INC'D - HVAC Executive Search

01 · The Sector

HVAC

No other trade turns a one-time repair call into a fifteen-year revenue relationship. That is why more PE capital flows into HVAC than any other service vertical.

The service agreement flywheel is what separates HVAC from every other trade PE has rolled up. A maintenance agreement - typically $150-$300 per year - generates 40 percent gross margins on its own. But the real number is the pull-through: every dollar of agreement revenue generates approximately two dollars in repair and replacement work. A platform with 3,000 active agreements is not sitting on $750,000 in recurring revenue. It is sitting on $2.25 million in total annual revenue that compounds every time a technician walks through a customer's door.

Then there is the refrigerant transition. As of January 2025, new residential HVAC systems can no longer use R-410A. R-454B cylinder prices have surged from $345 to over $2,000 since 2021. R-410A service prices have tripled. Recharging an ageing system is becoming economically irrational - and 84 percent of the 110 million installed HVAC units in the US are over ten years old. The replacement wave is not speculative. It is federally mandated and demographically locked in.

PE knows this. The share of HVAC M&A driven by financial buyers went from 8 percent in 2023 to 51 percent in the first half of 2025.

51%of HVAC M&A from financial buyers, H1 2025

18.5xEBITDA - Champions Group to Blackstone

29,000independent targets remaining

Champions Group sold to Blackstone at 18.5 times EBITDA. Sila Services sold to Goldman at 17 times. Redwood Services took on Altas at 17 times. These are not trades valuations. They are SaaS-adjacent multiples - paid because the recurring revenue economics, the replacement cycle visibility, and the 29,000 remaining independent targets justify them.

The problem is not the thesis. The problem is finding leaders who understand it from the inside.

The specific tension

The leader who built a loyal residential HVAC business - who knows every dispatcher by name, who spent twenty years building service agreement relationships one home at a time - is rarely the operator who can integrate thirty acquisitions, build a multi-state shared services infrastructure, and manage a $200 million P&L to PE reporting standards.

As Adam Hanover, Chairman of Redwood Services, told the Wall Street Journal: "Everybody and their uncle owns an HVAC business in the private equity space today." Every one of those platforms is competing for the same thin pool of executives who combine trades-specific knowledge with institutional-quality leadership.

We have spent years mapping that pool.

02 · The Numbers

THE FLYWHEEL

2:1

Every $1 of service agreement revenue pulls through $2 in repair and replacement work.

A platform with three thousand active agreements is not sitting on three quarters of a million in recurring revenue. It is sitting on two and a quarter million in compounding annual revenue. The operators who grow the agreement base without diluting technician margin are the ones who hit the multiple at exit.

THE INSTALLED BASE

84%

Of the 110 million installed HVAC units in the US are over 10 years old.

Combined with the R-454B refrigerant transition making repair uneconomical, this is not replacement demand. It is a federally mandated replacement wave demographically locked in over the next ten years. The platforms that convert service calls into replacement quotes win the cycle.

THE PRICE SHOCK

300%

R-454B refrigerant cylinder price increase since 2021. Repair is becoming uneconomical.

Service technicians are now the primary source of replacement leads, not call-center marketers. Platforms still organized around install and service as separate P&Ls are leaving thirty to forty percent of replacement revenue on the table.

03 · The Brief

The dispatcher controlling a platform's daily revenue allocation is paid like a coordinator. They perform like a Chief Revenue Officer.

HVAC is the only trade where the residential and commercial segments require fundamentally different operational DNA. A residential VP of Operations manages high-volume, same-day service calls dispatched to individual trucks - the economics are driven by average ticket, conversion rate, and revenue per truck per day. The industry benchmark is $275,000 per truck per year. Top-performing platforms hit $400,000. The same technician at a $380 average ticket versus a $220 average ticket generates $163,000 more annual revenue per truck. That difference lives entirely in pricing strategy, technician training, and dispatch quality. Almost nobody brings all three.

A commercial HVAC operations leader manages something else entirely: multi-year preventive maintenance contracts, complex building systems, facility manager relationships, and project-based retrofits with entirely different margin profiles and sales cycles. Few executives have credibility in both worlds. As platforms expand - residential operators adding commercial, commercial operators acquiring residential - the demand for leaders who can bridge the divide has outrun the supply of people who actually can.

The CFO brief is equally specific. HVAC CFOs manage deferred revenue accounting for prepaid annual agreements, seasonal cash flow modeling where revenue drops 40 percent during shoulder seasons while fixed costs hold steady, and acquisition evaluation where the strategic value sits in the unmonetized service agreement growth potential - not the trailing EBITDA. A candidate who understands SaaS-like recurring revenue metrics but has never managed a fleet of 200 trucks through a 95-degree July is as wrong as the operations veteran who cannot build a PE-grade board pack.

Where the search breaks down

Replacing a founder-operator with a corporate manager who lacks trades credibility - field technicians will not follow a leader who has never pulled a refrigerant line, and attrition starts within weeks
Hiring a CFO who does not understand deferred service agreement revenue - most HVAC balance sheets carry substantial deferred revenue that looks like a liability to a general-industry finance executive and needs to be read as a strategic asset
Treating the Director of Dispatch as a mid-level operations hire - a single dispatcher controls hundreds of thousands of dollars in daily revenue allocation, determines technician morale, and manages demand spikes that hit 300 percent of normal volume on the first extreme-weather day
Undervaluing the VP of Service Agreement Sales - growing agreement penetration from 15 percent to 30 percent of revenue does not just improve margins. At platform multiples of 17-18 times EBITDA, it transforms the exit valuation.

What we bring to it

We know the difference between an operator who has genuinely built a service agreement flywheel and one who inherited a mature base and maintained it - the value creation profiles are completely different
We have mapped the construction CFOs in the market who understand deferred revenue, seasonal cash modeling, and PE reporting cadences - not a large group
We understand where residential and commercial HVAC leadership overlaps and where it does not - and we do not present a residential VP of Operations for a commercial platform search or vice versa
The technician-to-operator transition is the hardest leadership move in HVAC. We know which former owners have made it successfully and which ones will revert the moment integration pressure builds.

04 · Roles We Place

Roles We Place

Every seat on this list is hard to fill. The HVAC executive pool runs deep in operators. Thin in operators who have scaled inside PE.

CEO / Platform President

Must navigate an acquisition pace of 20-30+ add-ons per year while retaining the founder-operators and field technicians that made each acquisition worth buying. Balances refrigerant transition strategy, workforce shortage, and the decision between residential density, commercial expansion, and multi-trade diversification. The rarest profile: technically credible and institutionally fluent at the same time.

Chief Financial Officer

Owns deferred service agreement revenue accounting, seasonal cash flow modeling through 40 percent shoulder-season revenue drops, and acquisition evaluation where the value is in unmonetized agreement growth potential - not trailing EBITDA. Must model pull-through ratios and manage working capital through the peaks. Not a general-industry brief.

VP of Operations

Accountable for revenue per truck per day, first-time fix rates, technician utilization, and dispatch efficiency across multiple branches. In a PE-backed platform this role drives integration of acquired companies - migrating onto ServiceTitan, harmonising pricing books, building SOPs that allow a $5 million acquired company to operate inside a $500 million platform without losing the local loyalty that made it worth acquiring.

General Manager

Branch or regional P&L owner. $15M-$80M revenue. Manages dispatch, service agreement retention, technician productivity, and the residential/commercial mix. The seat requires fluency in both worlds - a residential GM who has never run commercial HVAC will struggle with multi-year PM contracts and facility manager relationships.

VP of Service Agreement Sales

A role that barely exists outside HVAC PE. Builds and scales the platform's agreement program - the single highest-impact lever on both EBITDA margins and exit multiples. Sets tier structure, trains technicians to convert one-time calls into recurring relationships, manages renewal rates toward the 85 percent target, and drives penetration from the typical owner-operator level of 10-15 percent toward the PE-platform target of 30 percent.

VP of Commercial HVAC

Leads the commercial division for platforms moving beyond residential. Manages preventive maintenance contracts, building automation integration, and project-based retrofit work. Requires a fundamentally different sales motion - facility manager relationships, longer cycles, chiller and cooling tower credibility. Analysts describe commercial HVAC consolidation as still in its early stages versus residential. This role captures that runway.

Director of Workforce Development

110,000 unfilled technician positions today, growing to 300,000+ by 2031. Five retire for every two who enter. The A2L refrigerant transition adds safety training complexity precisely when demand is accelerating. This leader builds the apprenticeship pipeline, manages EPA 608 certification, develops R-454B curricula, and designs the career pathway from apprentice to field supervisor - the retention mechanism that reduces the 25 percent annual turnover that costs $10,000-$15,000 per departure.

A sample of the senior leadership positions we place across this vertical. Not an exhaustive list - if the role you need is not shown, reach out.