No Bad Jobs: Three Generations of One Family at Northrich Florida

Three words got handed down from a father to a son in South Florida’s HVAC business: no bad jobs.

We filmed that story for the first episode of The ABC Mechanical Podcast. Rey Rivera, our General Manager, went to Northrich Florida’s headquarters in Weston and sat down with managing partner Cliff Dickinson and his son Alex. Rey has worked with Northrich for the better part of five years. He calls it “one of the best-kept secrets in the industry, specifically in South Florida.”

We should be upfront. Northrich is a partner of ours, so we are not a neutral party here. We are just glad to put these people on camera. The video is above. This is the written version, for anyone who would rather read it or wants to jump to one part.

Jump to a moment in the video

• 0:13  Welcome: meet Cliff and Alex of Northrich Florida
• 1:32  Big shoes to fill: Walter, 1959 and a job that came full circle
• 2:41  Competitive drive and a family culture
• 3:55  What Northrich brings: no bad jobs
• 5:10  Hiring for character
• 5:43  Growing engineers and the first sales call
• 6:59  Cliff's next chapter and a team that teaches
• 7:52  Now hiring, and no layoffs through COVID
• 8:25  Thanks and how to reach Northrich

Three generations, and a job that came full circle

Cliff has been at Northrich for 47 years. His son Alex has been there about six. Alex always knew he would end up in the family business, but he started in other sales jobs first, so he could bring outside experience back with him.

The roots go back to Alex’s grandfather, Walter. He was one of the partners who started the company in 1959. Walter retired in 1997, but people still bring him up. Every now and then an engineer or contractor tells Alex, “Oh, your grandpa used to call on me.”

One story says it all. In his first couple of months, Alex went out to a job his grandfather had sold as new construction in the 1970s. His father had sold the same building again when its equipment was replaced in the ’90s or early 2000s. Now Alex was quoting it. “There’s times every now and then where you get that connection still,” he says, “which is pretty special.”

A big bid feels like a big game

Rey and Alex got to talking baseball, and Alex says the drive he had in sports follows him into the work. “Big jobs, big bids. You get that same kind of rush of a big game.”

For him the thrill comes at the negotiating table, when you can tell a job is about to drop. Sometimes you win because you brought a solution nobody else thought of. Sometimes you win on price.

The thing he missed most about sports was the team, and Northrich works to keep that. The company is small in headcount even though its work is not, and it runs like a family. There is a monthly barbecue, cooked by Eddie and Frankie. “It’s hard to replace a team where you’re actually all working toward the same goal,” Alex says.

“No bad jobs”

Rey asked what Northrich brings that nobody else does. Cliff answered with a lesson from his father. Walter mentored him for 18 years, from the day Cliff started at 22 until Walter retired.

The lesson was three words. No bad jobs. “Whether it’s the engineer’s fault, the architect’s fault, the owner’s fault, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. You be the leaders to fix the job.” Everyone on a project has their own problems, Cliff explains. Northrich’s job is to be the point people who make sure no bad job gets left behind.

Rey compared it to the military idea of leaving no one behind. He says Northrich has been a kind of compass for ABC Mechanical. The team often shows him a different way to look at a problem, and “nine times out of ten” he had not thought of it. “So I know my true north at that point.”

Character first, engineering second

Rey had assumed every Northrich salesperson was a trained mechanical engineer. Cliff set him straight. That is not the requirement. “The prerequisite is: take care of your customer like family.”

The engineering depth comes from the inside applications team. Northrich hires degreed mechanical engineers for it, then mentors them in application engineering. That means learning how to apply equipment to a specific project, not just sell a model number.

The team usually has three engineers at a time. When one moves into sales or project management, a new one comes in, and Northrich is on its third round of this. The first engineer in the program interned while studying mechanical engineering at FIU, joined full time after graduating, and stayed two to three years before moving on. The goal for everyone on the team, Alex says, is simple: “become an expert on our equipment.”

That pays off when an engineer moves into sales, because everyone is nervous on the first call. “You can know as much as you want, think you’re personable, but that first call, your heart’s beating through your chest.” Northrich’s answer is hands-on. “We sit next to them and say, ‘Put it on speaker.’”

Knowing the equipment cold gives new salespeople confidence. It lets them tell a new customer they are “not just some random Joe Schmo calling you trying to sell you equipment. I can actually provide you a service.”

A team where everyone learns from someone

Cliff has no plans to retire. He just does not want 60-hour weeks anymore, and he expects at least ten more years. He worked beside his father for 18 years and beside Alex for six. “So I figured maybe 12 more.”

Rey saw the culture up close during about four months working with the team last year. It was family-minded but team-driven. “It wasn’t just coming to work and punching out numbers,” he says. Newer people learn from Tony, Tony learns from Joe, and Joe learns from Lyle. “It’s this constant evolution, a nucleus of information that’s nonstop, and it’s fun to watch.”

Now hiring, and no layoffs through COVID

Before the conversation wraps, Cliff makes his pitch. Northrich is hiring estimators, salespeople and project managers. Above all, he wants “good, solid people.”

He is proud of one thing in particular. Cliff says Northrich kept hiring all the way through COVID and never laid anyone off. As Rey points out, that was not the norm for suppliers or contractors.

Why this matters on a job

On a commercial HVAC project, the supplier on the other end of the phone shapes how the job goes. A supplier that takes ownership of fixing a bad job, whoever’s fault it is, and trains its own people to know the equipment, is one a contractor can lean on. That is why Northrich is one of the partners we plan our projects with, as we showed in our Florida Project Kickoff recap.

Want to reach Northrich Florida? Visit northrichflorida.com, follow Northrich Florida on LinkedIn, or call 954.678.6602. You can also follow ABC Mechanical on LinkedIn.

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