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In this episode of the Dominate Ductless Podcast, we sit down with Geoff Fishel—owner of All Mechanical Service in Dallas, Pennsylvania—to explore how starting a business on a kitchen table in 1987 led to 36 years of sustained success through quality-first principles. Geoff’s journey from a $100 pickup truck to a thriving operation demonstrates how the fundamentals of customer service, continuous learning, and strategic modernization can build a lasting HVAC business.
[00:39] – Kitchen Table Beginnings: Geoff shares starting All Mechanical Service in 1987 on his kitchen table, just like most contractors, with his wife eight months pregnant.
[01:57] – March 1989 Parallel: Discovery that both Mike and Geoff left their day jobs in March/April 1989 with newborn babies—a remarkable coincidence in timing and circumstances.
[02:46] – 36-Year Client Relationships: How landing key contracts in September 1989 led to client relationships that continue today, demonstrating the power of quality service.
[05:08] – Technology Evolution: From handwritten invoices and dome books through 2006 to modern CRM systems—the journey of business modernization over decades.
[06:15] – Marketing Awakening: After 35 years of refusing marketing, Geoff finally invested in a marketing program and saw significant bottom-line impact within one year.
[08:09] – Yellow and Orange Branding: The strategic decision to wrap vans in distinctive colors that competitors immediately copied, proving the power of standout branding.
[11:27] – Quality Over Price Philosophy: Core business principle of selling quality installations rather than competing on price, even when it means walking away from price shoppers.
[13:37] – Hiring Outside the Industry: Success stories of training non-HVAC workers—from concrete pumpers to waiters to arborists—who became top performers.
[17:38] – Speed to Lead Implementation: Creating processes to contact leads within one hour and the dramatic impact on booking rates and revenue.
[21:23] – Timing Windows and Customer Expectations: Why customers hear “8:30” not “9:00” when given service windows, and how punctuality drives positive reviews.
[26:39] – Kitchen Table Sales Revolution: Implementing Sales Builder Pro to close deals on-site rather than returning with quotes later—immediate impact on closing rates.
[30:35] – AI and Future Technology: Discussion of how artificial intelligence will transform sales calls and customer acquisition in the coming years.
Geoff represents the backbone of our industry—the contractors who’ve survived and thrived through decades of economic ups and downs by never compromising on quality. What strikes me most about Geoff is his humility combined with an unwavering commitment to doing right by customers, even when it costs him money.
Here’s a guy who started the exact same time I did—March 1989—with a newborn baby and nothing but determination. While many contractors from that era have either gone out of business or burned out, Geoff has built something sustainable by focusing on what really matters: quality installations, taking care of problems when they arise, and treating customers the way you’d want to be treated.
What I love most is how Geoff demonstrates that learning never stops. At 67 years old, he’s still attending training sessions, implementing new processes, and adapting to technology. His willingness to invest in Sales Builder Pro and modernize his lead follow-up process shows that successful contractors evolve with the times while maintaining their core values.
Geoff’s story proves that you don’t need to be the flashiest or biggest company to succeed—you just need to be the most reliable. His clients have stayed with him for 36 years because they know when Geoff’s team shows up, the job will be done right, on time, and any issues will be taken care of. That’s the foundation every successful HVAC business is built on.
Quality Over Price Always: Geoff’s 36-year success stems from never compromising on installation quality, even when it means losing price-focused customers to competitors.
Take Care of Problems: When disasters happen (and they will), go back and fix them regardless of cost. This builds the reputation that sustains long-term success.
Hire for Attitude and Train for Skills: Some of Geoff’s best performers came from outside the industry—concrete pumpers, waiters, and arborists who had mechanical aptitude and good customer service skills.
Speed to Lead is Revenue: Implementing a one-hour lead response process dramatically improved booking rates and generated significant revenue increases.
Punctuality Drives Reviews: Customers remember being on time more than technical expertise. Arrive at the early end of service windows.
Kitchen Table Sales Close More Deals: Having pricing tools that allow on-site quotes eliminates the delay that loses sales to faster competitors.
Continuous Learning Never Stops: At 67, Geoff still attends training sessions and implements new processes, proving that successful contractors never stop evolving.
Marketing Investment Pays Off: After 35 years of resistance, one year of marketing investment significantly impacted the bottom line through postcards and van wraps.
Geoff’s story demonstrates that sustainable HVAC success isn’t about being the biggest or flashiest—it’s about being reliable, quality-focused, and willing to adapt while maintaining core values. His 36-year client relationships prove that when you consistently deliver quality and take care of problems, customers become partners in your long-term success.
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Mike: Welcome to the Dominate Ductless Podcast, where I tell the stories of entrepreneurs who are building businesses that are focused on ductless heat pumps. I’m Mike Cappuccio, the owner of Dominate Ductless, and I’m excited today to have a longtime friend and business owner, Geoff Fishel. Geoff is located in Dallas, Pennsylvania. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your company and your day-to-day roles.
Geoff: I’ll start off from when we started. We started All Mechanical Service on the kitchen table like most contractors do, back in about 1987. It was a truck and a truck for a couple of years, and it started working pretty well and I started making some money. So in 1989, I landed this large contract for refrigeration at a local baseball stadium. So I left my job on March 17th, 1989—that’s what we use as our anniversary date. My wife was eight months pregnant with my son. I had no idea where I was going with this. Just a lot of luck and a little love from up above. We made it for 36 years.
Mike: I’m going to stop you for one second, because I started on April 1st of 1989. Same situation. And my son was literally just born—three months old. And I did the same thing you did—I walked out of my day job and was doing truck refrigeration work. What a coincidence!
Geoff: I had a 1972 Ford pickup truck I bought off my father for $100. It had a cap on it, so I ran around in that until we got enough money to buy some vans. My first employee came on August 1st of that year, so there was two of us then. We landed some really nice contracts in September, and we still have those contracts to this day—we’ve been with them for 36 years. They helped us through the rough times. Many companies have failed—we just had a little bit of luck and love from above, because it is very difficult to start a business like this.
Mike: I think it’s a lot of luck and a lot of hard work. How did the business start growing? What were your day-to-day roles when that was all happening?
Geoff: I was working probably 10-12 hours a day, then I would come home and have to do paperwork because I was the lone person at that time. Did the payroll, did everything. We were just starting when the computer age was really starting. I had my first computer in 1992—I thought I would have that computer forever because it had a 65-megabyte drive! We did invoices by paper up until 2006 when we went to a year.
Mike: What are your day-to-day roles now?
Geoff: Well, I’m going to be 67 in two months. My son, who my wife was pregnant with back in 1989, is now 36 next week. Him and his wife are taking over the company, and my wife and I are trying to merge our ways out of it. I’ve just cut down to four days a week working. I’m doing most of the marketing now. I haven’t been in the field in two years—I just got to the point where my body just couldn’t do it anymore. I decided two years ago to work more on my business than working in it, and that’s paid off quite a bit.
Mike: You mentioned marketing—when did you start that?
Geoff: I have a business coach—I recommend that to anybody. Having a coach, somebody to talk to on a weekly basis. The coach I have is industry specific and has been on me for the last ten years to do marketing. Finally last year I pulled the trigger on it and it put quite a bit of money on our bottom line. We started with postcards—I really didn’t think postcards would fly, but they told me to stay with it. After a year and almost four months later, we are seeing a return on just postcards.
One of the biggest things I did was several years ago, we always ran around in white vans. That same coach kept on me: “You got to get your vans wrapped.” I finally made that decision and got all the vans wrapped. Our vans are yellow and orange, which is no color you’re going to find on a car lot, so they stick out when you’re driving. That’s a moving billboard, and everybody I meet says, “We see your vans everywhere.” After we wrapped our vans, all our competitors wrapped theirs too!
Mike: Where did we first meet?
Geoff: Meyer Supply may have had you in. I remember one time you were in Scranton at the Hilton there—we had a day-long meeting with Meyer Supply. I think Mitsubishi was involved with that also. I’ve been to probably 6-8 of your trainings already.
Mike: Why do you come to that many?
Geoff: Mike, you’re just a dynamic teacher when it comes to that. We just attended the one in Bethlehem three weeks ago—two-day seminar. You kept everybody on the edge of their seats the whole time. I’ve gotten a lot out of them. I took some stuff back with me out of this past one that we implemented, and it works.
Mike: How has the training helped your business? If you were to take two highlights away from the past 10-12 years, what would those be?
Geoff: From the beginning, what I got out of it is quality, quality, quality. We sell on quality, not price. I think I got that out of you big time because we always want to do a quality installation. Believe me, Mike, we’ve had some disasters over those years. The one thing that we did and we always do—it’s part of our culture—we go back and we take care of it. It might cost us money and it has cost us money, but you go back and you take care of it. That’s probably why All Mechanical has survived this many years. We don’t leave customers hanging.
We have many competitors selling on price and moving boxes. That’s not us. If you want to do that, then you have to go to our competitors. But if you want a quality installation with no corners cut, then you call us.
The last class—one of the things I brought back here was trying to find help. You pointed out to me—we’ve always probably done that—don’t look for somebody specifically in the industry to do your installations. Train them. You just need somebody that’s mechanically inclined that you can train.
Mike: Can you give me some examples?
Geoff: I had a guy here who just retired last year. He was with me for 19 years. Before he started working with All Mechanical, he was a concrete pumper. He pumped concrete for a living. His trade was a carpenter. He came on board with us and ran our installation department for 12-15 years.
Our salesperson, Chris—he was a waiter. But he had mechanical ability—he worked on cars, his father was a carpenter, he knew building, he knew how to measure, he’s great in math. We brought him on as a helper in the installation department. He is now our salesperson doing the sales and running the sales.
We have another guy, Bobby, who we just brought in last year. Bobby was trained as a carpenter, went to trade school for carpentry, and was an arborist trimming trees. You really made me realize that we don’t want to—not that we don’t want to—but don’t just be industry specific trying to look for somebody who has experience.
Mike: I think we proved that in the training when I went around the room and asked 10-15 guys about someone who wasn’t in your industry and is now an A or B guy for you. Did you notice how everybody had one?
Geoff: Yes. It’s not just the mechanical ability—it’s the communication skills, the customer service. People think of customer service people when you go to a restaurant and have a good waiter or waitress that’s on you with attention to detail, and you don’t even realize they’re upselling you with appetizers and alcohol. That’s what good customer service people can do.
Mike: What else did you get out of the training?
Geoff: Speed to lead. One of the things we were having issues with was when leads were coming in, we weren’t getting right on top of them. They were sitting here.
Mike: This happens at every company, Geoff. Did you think it was getting done?
Geoff: Yes, I thought it was getting done. So we didn’t have a process for it, so we had to write a process. I remember those words “speed to lead.” When the call comes in, we get the leads coming from Mitsubishi ABC system leads. They come across on the internet, and as soon as we accept them, they go into our CRM system. We made a process that we want those people contacted within the hour and see if we can get them booked within the hour. That seems to be working very well.
Mike: And how do we introduce ourselves when we call?
Geoff: I do remember. “Hello, my name is Geoff Fishel and I’m calling on behalf of Mitsubishi. We got a lead from them. I am with All Mechanical Service.” So we’re introducing ourselves, we’re trying to bring that Mitsubishi up.
Mike: We did change that—you need to introduce yourself as Mitsubishi, so they know you. They just signed in for a lead for you to come look at their system. We want them to know that we’re with Mitsubishi, we’re an elite diamond contractor.
Geoff: That’s what we’re doing now.
Mike: Are you seeing that the booking rate is higher?
Geoff: We’re booking them now. We weren’t booking them before. Now we’re booking them.
Mike: What happens when you book more leads?
Geoff: You get more sales.
Mike: Remember when I showed you if we just book four more calls? Just four more calls—30 to 35% increase in revenue. It’s not just the speed to lead that’s important, but the revenue comes on top. It’s a very simple thing that can create more revenue for a contractor. In this business, you just kind of do two things: call people back and show up.
Geoff: Absolutely. We just talked about that this morning in our meeting. We have a meeting every Friday morning. We talked about when we give the customer a window for service—we give them a window from 8:30 to 9. Well, the customer doesn’t hear the nine, they hear the 8:30. So we’re trying to train our guys that when we give you a window, you need to be on the up side of that window. If it says 8:30 to 9, you need to be there at 8:30. That’s very important because the customer hears 8:30, they don’t hear 9:00.
One of the comments we get most on our reviews is “we were on time.”
Mike: That’s why I don’t like people giving ballpark estimates over the phone. If you tell someone it’s between $5,000 and $10,000, do they hear ten? No, they heard five.
Geoff: My attorney called me the other day questioning me about a price. I told him, “I can’t give you a price because prices are changing so fast today that I cannot give you a price, and I won’t do that, because they’re going to hear that $5,000, not ten.” He appreciated that. I said, “I’m going to have Chris, our salesperson, get ahold of you and he will price it out for you.”
The other thing about ballparks—somebody says, “Give me a ballpark price.” Well, how big is your ballpark? Is it a minor league, little league field, or major league field? It’s the same thing with air conditioning. I don’t know how big of an air conditioner you need, so I can’t give you a ballpark price.
Mike: In closing, if you had a recommendation for other contractors around the country from a heat pump perspective, what would that be?
Geoff: We’re doing a considerable amount of heat pumps, and I think the technology in heat pumps coming out—we’re recommending more heat pumps because in our area, we have oil, natural gas, propane, heat pumps, electric heat, all different types of systems. But heat pumps seems to be the big drive because electricity is not getting any cheaper.
Even the unitary manufacturers are coming out with higher efficiency units now, competing with Mitsubishi and the ductless out there. I can see in the next ten years, that’s probably what you’re going to see. The technology in these things just blows my mind. We’re going down to minus five at 100% now in some of these Mitsubishi units. That’s insane. When ten years ago, if you hit 37 degrees and you were getting heat, that was great.
Minus five really blows my mind at 100% when some of these units coming out. I think it’s here, it’s going to stay. It’s an opportunity for us in this market, even with the economy the way it is.
Mike: Do you think other contractors just don’t buy into it?
Geoff: It is, but again, it goes back to that quality versus price. People are looking at price, not quality. So many people are doing that—not doing the customer a favor by putting in the cheapest thing they can do, and then ten years down the road putting something else in.
One other thing we started this year—we brought on Sales Builder Pro. We wanted to sell at the kitchen table this year. We never did that before. We always go out, guy takes the measurements, talks to the customer, comes back, does the quote, and sends it back out. You’re looking at a day’s time. Now with Sales Builder Pro, we’re giving them the price right there at the table. Chris has closed three deals within the last three weeks right at the table by using that method.
Mike: What made it important to you to say we need to get this tool to put it at the kitchen table?
Geoff: We were losing sales from it because the competition was in there. Usually there’s three competitors, and they were back to the customer real fast. With this, we’re able to leave a quote before he leaves the house. Unless it’s something special, the cookie cutter systems that are out there, he can leave them a quote with three options and gives them everything. The nice thing about Sales Builder Pro is it puts all the rebates down for you, gives you all the financing information right there on 1-2 pieces of paper.
Chris was talking to me the other day and said, “I just go in, present it to them, and then I just sit there and keep my mouth shut and let them look at it for a little bit.”
Mike: You’re going to see technology changes. Within the next year or two, you are going to add artificial intelligence to that sales call. I’ve been on multiple calls with multiple AI sales companies to find out what the salesperson’s doing wrong in a home, why customers are buying, what they’re buying, when they’re buying it, and how they’re buying it. You’ve now seen the power of a kitchen table tool—wait till you see in the next year or two the power of AI.
Geoff: I just learned something the other day—one of our contractors on Service Nation Alliance, his customer used AI to find out who the best contractor was in the area, and his name came up. So people are using it to check you out. Even though your Google rating is very high, they’re still asking AI who has the best Mitsubishi installation, and AI is spitting it out within seconds.
