Growth has been the McAfee story for a while. About three years ago, he bought a building originally built for Miami Computer Supply store at 4750 Hempstead Station Drive. McAfee basically moved next door, tripling his square footage and allowing him to consolidate a number of functions under one roof — warehousing, training and custom sheet metal work.
The business has 45 employees today. By far, most of what McAfee does — 95 percent, in fact — is residential work, installation and repairs, including air duct cleaning. He still has an sheet metal shop in house for custom duct work, for himself and other area companies.
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“I’d still be in a garage if I didn’t have a strong team,” McAfee said.
McAfee started his business in 1990, and he added air duct cleaning as a service just three years later. The move made sense because customers started asking about the service.
“We were having several calls for air duct cleaning, and we didn’t do it,” McAfee recalled.
He found a used air duct cleaning truck out of state and refurbished it.
The idea isn’t complicated. The average home today can build up two to three pounds a year of dust in the duct work, McAfee said. “A lot of it you’re not going to see from the original register, but on down in near the trunk line where it actually settles, it can be inches thick of dust.”
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So far this year, business is up. Privately held McAfee says revenue is up 15 percent from last year. “And last year was a good year,” he noted.
He attributes growth to active foundation and community work, steady marketing and spending about six to eight percent of gross revenue into advertising into TV and radio.
And profits are always invested back into the business, he said.
“All my profits are reinvested,” McAfee said. “That’s why I can write a check for two trucks.”
He has an acronym for what he says people are breathing when they buy a home — “OPD” or “other people’s dust.”
McAfee recommends the duct-cleaning service — which costs an average of about $400 — every three to five years. When the approximately four-hour job is completed, air flow should be improved, he said.
Since 1993, the company has probably gone through half a dozen air duct service trucks.
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The new trucks are Pringle-brand gas-powered trucks, made in Ohio. (Pringle Co. is based in Malinta, Ohio.)
Many younger workers can’t drive standard-shift, so these new trucks offer automatic transmissions, McAfee said.
“We actually have to have classes on how to drive a standard shift before we can put someone in other trucks,” he said. “These are automatics.”
The company started out serving customers within a 15-mile radius in the early 1990s. Today, McAfee serves a 25-mile radius, and he said expanding to a 30-mile radius is under careful consideration.
Nationally, growth is expected in the HVAC industry. The number of heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers is expected to grow by 15 percent by 2026, according to the Department of Labor. The 2018 median pay for the industry was $22.89 per hour or $47,610 a year.
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