Building a Business That Lasts: Why Culture Beats Strategy in HVACR w/ Tony Gonzalez

Bryan opens by explaining that the episode will examine why culture can matter more than strategy when building a lasting HVACR business. His guest, Tony Gonzalez, has spent more than 25 years at Fieldpiece. Tony started directly out of high school in the warehouse, when UPS shipping was handled with a book, handwritten information, and pulled stickers. Since then, he has worked in repair, technical support, quality, product testing, and product development, and now leads Fieldpiece’s training department. Tony says Fieldpiece Training is intended to help close the industry’s labor and skills gap. Its work focuses on best practices and practical applications that help contractors and technicians do their jobs more easily, quickly, and effectively. Bryan connects Tony’s experience to his own long career at Kalos, where he has tried to help build a healthy company culture. They frame the discussion around the difference between values displayed on a wall and the behavior a company actually rewards, how mistakes are handled, and how leaders can remain curious instead of judgmental.

Tony explains that Fieldpiece’s core values were created when the company was still a small organization of roughly 10 to 15 people. The employees who already enjoyed working together gathered to identify what made Fieldpiece distinctive and why they had each other’s backs. After several rounds of refinement, those ideas became TURTL, the company’s five-value framework. Tony stresses that values cannot be purely aspirational: a company cannot claim to be all of these things if none of them describe its present behavior. The T stands for Tribe: developing people professionally and personally and helping them move toward roles where they can provide the most value. U means Upfront homework—understanding technicians’ and contractors’ jobs, pain points, and challenges before proposing solutions. R means Right stuff: giving internal and external customers what will genuinely help them rather than simply selling what the company wants to move. The second T is Trust, beginning with the assumption that people have good intentions rather than waking up intending to cause problems. L is Lean, a philosophy of continuous improvement through small daily improvements. The missing E is deliberate: employees leave their egos at the door.

Bryan asks whether TURTL is genuinely used inside Fieldpiece or merely displayed on banners. Tony says the company has worked to keep it active through quarterly recognition of two or three “Turtles of the Quarter,” leadership discussions during monthly one-on-ones, and development reviews that ask employees how they have observed and lived the culture. He says leaders have to act as culture carriers so the values remain relevant rather than becoming words on a wall. Both speakers argue that culture is most visible when people are under pressure. Bryan describes a recent small CO2 leak at a grocery store, where the fire department initially acted on the CO2 lines and refrigeration personnel from around Kalos immediately offered to come help. He contrasts a culture that responds to callbacks by improving the team with one that blames people, and a teaching culture that helps a struggling apprentice rather than asking why the apprentice did not already know. Tony defines culture as an organization’s underlying or “social” operating system—the repeated behaviors and reactions that govern how people function together. They return to the principle that culture is defined by the worst behavior a company tolerates. A salesperson or technician cannot be excused for unprofessional or unkind conduct merely because they produce revenue or possess another valuable skill. What leadership permits becomes the real standard.

Bryan describes Kalos’s phrase “professional pride, personal humility.” Professional pride means treating the work as meaningful, caring about quality, and taking mistakes seriously. Personal humility means recognizing that everyone is human, leaving ego aside, and remaining willing to learn from an apprentice, a veteran, or someone with a different specialty. Tony makes a similar point through Fieldpiece’s decision to leave the E out of TURTL. The discussion then turns to leadership. Tony says a true leader is more concerned with the team being recognized and succeeding than with being personally perceived as great. Bryan says he has learned that the apparently quieter, more humble leader may build more trust and achieve more than the leader who constantly advertises personal accomplishments. Leaders should not feel threatened when their team members become highly capable; the team’s success demonstrates leadership success. Tony says people generally stay when a company helps them grow, offers development and recognition, provides reasonable compensation, and gives them a sense of belonging. Fieldpiece grew from three people to roughly 430 over 20 years. In its early years it could not always offer the best insurance, benefits, or pay, yet employees stayed because of relationships, recognition, opportunities to learn, and the feeling of being part of something. Bryan adds that employees look at the people ahead of them and ask whether those leaders have jobs and lives they would actually want. He left a previous company partly because he did not want the role or treatment he saw attached to advancement there.

Tony connects the phrase “curiosity before judgment” to Ted Lasso and to Fieldpiece’s leadership training. When something goes wrong, leaders should assume first that the person did not intend to cause harm, create a safe way to acknowledge the mistake, and investigate the root cause. The useful question is not only what happened but what the team learned and will do differently. Tony says Fieldpiece even celebrates failure when it reflects an attempt to do something ambitious, because punishing every failure discourages people from trying meaningful improvements. Bryan compares this approach to troubleshooting a failed compressor. A good technician does not simply call the compressor stupid; they take it apart conceptually, test, and investigate why it failed. The same applies to an employee whose performance has declined. Instead of assuming laziness or bad character, a leader can say, “I’ve noticed a dip in production. What’s going on, and how can I help?” Both argue that judgment assumes the leader already knows the answer, while curiosity leaves room for facts and learning. They discuss the “bank account” of care: leaders should make regular deposits of concern, support, and empathy so that a difficult conversation draws from an existing balance of trust. Tony relates this to Radical Candor, where leaders combine care with accountability. The danger is “ruinous empathy”—caring but avoiding necessary correction. Bryan adds that “clarity is kindness.” Small problems should be addressed while they are still molehills rather than allowed to become mountains.

When employees bring bad news, Tony says the first task is to understand why and how the situation occurred, not merely react to the outcome. Bryan gives an example involving an unsecured open pit at a significant client’s job site. He initially became intense while discussing the problem, noticed that the employee in front of him was mirroring that tension, and deliberately took a walk to reconnect as humans before working through the facts and prevention steps. Both say psychological safety is not about avoiding standards; it means people can bring problems forward without the leader making them worse. Consistency matters too: employees can handle pressure or empathy more readily when they know what reaction to expect. The hosts then use Bryan’s “flight crew” analogy. A safe flight requires pilots, mechanics, maintenance staff, ground crew, and air-traffic controllers, and each role contributes differently. Tony connects this to the “right people on the bus” idea from Good to Great: attitude and cultural alignment can matter more than existing skills because skills can be taught. Leaders should help people understand how their work connects to the company’s mission and move them toward roles where they can contribute most effectively. Bryan warns against hiring or evaluating only people who resemble the leader. He gives examples of technicians whose trucks may be messy but whose technical, training, or troubleshooting abilities are exceptional. Tony identifies this as the horns-effect bias, where one negative trait eclipses all other strengths. They agree that every link—from warehouse to dispatcher to technician—can affect the customer outcome. Bryan closes with leadership commitments including truth over comfort, raising problems while they can still be fixed, looking for what may be missing, keeping doors open without gatekeeping, and putting people over plans. Tony’s final advice is to define the organization’s North Star, document the principles that produced success, live them consistently, and give yourself grace because leadership is an ongoing journey rather than a destination.