The Five-Year Plan That Lasted About Five Minutes

When I started Klein Cooling, I had a five-year plan.

Build the company.

Grow it.

Systemize it.

Make it profitable.

Then sell it.

That was the plan.

And I didn’t come up with it on a whim.

I read ALL the books.

For years.

Business books. Leadership books. Sales books. Books about systems, scaling, building companies that don’t depend on their owners, creating value, building wealth and eventually exiting.

I listened to the podcasts.

I studied successful companies.

I thought about this stuff long before Klein Cooling existed.

By the time we started the company, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted.

Build something valuable.

Build something sellable.

Give it five years.

Exit.

Then I started reading THE Book.

And the plan didn’t survive very long.

The Company Didn’t Change. I Did.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I threw the five-year plan in the trash.

It happened gradually.

The more I turned to Scripture, the more uncomfortable I became with some of the assumptions I had built my definition of success around.

Not because making money is wrong.

A business has to make money.

We have employees to pay. Families depend on this company. Trucks break. Equipment costs money. Insurance costs money. Training costs money. And despite my repeated objections, apparently supply houses expect us to pay our invoices.

Profit matters.

But I started realizing that profit couldn’t be the purpose.

That was different.

I had spent years asking:

How do you build a successful company?

Scripture started making me ask:

What is the company for?

That question changed things.

Maybe This Wasn’t Given to Me Just to Get Rich

Slowly, I started seeing Klein Cooling differently.

Maybe an air-conditioning company wasn’t simply an asset I was supposed to grow until somebody offered me enough money to walk away.

Maybe it was something I had been entrusted with.

Something to steward.

A way to provide for my family, yes.

But also a way to provide for other families.

A way to serve homeowners when they’re vulnerable and don’t understand what’s wrong with an expensive system in their home.

A place where somebody can learn a trade.

A place where a young technician can be taught to diagnose instead of sell.

A way to help somebody who can’t afford a repair.

A way to show people that honesty and business don’t have to be enemies.

A way to serve.

That doesn’t make Klein Cooling a ministry.

We’re an air-conditioning company.

We have invoices to send and payroll to make.

But it changed what I thought the air-conditioning company was for.

That Started Affecting Decisions

Once your definition of success changes, some business decisions start looking different.

We’ve talked customers out of replacing systems when replacing them would have made us considerably more money.

We’ve published HVAC knowledge that someone could probably argue we should keep to ourselves.

We started a free HVAC training program.

We began publishing real jobs and what customers actually paid.

We’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time building A/C University because homeowners deserve to understand the equipment they’re spending thousands of dollars on.

We’ve helped people when there wasn’t much—or sometimes any—money in it for us.

From a purely transactional perspective, not all of those decisions make sense.

And I’m certainly not claiming we’ve figured everything out.

We haven’t.

We still have to price correctly.

We still have to protect margins.

We still have to grow.

We still make bad decisions.

I still worry about revenue.

I still look at the bank account.

I’m still running a business.

But now there’s another question sitting above all of those questions:

Are we being faithful with what we’ve been given?

Success Looks Different Now

I still want Klein Cooling to grow.

Probably more than ever.

I want it to be profitable.

I want our employees to make good money.

I want their families to benefit because this company exists.

I want us to train people who didn’t have an opportunity before.

I want customers to know that when we tell them something about their air conditioner, they can trust that we actually believe it.

I want us to have enough resources to help people when helping them doesn’t make financial sense.

And yes, I want the company to build wealth for my family.

But wealth isn’t the finish line anymore.

Stewardship is.

That’s a very different five-year plan.

Actually, I don’t really have a five-year plan anymore.

I have ideas.

A lot of them.

Some of them are probably ridiculous.

We’re going to try some anyway.

We’ll keep learning. We’ll keep building. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll change things when we’re wrong.

And we’ll try to faithfully steward whatever this becomes.

It’s funny.

I spent years reading books trying to figure out how to build the company I wanted.

Then I started spending more time in one Book…

and realized I’d been asking the wrong question.

I started Klein Cooling with a plan to build a company I could eventually leave.

Somewhere along the way, I started building one I didn’t want to.

That change in purpose eventually became what we call The Foundation.

Read The Foundation →
https://keepfloridacool.com/the-foundation/