’s having people and growing people who see it as something that they can use as a theater that they can grow in and that they can help others grow. The minute that I see a technician who doesn’t want to help a new guy learn, I’m really looking carefully at that guy because, to me, that indicates a real sickness, and it’s a sickness that we see within our industry.

The whole idea of protectionism in the industry is something that I just reject completely—the idea that we have some secret knowledge that we have to prevent people from understanding. I want everyone to understand this business. Now, there are some concepts and some things within the industry that are very hard for people to understand because you have to have the experience to understand it, so I’m not going to go to a customer and start talking advanced psychrometrics. That probably isn’t the best use of my time, but what is a good use of my time is for me to start to educate people, be willing to educate people, to have the heart of a teacher. That’s a really important part of what we do: a heart of a teacher with customers, a heart of a teacher with other employees, and if our vulnerability is kind of revealing who we are and what it is that we think leads to somewhat correcting us, well great. That’s great. If someone can help me by telling me something that I’m doing wrong or something that I could improve, that’s excellent. But if someone just wants to beat another person up because they’re not perfect, well that’s a human condition.

You know, we’re all imperfect, and we have to be willing to learn from our mistakes, even when it comes to things that I know a lot of people will say. Even my wife says it to me sometimes, “Are you sure that you know exactly what you’re doing there?”

The answer is, “No, I’m sure that I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.” The more that I do, the more I realize that there’s so much that I still need to learn, and really, I can’t wake up the next morning getting upset about all the stuff I don’t know. What I have to do every morning when I wake up is be excited about the things that I can learn and the things that I can grow.

So, that’s it for Kalos 101. I hope you guys have enjoyed it.

Visit KalosFlorida.com or call (352) 243-7088 for more information!

More questions? Make sure to sound off in the comments or leave us a Voicemail. If you do, you might end up on our Podcast!

The post Kalos 101: Founding, Growth, and Vision appeared first on Kalos Services.

In the State of Florida and around the country, you hear stories all the time about unsuspecting homeowners being the victims of theft or scams by an unlicensed contractor who works or says he is going to do work on their homes.

Before you let a contractor into your home or business, you must know for sure if that person is a licensed professional or not. Hiring a licensed contractor offers many additional protections to the property owner, especially regarding residential property. First of all, a contractor cannot obtain a license without a minimum amount of experience, and they must pass a business management test. The applicant also may be subjected to a criminal history background check and must not have any unresolved contracting complaints outstanding.

Five Minutes Can Save You One Huge Headache

So, here’s our five-minute process that could potentially protect you from a huge financial mistake.

*We will be using The State of Florida as our example. If you live in another state, the laws will be similar, but check your government’s regulations and laws for differences.

For the fastest results, just follow this link to arrive at the search page.

This is part of the MyFlorida.com Department of Business and Professional Regulation website. You can also access the license verification database from the main page. Navigate to http://www.myfloridalicense.com/DBPR/. You will see two yellow buttons beneath the search bar, and the one on the right says “Verify a License.” Select that button.

If you are checking a particular company or a certain individual, click on Search by Name, but there are other options available as Next, click the Search button at the right.

Now, you can enter your information to search for a particular person or company. Usually, you will find who you are looking for with their name and correct city.

You’ll see a list of licenses on the screen, and in our particular case, see the Air Conditioning, Electrical and General Contractors license we hold. (You can also click into the entry to further investigate the company – to ensure that everything is up to date with their Florida license and that you are looking at the right company.)

Contractor Check Complete

There you go! Though this process won’t completely protect you from incompetence, it will at least protect you from scammers. This process can be a great resource when you’re doing business with anyone you have not properly vetted or without solid referrals. Check out websites like Angi or the Better Business Bureau for reviews on how that company does business. You can also see if their customers are pleased with them!

Do you have questions? We can help! Fill out the form below:

[contact-form-7]

The post Is Your Contractor Licensed? appeared first on Kalos Services.