Running a family heating and cooling business

Running a family business is a tricky business.  Especially an HVAC business with a bunch of very strong personalities involved.  My dad, my mom, and their business partner started David White Services in 1977.  Now almost 35 years later it is a thriving business with two offices, in Athens and Lancaster, serving the majority of southeastern Ohio and parts of West Virginia.  So many counties, so many towns like Logan, Jackson, Gallipolis, and Canal Winchester to name just a few of the seemingly hundreds of great communities that we love.

I was only 3 years old when the business began and some of my earliest memories are sitting at a little desk with my own adding machine, crayons, and paper above C&E hardware on Richland Avenue in Athens.  And now my husband works here, my sister and her husband both work here and our eldest children, 13 & 10, both think they'd love to stay in the family business.  And my three year old is currently sitting at a computer watching cartoons on Netflix coloring with her own crayons & paper at the desk next to me.

The best part of working with my family is I have a real feeling of belonging and community.  I used to hate, when I was younger and searching for my own identity, being "David White's daughter."  But now I love it.  My parents are cool and well respected and I am Ohio all the way through.  A Buckeye, a Bobcat, a small town, midwest girl.

The decisions they made when I was too young to know what was happening, I'm proud to be now carrying on to the next generation.  Long ago they decided to work mainly with residential service, not with new construction and commercial.  This suits my personality perfectly.  Instead of working with big companies and bureaucracies, we work with our neighbors, our community, our friends.  We take care of their furnaces and air conditioners and heat pumps.  Their stoves and their fireplaces.  We truly are hearth and home.  And having done so for so many years, we are now taking care of second generation and third generations, both their homes and their small businesses.

When I'm at my house, with my own kids, I really do ponder all the other people in the surrounding counties, that are also snowed & snuggled in, in front of their fireplaces and with their heat pumps and furnaces chugging away, and I'm happy to have played a part, even a tiny part, in their comfort.

And I won't dwell on the bad parts of a family business.  I'll just say my parents raised my sister and I to be honest in our opinions, and as long as we said it respectfully we were allowed to say whatever we wanted.  So you can imagine that we grew up with very strong opinions that we aren't afraid to share.  Good thing they raised us with great senses of humor and the knowledge of the power of an apology.

The whole brood: courtesy of Morristowne Photography