Tom began his career at Honeywell, selling HVAC maintenance contracts. Over time, he rose to the top of a nationwide sales organization of more than 900 salespeople. During this period, he recognized a critical flaw in the industry: maintenance contracts were often won based on sales skill and personality, not on a clear demonstration of superior maintenance value.

Determined to change this, Tom set out to define HVAC maintenance in objective, measurable terms and over decades developed and refined his Maintenance IP.

1980s

Tom designed and built the first maintenance estimating program in the HVAC industry, using Microsoft Multiplan, the predecessor to Excel. This laid the groundwork for quantifying maintenance effort instead of relying on subjective pricing.

1990s

He pioneered task-based maintenance with standardized labor times, creating the industry’s first repeatable method to measure maintenance scope, effort, and value.

2000s

Tom advanced the model further by introducing component-configured tasking, ensuring that maintenance was based on the actual equipment configuration rather than generic checklists.

2010s

He developed capital reserve forecasting using ASHRAE lifecycle data combined with real-world external factors. This directly linked maintenance quality to long-term asset life, replacement planning, and financial outcomes.

2020s

During this period, he worked with contractors nationwide to test and validate the solution, using real-world feedback to refine both the core IP and supporting software.

2025

Tom completed this evolution by leveraging AI to automatically generate maintenance tasks and labor times directly from equipment model numbers and exact component configurations—eliminating guesswork, spreadsheets, and manual scope creation.

Impact

At every stage, Tom trained sales teams to sell provable value, not personality. When applied correctly, these methods consistently doubled industry-average close rates and fundamentally changed how HVAC maintenance contracts are priced, sold, and delivered.

Maintenance IP evolution: This IP lies not in a single discoverable best practice or algorithm, but in the compound integration of domain expertise, historical data structures, task logic, lifecycle modeling, and real-world validation across decades of live contractor usage. This depth of applied knowledge is difficult to replicate without extensive industry experience, longitudinal data, and repeated field validation.

When deployed, the IP consistently enables sales teams to sell provable value rather than personality, resulting in close rates approximately 2× industry norms while simultaneously improving maintenance delivery consistency and financial predictability.