Tales from the trenches, stories forged in the fires of experience.
ESCO's materials are utilized within hundreds of schools, wholesalers and other training
entities across the globe.
Learn more at escogroup.org.
All right everyone, thank you once again for joining Did You Know?
The ESCO HVAC Podcast.
So we spent a lot of time here at ESCO talking about careers and opportunities in the trades,
particularly in the building sciences.
HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, there's so many things happening.
So we're hanging out with my incredibly close friend Daniel Mendoza.
Brother Mendoza, how are you buddy?
Doing all right.
Thank you for bringing me in.
Well, you know, you have such an interesting perspective on our industry and I want people
to know that.
I want people to hear it and be able to talk about this experience because not only did
you find HVAC, like many of us did, you actually made an entire trip here and then found it.
So you started your life in Venezuela.
Yes.
And was very professional in what you do.
A lot of people don't know that, you know, they know Daniel Mendoza, this like really
good HVAC contractor and like tech guru, video editor.
They don't know that you have like an amazing musical background.
And many of us that are very passionate, very organized people have music backgrounds.
I mean, that's just something about it.
Yeah, it's kind of interesting.
It gives you a different flavor, a different perspective into all the things.
It kind of spills over.
They say that it makes your brain, you know, the left brain and the right brain work better
or something like that.
And it's kind of a form of art, just like painting.
It is.
So that form of art kind of moves into the career.
So yeah, so let's talk about, you know, coming to the United States, starting a new life
here and then your reasons for moving into HVAC.
We just we got to know this story and we have to share it because it's it's very real and
it's very interesting at the same time.
Yeah, well, the way that it went down is I used to be a musician, Venezuela of all places
has one of the most successful music programs in the world.
And actually, these are conductor very famous.
So people have probably heard of him as Gustavo Dudamel.
He's actually one of the world's best conductors, like most famous.
You probably Google it.
But anyways, he actually was in orchestra there along with a bunch of other people that
are playing all around the world.
And I was part of the youth Venezuelan youth orchestra, the travel around the world when
I was little, I was like 15, 16.
Really?
Yeah.
And you're the cream of the crop.
Kind of.
They basically they did a selection, the auditions all nationwide and they selected like six
clarinets, four oboes and, you know, 20 violins and all that kind of stuff.
And I made it.
I was one of the only six kids nationwide that was selected to play in the orchestra.
Yeah.
Yeah, you absolutely were the cream of the crop.
I used to play clarinet.
But the funny thing is like I wanted to play saxophone because of the same songs, you know,
how Lisa plays saxophone.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to do.
And that's how I got introduced to music.
So my brother, a bunch of friends, a bunch of people were involved in the orchestra.
So some of them ended up moving to the United States to a small school in Massachusetts
called Atlantic Union College.
It's like a 500 student school and they had scholarships and things.
And at some point, my brother talked to the director of the music program and he said,
hey, my brother plays really well.
What are the chances that he can come down here with a full scholarship?
And that's what happened.
I ended up moving to Massachusetts in 2005.
Yes, 2005.
I was almost 21 back then.
And that's kind of like came to the US.
I had a full scholarship in small school playing in orchestras and clarinet and all that.
Right.
So at what point along the way, because I think same way, you know, I went to college
for TV, radio, film.
I was playing French horn in the ISU symphony.
That was my gig.
The French horn is so hard to play.
So I played French horn and trumpet.
I still got a flugelhorn and trumpet here at the house though.
And I went once in a while for nostalgia, I'll break out.
What I realized was that was my passion, but not necessarily a profession.
So how did that go for you?
Well, what happened is that to make a living as a musician in the United States is pretty
hard.
You have to either be a teacher or be famous or something of that nature.
And you know that programs that get caught in schools usually involve like sports, extra
curricular activities and music sometimes goes out the window as well.
So the job security is not necessarily the best thing ever.
And not to mention that you don't get paid too much.
So at some point I have to decide what to do with my life and I have to switch gears
and I had to decide what to do.
I ended up moving to Michigan because the school that I was at actually went down the
drain.
Something happened financially and they lost their accreditation.
So I've been bouncing around all the place just like most people probably.
What's happening in life?
I was at that age.
You're like, oh man, I'm good at what I'm doing, but can I make a career of this?
Can I make a living?
One of the things that was funny and a lot of people that can listen to my story, they
probably relate is that I used to be really good with my hands.
I just fixed anything.
So if you are one of those people that can go to somebody's house and there's a pipe
that's leaking and then you fix it and then you fix electrical things, you know how to
configure your stuff.
I don't know.
I'd realized that I was very good with my hands and I had a bunch of credits from a
school.
I went to a university in Venezuela.
I had the credits from Massachusetts for the school and I ended up going to Michigan to
Andrews University.
I also had a bunch of credits there.
So I had like 200 credits and I didn't have a diploma.
I didn't have a degree.
So in order for me to specialize in computer science or in chemistry or anything, I had
to take two more years of schooling.
And I wasn't about to get 40,000, $50,000 a student loan debt to get deeper in the hole,
so to speak.
So I just told my wife, we were dating back then.
I told her I need to figure out what to do.
And I thought about the funny story is this.
My neighbor in Indiana, we lived in Indiana for a little while.
He used to do, he still does air conditioning.
And one day he came to fix our system.
It was a furnace, split furnace.
And I thought it was very interesting.
I was like, oh, that's kind of cool.
Right.
Yeah, I was intrigued by all the wires and the motor and the whole thing.
I just kind of looked.
There's a lot going on in this little box.
Yeah.
So I told my wife, look, we want to get into real estate.
Where are the things that are really expensive to pay for?
One of them is roofing and one of them is air conditioning.
And I knew I didn't want to be a plumber.
I don't know.
I didn't look too interesting to me.
I didn't want to be an electrician.
Didn't look super interesting to me.
And then I was like, you know, air conditioning is kind of cool.
You know, you have electrical stuff, you have mechanical things, you're messing with refrigerants
and stuff.
Plumbing, math, calculations, measurements, a little bit of everything.
A little bit of everything.
And the funny thing is that now that we've gone into real estate and we have some properties,
what's happened is that I can virtually do anything.
Yeah.
I'm a contractor.
You diversified yourself.
Yes.
Yeah.
Based on the experience.
So that's kind of what made me decide to go into the trade was that I had to figure
out what to do with my life.
And I knew I kind of didn't want to be an administration.
And that's what I ended up doing.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you get to that point in life, you're spending time with your girlfriend going, all right,
we're going to make a life together.
I want to be a productive contributor to this family, this relationship.
I don't know that music's going to pay enough.
I don't know that we want to go deeper in debt just so that I can get a degree career
and let's look at these options.
I think, man, that was kind of interesting on HVAC.
What's the next step?
I mean, it's interesting, but like, where do you begin?
Well, what happened was we were bouncing around again.
I came originally to Massachusetts.
Then we moved to Michigan.
Then I moved to Indiana.
It was like half hour distance.
You know, they're right next to each other.
And then my wife got a job here in Tennessee and I didn't have much going on down there.
I actually worked for a little while for a Consulmer there in Elkhart, Indiana.
And a lot of people know about Consulmer.
It's like one of the last manufacturers of musical instruments in the United States.
So I worked there for a little while and I didn't have much going on.
And my wife said, let's just move to Tennessee.
And that's what we did.
And I came here and was, okay.
Were you chasing a woman?
No, I've always been with my wife.
No, no, you're chasing her career.
What she want to do?
I'm going to go wherever you want to go, baby.
That's right.
I'll go anywhere you go.
That's right.
I went on Google and I was like, hey, where can I go study air conditioning?
And I found Chattanooga State.
They have the TCAT program down there.
Yeah, absolutely.
So one year program.
They have the morning college of applied technology.
It's one of RageFact excellence accredited programs.
That's right.
And that's funny because the first time I learned about ASCO is because of Chattanooga
State.
And you know, there were, you know, flyers and things around or things on the wall.
And that's, you know, I ended up taking the EPA, the six OAS certification down there
through ASCO, of course.
Through ASCO, yeah.
But yeah, so I went there.
I talked to Houston Graham.
He's a shout out to Houston.
He's a very well respected gentleman in the industry.
He is the man.
And I remember I met him and I was like, my name is Daniel.
I'm going to come to the air conditioning program and I want to become one of the best
technicians these cities ever seen.
You know, I tend to be a little bit extra, so I don't know why I did that, but that's
what I did.
Right.
And yeah, I just went through the program was one year long.
It was gruesome in the sense that I was working with a local air conditioning company.
I was getting paid like very little.
And so I was waking up like at 6.37 in the morning, putting a full day in and then going
to school full time.
Yes, sir.
So I was rolling 13, 14 hours a day.
That really tested my levels of energy and patience.
Sure.
But yeah, that's what I did.
I worked and went to Chandogya State for a T-CAT program for a year.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So go through T-CAT along the way.
What did you find?
Did you find that HVAC was absolutely the thing or was he, were you still questioning
what you're going to do when you grew up?
It was very interesting.
This is like a funny story.
And I want to encourage people like to look into it.
You don't have to start with any kind of knowledge, to be honest.
I didn't know anything about anything.
All that I knew is there's a hole in the wall that I plug for the TV and my laptop and I
charge my phone.
I didn't even know about 120 volts to 40.
I didn't know anything.
I just knew that I went into the air conditioning.
So the first day, Houston comes and says, hey, can somebody draw the refrigeration cycle
on the wet board?
And being me, I raised my hand and I was like, I'm going to do it.
So I remember I drew a house and I drew like a package unit with a rain shield and everything.
So that's a refrigeration cycle.
And I kind of laugh a little bit, but imagine that I didn't know anything that I drew a
house.
It was just a box.
I might as well just have drawn in the window unit.
So yeah, that's how it started.
And as we went into the topics and started learning about the refrigeration cycle, the
electrical side of things, it was fascinating.
It was pretty interesting.
Yeah.
Right.
So I know personally, I know that it didn't take you very long before you decided, you
know what?
I've actually gotten pretty good at this in a short period of time.
I think I'm even going to start my own business.
Well partly what happened was typically, I think most people, it goes this way.
You're in the program.
As soon as you get your feet wet and you understand more or less how it works, you can get to
a local company and say, hey, can you hire me as an apprentice?
And I like to get my, you know, because if you're reading the book and you're not doing
it, you're not going to, it's a, there's a weird gap between reading the book and actually
doing this.
I got the fundamentals, but now I need the legwork.
I need to be able to get out, get my hands on it and see it out in the wild.
Yeah.
So I started working for a local company.
I worked there for about three months.
I didn't feel that I was being appreciated.
And again, there's another lesson to learn from this is that if you work at a place and
you don't like it, there'll be another place that will hire you and they will appreciate
you.
So don't get hung up that my first job experience was bad.
And I just, I don't like it.
Just find another place.
Give up on the career.
Don't give up on a career.
On a hiccup like that.
Yes.
Exactly.
So after the three months, I actually went and talked to Houston again, a channel, we
stayed and it was like, Hey, do you know of another company that is respectable?
I want to be honest.
I want to take care of people.
I don't, I'm not all about pushing units on people and all that.
So he told me another old company has been around for like 40 years.
So I applied for the job.
They gave me the job and I love them to tears.
They're still rolling to this day.
But one of the problems that I noticed immediately is that they were stuck in the 1980s or something.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, I mean, some people, you know, you can skin a cat in five different ways.
It's fine.
I get it.
But I remember like, why don't you use a GPS back then the Garmin GPS and when you put
in windshield, it was all in the thing, you know?
So yeah, you have to know where things are.
I'm like, no, I don't.
I have a GPS.
Yeah.
And you know, using flip phones or sticky notes for stuff.
I was like, do we have iPads?
Can we use the internet?
I can do all this kind of stuff.
And then come digital gauges and all the technology into the industry.
I was the first one and the only one to buy the latest and the greatest.
I see that.
I've always been a tools nuts.
Yes.
It's how you call it.
Yes.
And I love, I think that tools help you a lot.
Anything that can help you cut a little bit of time here and there is essential because
if you do the same thing a hundred times a day, if it takes you an extra minute, that's
a hundred minutes anyway.
So anyway, how much you can cut down.
No, I mean, that's what it comes down to, you know, go ask an accountant when it was
the last time they used a scratch pad and a pencil for doing their calculations and
not a calculator.
Just don't do it anymore.
So at some point it started getting frustrated because, you know, you go to a customer's
house and you go like, like when was the last time we came here?
What did we do?
How much we charged?
And as you can probably imagine, familiarize with you go to a customer's house, like six
months later and they say, you were here last week.
You just changed that.
It just broke.
And it's like, no, I was here six months ago.
Not last week.
You know, it's that kind of stuff.
You have to use technology for your advantage.
And at some point I decided to split up and just do my own thing.
Yeah.
Which turned into a very successful business in your area.
Yeah.
Man, it was, I just bought a van.
I started with $27,000.
So we sold, we had a property, we sold it.
I grabbed that money.
I bought a van and it was empty in the inside.
It was a rental, I think it was a Nissan MV 2500.
So I had to put the shelves inside.
I had to put the mat.
You had to fit it all.
All this from scratch.
Then I had to fill it up.
So I dropped like $10,000 just buying all this stuff in the inside.
And now that I look back, I'm like, wow, that was, that was quite a bit of work.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's one of the things we want to talk about is there are so many different avenues
and finding the resources and connecting with other people who have had the experiences
that can feed your own curiosity.
That's what we're here for.
We're here to make sure that you learn from people who have had these experiences.
So if you step back and you think about it, what things would you have done differently
or what things are you very proud of that got you where you are right now?
Well, one of the first things I regret is that I quit my job and I went to buy a van
like three weeks later.
The first thing they said was like, where's your employee?
Do you have a W-2?
Do you have an employment?
And I want to buy the van.
Well, if you have a job-
I'm the employer.
Yeah.
I'm the employee and the employer.
And you want to buy a van.
Well, the interest rate is like 2% if you are your own person, but if you buy it and
you don't have a job, it's like 10%.
That was the first mistake that I made.
It was very expensive.
I should have bought the van, parked in my house and then quit next day.
I didn't do that.
Things that I would have done, this is one of the biggest mistakes that I've made.
You have to, nowadays you have to focus and even back then, quite a bit on your presence.
You have to realize you're going to have to compete against everyone in the industry.
I built a website with a guy, a friend of a friend, and I thought that by building the
website it would work automatically and just show up on Google.
And I didn't know anything about SEO.
Right.
Here's my sign.
Everybody come see it.
Something like that.
So a long time went by and I just kept asking the guy, I was like, hey, why am I not showing
up on Google?
And he said, no, just don't worry about it.
It takes time.
It's just how it is.
And like six months would go by and I'm like, hey, what happened?
Dude, I'm not showing up on Google.
Like I have 127 five-star reviews.
No, it just takes a little bit of time.
Just don't worry about it.
Then like two, three years later, two years later, I found out that you were supposed
to be doing a bunch of stuff.
So I lost two years of SEO, internet presence and all that because I didn't do that.
You have to, from the get-go, you have to start pumping, messing with the Google, the
internet and all that kind of stuff.
Otherwise you just don't exist.
But yeah, that was one of the challenges.
Something that probably makes me proud of from the company, from the get-go, I knew
that I didn't want to take advantage of customers.
I didn't want to rip them off.
I probably have thousands of service calls.
At the end, we had over 400 five-star reviews on Google.
So in three years, I didn't have one single person, one out of thousands to say, oh, you
charged me.
You didn't fix it.
Oh, you, you, you ripped me off.
You didn't know one time out of thousands, no one single disgruntled customer that went
to Google to write a scathing review about my note, not didn't happen once.
So I think that if you have your mind right and you know what you want to do and you believe
in yourself, you can do it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.
There are so many stories to tell and we want to hang out with you and talk about these.
Are you a technician and you're thinking about, man, maybe I'm ready to make those next steps?
Well come hang out with us at the National HVACR Education Conference and grab some time
and go, hey, Daniel, let's go over to the side here and let's grab a iced tea or cold
beer or whatever our choice is.
And let's talk about things and let's make connections.
And that's really what we're here to do.
We're here to encourage you to lift you up and to help get you the resources for whatever
stage you are in your HVAC and refrigeration career.
We've been down different paths and we all come together for this, to share our stories,
to share the things that we've learned, to talk about the heartaches and the heartbreaks,
but also to motivate and tell you how to do things right.
Completely, for sure.
Now we started the podcast talking about music and stuff in the background and it's very
interesting.
I think that music helped me when it came to troubleshooting and stuff because I could
listen to a, I could hear a unit from afar from like a hundred feet and I can tell if
the compressors sound weird.
Listen to the frequencies.
Yeah.
And but it's not only music.
I met guys that work in air conditioning and sometimes they have a background, they were
mechanics or they worked as anything.
It doesn't matter.
You'll be amazed how you can transfer or translate some of the skills that you have into something
that you may not think that it matters or it's just, so I don't regret spending several
years of my life doing the music because I think that some way kind of helped me a little
bit along the way.
Yeah.
I agree.
Daniel Mendoza, newest member of the ESCO teams.
So proud to be working with you, my friend, and look forward to all of the fantastic opportunities
that we get to do together and all of the knowledge we get to share.
Awesome.
All right.
See you later.
Thank you.