Hey guys, this is Ricky, owner of AirBros Air Conditioning and Electrical. I started off in this trade as a kid. My dad was an HVAC owner as well. I started off with him as a five year old in the garage.
He used to have me cutting up duck board for him on weekends and at nights, all because he didn't want itchy fiberglass all over him. That's how I got started in this trade is helping my dad. And from there helped them all throughout middle school, high school, during the summers until I graduated out of high school.
I went straight into trade school after high school and actually wound up getting a job with a local company here in St. Pete, a commercial company, and started off with them. They hired me just as a regular filter changer. I started straight from the bottom, worked my way up as a filter changer to actually becoming a service technician.
About the time I turned 22 years old, my father and I decided to start our own business. At that time, I was working two jobs. I would work for my commercial company that I worked for from nine to five. And then after that, I would come home, take all my tools out of my commercial van, put them in my pickup truck, and then my father and I would do our residential business till all hours of the night, until one, two, three, sometimes four o'clock in the morning. I remember us working just building up our residential brand business and clientele base.
We did that for a long time. My wife actually got involved. There would be times my wife was working as a nurse, and she would be working three days on four days off. We would actually have her drive my pickup truck to the supply houses, picking up equipment, delivering it to job sites so that I could get off work at five o'clock and go do installs at night.
And then of course on weekends, it was nonstop. We did that for a long time, got very busy, obviously, and I ended up becoming a service manager at the company I was working for. I was trying to become a service manager. I was a service manager for one company, owner of a residential company, and it got to the point where, something had to give.
About 10 years ago, my family, my wife, we all moved here to St. Pete. We moved to the Shore Acres community and decided to pursue my own business full time. And that's when I started.
I didn't know anybody in this community. I moved over from Tampa, where I started my business.
We moved over here to St. Pete, fell in love with the community, fell in love with Shore Acres, fell in love with my neighborhood, my neighbors, and got really involved with the community over here.
I started listing my business on Google as 24/7 trying to drum up some sort of business in this area. And you know, mostly I would just get the calls on nights, weekends, when someone really needed an emergency. I really grew the business, started off real small here, centralized in Shore Acres, built up our reputation.
At the time, it was just me and a pickup truck. I answered the phones, I did the billing, the sales, the installs, the service, really a one-man band with my wife helping out as well.
That's how we started. We were scraping by getting as many reviews as we could, making as many good impressions on people, making sure whenever I was out in the community, handing out cards, shaking people's hands and letting them know that the service that I provide that I could do a great job for them.
We grew it from there. My brother started working for me. My dad didn't want to be involved anymore. He kind of retired.
My brother started working for me and we were searching for a name. We didn't have a name for the business. In between service calls, we used to just drive around and just shoot names at each other. And I remember just saying Air Bros at the time with my brother sitting next to me. It just was a thought in my head.
It kind of just stuck. I knew as soon as I said it, I was like, that that fits my personality and the company's personality to a T. We kind of ran with that name about five years ago and stuck with it ever since.
Since then, I've had two kids. My wife and I are entrenched in the Shore Acres, St. Pete community. We host events, we host parties, we do block parties and really have fallen in love with St. Pete as a community.
We support all the local small businesses in the area as well as, I've become friends with a lot of the small business owners in the area and really team it up. That's probably one of the biggest things I love about this community is how the small businesses kind of stick together and everyone supports everybody. It feels like a hometown community and not like a big city.
We've obviously grown from the one truck that I was up to, I think we're at 13 trucks now, which is amazing and we're just we've added electrical services to what we do and all the while maintaining our five star reputation, which is the most important thing to me.
I’m really proud of that and excited to keep going.
Thank you,
Ricky