Paul Szmal: Good morning, 749FLX Morning, Wednesday, and we're Zooming with Hal Smith, the CEO of Halco Home Solutions, celebrating 40 years in business now. Good morning. How are you?
Hal Smith: I'm well. It's great to have you here. First off, thank you for your advertising business. Congratulations on 40 years. Do you remember the first job you did?
Paul Szmal: Yeah, I do. It's been a real growth experience since then. You've expanded in so many ways, and you've had such success over 40 years. How are you able to do it? You go from one day you're having your staff meeting on a picnic table, and then you're up to 180 employees in 23 counties. How do you keep the quality as you grow like that?
Hal Smith: I think the key has been taking good care of the customers, always honoring warranties, even if it's a little gray. You make sure the customer's taken care of. You have to have good employees. You've got to have a training program, and you've got to take care of your employees and make sure they're well compensated. That ends up with happy customers.
Paul Szmal: Let's talk about the transition to Halco Home Solutions and all the reasons for that, all the things you offer. I think there's probably a lot of things you're doing now that people might not know about yet.
Hal Smith: We've continued to expand our services. We have a customer service agreement base of 10,000 agreements. Those customers know, like us, and trust us. Over the years, we just continue to expand more and more services. Those customers appreciate that and take advantage of it. We started in the plumbing business, then we got very quickly into the HVAC business followed by electrical, insulation, both spray foam and cellulose. We do renewable energy, which includes solar, geothermal, and air source heat pumps.
Paul Szmal: You've won a number of awards, including our FLX Finest Awards. You won those in multiple categories. You also won awards from the Canandaigua Daily Messenger. It must be very rewarding to see that your customers step up and say, hey, these guys are great.
Hal Smith: We work hard at it. We make sure the customers are happy to the best of our ability. That shows in all of our 13,000 five-star reviews. It shines through, and we're very proud of that. It's a lot of work, making sure each and every customer is happy.
Paul Szmal: One of the main reasons we're having this conversation, we want to celebrate 40 years, of course, but you won a New York State Award for a Best Renewable Energy Geothermal Project in Newark. Give us some details on this project.
Hal Smith: It was a very unique, old, historical home that was originally heated with a coal-fired steam system. The need was there to completely heat and cool the home, which the steam system didn't obviously do. Geothermal was the right answer. There was property in the back that we were able to bury these pits about six, seven feet down. We're now taking the heat from the ground to totally heat, air condition, and also create all the domestic hot water for the building. It's a complete job.
Paul Szmal: How did that come about, getting the state organization to award you this job? Was it a competitive bidding kind of situation, or how did you learn about this opportunity?
Hal Smith: There's an organization called NYGO. Each year, they have a conference, and you would enter your jobs under what's called a top job contest, and then there's a panel of judges that award the top job for the year. You enter, you get selected as a finalist, and then you go through the judges' decisions.
Paul Szmal: I think a lot of people have heard of geothermal, but I think it's still relatively not that well understood. Explain a little bit about how that works, and at the residential level, what kind of how much land do you need, or what do you need to be a good candidate for having geothermal in your home?
Hal Smith: Yeah, so geothermal in the winter, you're taking heat from the ground. You put it through a refrigerant process, where when you compress that heat, it becomes much greater to the point of 130 degrees, where you can heat your home. In the summer, you do just the opposite. You remove the heat from your home, and you put it back into the ground. So it's just one process in the summer, one process in the winter. There's a couple different fields that we have. So if a person has a lot of open land, we do what's called a horizontal field, and that's the least expensive way to do it. If a person doesn't have a lot of land, all we need is one little spot to drill a hole, typically 400 to 500 feet deep. We come in with a drill rig, and it's one six-inch hole down, and we put the pipe. So a person doesn't need a lot of land to make this happen. The initial investment for geothermal is more, but there's federal and state tax credits that go along with it that really reduce the cost. But the operational cost long-term well pays for it and makes it a great value. So it's a little more up front, but the payback is certainly there down the road.
Paul Szmal: I know a solution more and more people are choosing these days are these heat pumps. Instead of having a furnace and an air conditioning unit, you have the heat pump, similar to geothermal, where it does both. Tell us how those work.
Hal Smith: Yeah, those would be called air source heat pumps. So geothermal or ground source heat pump, where the source is the ground, air source is where you have an outdoor unit, looks like a suitcase. They don't look like the old traditional square cube heating, cooling, air conditioning units. But yeah, they're air source. So they're actually extracting the heat from the air. And the newer units that we've used in the last 10 years are considered cold climate air source heat pumps. So they totally can heat the building down to well below zero and be the sole heating source. So yeah, they're a great source because you can put them in so many different configurations. You don't have to have a complete duct system because you have the options of high wall heads or low wall heads. They're sometimes referred to as mini splits, or it could be a combination of air handler with duct work and a high wall mini split type head. So lots of ways to solve problems we've never been able to solve in the past with a cold climate air source heat pump system.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with Hal Smith this morning. He is the CEO of Halco Home Solutions. You can't go anywhere on the Finger Lakes without seeing one of those trucks with the wrench, which by the way, I love that logo. Who did that logo?
Hal Smith: You know, we started out a lot of years ago with Miller Brothers Signs out in Newark, and they helped us design the first logo. But the logo has evolved. We started with just the pipe wrench. And then when we got into HVAC, we added the thermostat. When we got into the renewable energy, we added the sun logo around it. So the logo has grown with us as we've expanded our services over the years.
Paul Szmal: So it's a natural time to be nostalgic, 40 years in business. As you look back, was there a moment when you realized that it was just really taking off? Did it go zero to 100 at some point where all of a sudden the customers and the jobs kind of started rolling in, or was it slow, steady growth?
Hal Smith: Yeah, slow and steady. You know, and there's been times where we've actually went backwards a little bit and then regrouped and moved forward. You know, a lot of learning experiences over the 40 years, but you persevere and you always put the customer first and you come out winning in the end.
Paul Szmal: What's the plan for the next 40 years?
Hal Smith: Well, I have lots of great employees that work, that are capable of running the business. I have two sons in the business. So we're going to stay a family-owned business and just continue to do what we do and build the business.
Paul Szmal: Congratulations on 40 years, hopes for 40 or 400 more. And again, thank you for your advertising business on our FLX local media stations. And then thanks for being with us this morning. I really appreciate it.
Hal Smith: Thank you.
