About This Conversation
Ronel Lamour Junior is a Senior HVAC Service Technician based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with about 16 years of experience working on residential and light-commercial heating and cooling systems. He holds an EPA Section 608 Universal Certification and has spent much of his career mentoring younger technicians while continuing to take on the complicated diagnostic calls himself. In this conversation, he talks about how he defines success in a trade where the work is judged one repair at a time.
What Does Success Look Like to You, Personally, in Your Work?
For me, success is pretty simple. Did the system work when I left the house, and did it still work a week later. I’ve seen technicians who can get a unit running for the moment but never actually find the real problem. That’s not success to me, that’s a delay. I want to know that what I did will hold up through the next heat wave, not just until I pull out of the driveway.
How Do You Measure Success Call by Call?
I ask myself one question before I pack up: could I explain this repair to the homeowner’s kid and have it make sense. If the answer is yes, I probably did my job right. If I’m hand-waving or skipping steps in my own head, that’s usually a sign I didn’t actually finish the diagnosis. A clean explanation is a good test of clean work.
Was There a Moment Early on When Your Idea of Success Changed?
Early in my career, I thought success meant speed. Get in, get it fixed, get to the next call. I was a helper and then a young tech, and the whole industry rewards fast work. It took me a while to realize that speed without accuracy just means you’re fast at creating callbacks. I remember a job where I replaced a part that looked like the obvious culprit, and the real issue was an airflow restriction I hadn’t bothered to check. The system failed again within a month. That one stuck with me. Success stopped being about how quickly I finished and started being about whether I’d actually found the cause.
How Has Mentoring Younger Technicians Changed How You Think About Success?
It’s made me take my own habits apart and look at them again. When you’re explaining why you’re checking something, instead of just checking it out of habit, you realize how much of this job is pattern recognition built over years. Watching a newer technician get a tough diagnosis right on their own, something they couldn’t have done six months earlier, feels like a win that’s separate from anything I did on a truck that day. That kind of success doesn’t show up on an invoice.
Does Success in HVAC Look Different in Florida Than Somewhere Else?
I’d guess so, just based on what the climate demands. Here, a system doesn’t get a break. It’s running constantly through a long cooling season, dealing with humidity and storms, and there’s very little margin for a unit that’s only “mostly” fixed. Success in this market means a repair that holds up under conditions that don’t let equipment coast. A technician who’s used to milder climates might call a job finished a step before I would.
How Do You Balance Success at Work With Your Personal Life?
Honestly, I try not to let the two compete. I’m up early, especially during the summer cooling season, going over my calls with coffee before I head out. But I keep my weekends for fishing, working on cars, and time with friends and family. I think a technician who never steps away from the work actually gets worse at it. Some of my better troubleshooting ideas have come to me while I was doing something completely unrelated, like sitting on a boat early in the morning.
What Does Success Look Like for You Going Forward?
Long term, I want to build a small HVAC company here in South Florida. Success in that sense isn’t about getting big fast. It’s about building something known for honest recommendations and technicians who actually know what they’re doing, the kind of place where customers come back because they trust it, not because they have no other option.
What’s a Misconception About Success in a Trade Like Yours?
People sometimes assume success means selling the customer on the biggest fix available. I see it differently. Real success is telling someone what’s actually wrong, what’s optional, and letting them decide with accurate information. The trust that builds is worth more over time than any single invoice.