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Dr. John Sherk, owner and president of Operations Laboratory reveals all of his HVAC technician career happiness strategies, income improvements and killer tech-happiness tips and tricks so you can get ahead of the curve with your HVAC technician career. Discover how you can create a quality negotiated agreement with your manager that works for you so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love, whether it’s coaching your kids’ teams, getting out there for hunting season, or just living comfortably at home with your family. Since 2010, he’s been consulting his many HVAC clients on how to develop and manage a culture that is friendly to tech-happiness, and here he openly shares his wins, his losses, and all the lessons in between with the community of energetic but humble HVAC techs, managers, and owners who follow him. Self-proclaimed “Technician Happiness Guru” you’ll learn about getting paid what you deserve, building genuine and loyal relationships at work and at home, recruiting winners (tip: they all already work for someone else), building a tech-happy culture, quality communication, skills mastery, optimizing performance, negotiating compensation, professionalism, , and productivity tips so that you create an amazing, tech-happy life without burning yourself out. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from John you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
00:02 Welcome to the podcast, everybody. HVAC JoyLab. We're here with Norm Van Johnson out of Atlanta. Welcome Norm. Hey, how you doing today?
00:11 Doing well. Doing very well. Very well. As we're recording this, we're both, experiencing hot weather in down in South Louisiana and in Atlanta.
00:20 Hi. That's our kind of that's money making weather. So Norm, tell me, tell me your story. Tell me about you and, and your background and what you're doing.
00:32 doing these days. Okay, well, my background is we moved to Atlanta in 1979. I had never lived in the South before.
00:47 I'm from Detroit. My father was in the entertainment business It's a singer-songwriter, going big this record. So we spent most of our time in Motown.
01:02 And we moved to Atlanta, more outside of Atlanta, East Point in 79, I was 13 years old. I don't know, it took me a little while to get used to the school system.
01:16 Very, very different. And at the end of it, at 17 years old, I got my first job. My parents wouldn't let me work when I was in school.
01:29 So I graduated from high school. I got my first job as a leasing consultant. And I hated it. But it was like everybody else looked at it like a big thing.
01:42 And I kind of got into the big thing of wearing a tie carrying a briefcase and doing paperwork and I being naive I just thought you know that I had a prestigious job because I wore a tie and carry the briefcase every day at 17 years old and just start more so on my lunch breaks and stuff start dealing
02:04 with the maintenance crew and found out that they made more money, there's some of them made more money than me, which was shocking to me.
02:15 I was like, the guys in the d****** make more than the guy in the office. I was like, now how could this be?
02:24 And I said, well, I started looking into it and I asked who made the most. And I found out it was the air conditioning guy.
02:31 And I hadn't decided what I was going to do with school. I was going to go two. I had different colleges that I could have attended and decided on my own that I was going to go to a trade school and everybody, my counselors and everybody just went berserk.
02:49 They were like, your family has the means to pay for a school. Why are you taking this way out? And I was like, no, you know, being from Detroit, you know, even on my father was in music business.
03:03 Most of my friends, fathers, were mechanics, you know, at the Ford plants and we always worked on little stuff, you know, our little mini bikes and go carts.
03:14 We all had garages and we worked on stuff. And so I had mechanical skills and I enjoyed that type of work.
03:21 And so I just went down to Atlanta area tech back then and enrolled. And that was in 83. interesting. Yeah, graduating in 85 and I'm back here teaching here, I've been here at the school that graduated from for 30 years now.
03:38 Wow, that's fascinating. And then so the school you teach at is Atlanta Technical College. Atlanta Technical College, it's great. And I'm assuming you teach the the H-track.
03:49 That would be correct. I'm the chairperson of our division. And like I said, I've been here 30, 30 plus years now.
03:59 Interesting, very interesting. Well, no one let me ask you, the purpose of the podcast is to have to increase the number of conversations about technicians and what makes a great life for a technician.
04:12 One of the things I noticed over the years of doing this is technicians very often are reactive in the sense that this wasn't their grand plan for the career that they find themselves in, they get up every day when someone else tells them where they're working today.
04:29 And it, it, there's, it doesn't, it doesn't always come natural for a technician to take, to pause and say, wait, how, how am I doing?
04:39 Like, how is my life going? Is it, what should I be thinking about for the next five years that they just kind of get up and it's more like, I got a role today.
04:46 So I'm thinking about today, right? Yeah. So it with, but with that kind of perspective in mind, like, what do you feel like a technician needs or needs to prioritize, needs to focus on to live a great life as a technician?
05:02 What's interesting that you would ask that because I've been in this field, I mean, I've been teaching here for 30 years and whatever, whatever adds up from 1985, I've been out in the field for that long.
05:16 I've nothing, I do other things in life, but pain and and was taking care of the bills since that period of time has always been something close to or, you know, directly suited with air conditioning.
05:32 And I kinda like re-evaluated my, even myself after a long period of time when, you know, they bless me with the award of being one of the Esco Institute, you know, instructors for 2024 and flew out the Vegas and did that thing.
05:55 And before they, before they, before I went out there, they asked me to do a video and they asked me why I did what I did.
06:05 And so since that point, I've been talking about this HVACY, you know, why I do what I do or why are you doing what you do in the HVAC industry.
06:20 Now, I worked in apartment maintenance. As a HVAC tech, I've worked for an air conditioning company. I've been an independent contractor.
06:30 I've been an instructor. I've been a consultant. And really, you just have to, in this industry And it's really, really interesting, even with us having this conversation here, is my wife got me into length, Dan.
06:47 You know, she was like, oh, you do? I'm a, I'm a, I'm a published photographer and, and, and, and published writer.
06:58 And I was more so focusing in on my social media stuff with my hobbies. You know, on Instagram, you know, people on Instagram never knew that I was a air conditioning technician.
07:11 They thought I was a photographer. You know, I learned Johnson's a photographer. And then my wife was like, you know, you've been in this field of HVAC for so long.
07:20 You know, you should get into LinkedIn and I had tried a long time ago and since the dynamics of the Instagram and LinkedIn was so different, you know, for me, you know, I was like, it didn't work.
07:33 And then my wife said try it again, I had like five followers, you know, and I just started reaching out to people in my community, you know, just Instagram, I would take anybody as a follower.
07:46 But for my LinkedIn, I only deal with people in my industry. And it started, let me see the different things that people did, you know, and it brought me closer into this core, this core tribe group of people who did the same thing that I did.
08:05 And looking at that, now I make all of my students do LinkedIn. I say, I've got a new class coming in now this fall.
08:15 And the first thing I would say is, I know y'all do social media, but I want y'all to get a LinkedIn account.
08:21 You know, and it opens up a door when you see people who do the same thing that you do. And they're very fortunate because they get to see like a renaissance of skill trades.
08:33 You know, they get to see it when it's up at, it's really at the top right now. You know, it's just really at the top.
08:40 Well, this is a great, that's a great thing you're doing about getting your students into LinkedIn. in because you know, as a consultant and recruiting technicians, where do you go find them, you know, that's part of the question.
08:54 And the normal thinking is, you go to LinkedIn to find controls tax. You go to LinkedIn to find chiller tax.
09:01 You go to LinkedIn to find specialty stuff, you know, but your garden variety tax are not on LinkedIn. But the thing is, people still look.
09:13 And so So you're in a pool of thousands on indeed, on LinkedIn, if you're just a solid technician who wants to go out there and do residential home service, you're probably going to get more looks because people are still looking and you're not swimming with all those other people that are on indeed.
09:32 Yeah. That's a good thing that you do and it's really interesting. Yeah, and just the whole, like I said, the HVACY, you know, a lot of people get into it for different reasons.
09:48 And for the last, since we've been back from the pandemic, you know, we've partnered with a lot of big industry people here in the state of Georgia, like cousins, properties, a land apartment association.
10:04 the federal reserve, their partners with our program at the school. And when we go to tours, when we go on tours to these different locations, like we went to Cousin's property, and I don't remember his name, but you know, because we go to so many different tours.
10:23 But the CEO of this billion dollar corporation came and talked to the students. And I said, y'all looking up on LinkedIn, you know, and they couldn't believe, you know, who they were in there talking to who was really wanted to hire some of our students.
10:43 They were like, wow, this guy is like the CEO of this big company. And he does all of these different things all over the world.
10:51 And he came and talked to us and it allowed them to get a better look at But not just knowing that somebody came and talked to them, but they can look at their background and look at what they do and say that this person took out the time of the day to come and talk to us and give us a tour of his facility
11:12 and connect it with us on the LinkedIn level. So just with my students and, you know, my objective for them is whatever their goal is.
11:29 You know, if whatever your goal is, you know, I want to push you as far as you can go. But my goal is to help you reach the goal that you set out to when you signed up for this class.
11:44 Now some may not know exactly what they want to do, but we got them for a year and a half, you know, that's how long our program takes and from that I like to expose them to all the different all the different departments and all the different outlets that this industry that this industry you have like
12:07 we just attended the skills skills USA that's like when they compete you know we didn't have anybody competing because but but I took them down to the skills event at the world congress center this was just like a couple of months ago just to show them how big you know this and you know it's just not
12:28 a small thing you know when people look at skill trades and think that that is very, very, very narrow road, but it has a lot of different outlets.
12:37 You just have to pick what you want to do, what your why is in this industry. Yeah, I think one of the more under-discussed topics in HVAC is if you want to spend 10 years traveling the world, you can do it in this industry.
12:58 Yeah. I mean, I, I know guy that he commissioned systems for Siemens and he just traveled. He by the time he was down, it was like, and I'm, I need to settle down and find a wife to do all that stuff.
13:11 Yeah. But he, he's just, he wanted to travel the world and he enjoys HVAC doing, he's a controls guy now.
13:19 But he is, he hit that dream for him came true because he became a technician. Yeah, and with me, and after I got into the apartment maintenance, because I was the first job I had.
13:37 I hear it is, and it was kind of in itself was strange because I left the apartments and went to school for a year and a half, two years.
13:47 And I came back, you know, now here I am, now 19, 20 years old. with the same people who I used to be the leasing consultant with and the guys who were doing maintenance were like, wait a minute it's not the leasing consultant and now I've been to school and they were like some of them were happy for
14:08 me and some of them were kind of like wait a minute now how was he doing the same thing that we're doing after a two-year period of time and then in a short period of time I was the supervisor.
14:22 You know, so here I am now 22 23 years old and I'm the supervisor in between that 23 time I got my state contractors license.
14:33 I was one of the youngest license contractors in the state of Georgia and so here I am sitting now with credentials that they don't even have and I'm a supervisor and And I'm only like 22 years old, and I was like, where do I go from here?
14:51 And somebody told me that I had a knack to teach, you know, they were like, look man, you make this stuff really, really, really simplistic, you know.
15:02 And so the owner of the one of the first company I was working for had me teaching classes, is, which really unnerved some of the older guys, because that way, they all came back as now he's now he's teaching us on Saturdays in his, in his, in his, in his, in his lab at the, at his, at his, at his office
15:21 . And that's, I did that for about a year. And they will, I called a bug from it. I said, you know, this teaching thing, even though it's be about five, four or five years later, you know, a teaching job came available when it wasn't that many schools then.
15:41 Before I started teaching Atlanta Tech, I was teaching at another school called Interactive Learning Systems. And that was my first teaching job.
15:50 And I was doing that and running my own little independent heating and air conditioning company. So I did it part our time.
15:57 And from there, you know, I just always wanted to grow in different areas. I was like, this field is, you know, has, you know, no limits.
16:05 If you, if you, if you can dream be, I mean, because most of my teachers, because I taught in the same community where I went to high school at, and one of my teachers brought a tour through the school one day, and she was like, no, I'm a child.
16:19 So what are you taking up here? I said, no, no, no, I'm not taking anything. I'm an instructor. She was like, boy, quit playing it.
16:26 I'm like, no, I teach here. And she couldn't, she couldn't believe it. And the teaching thing just really worked for me, like I said, you know, I've, I've had pretty four, four, four presidents, you know, probably about 13 or 14 deans, and thousands and thousands of students who literally come back and
16:53 say, thank you for doing what you did, and I think that's what keeps me here, just the ability to help other people get the way they're trying to get to.
17:05 So let me ask you this. I mean, you're an instructor, so you're obviously going to lean on one side of this question.
17:10 but talk about the issue of trade school, no trade school. Like the, you know, I'm giving up a year and a half of time that I'm not really earning to go to trade school and learn a craft sort of on the classroom side.
17:28 It still hands on, but it's not really the same thing is, you know, working out there every day. Right. So sometimes I'll hear a guy say, I don't really need that.
17:38 I just need to get a job and I'll learn it. Like, what, talk to that a little bit, would you?
17:43 Well, I don't, I don't have a problem with a person who feels that way, you know, and that's a decision that an individual makes.
17:52 But if you came and asked me about it and said, hey, you know, what would be the best way to approach this?
17:59 And especially if you're young, because we're getting way younger people now, you know? And I mean, the classroom dynamics have changed.
18:07 I mean, we have high school students now, you know, that are in our programs, and one of the things, and just like you were saying, you know, trade schools, my president, Brenda Watch Jones, who was the first black female president of a technical school in Georgia, when she first took over here, when
18:27 the state took over, because when I first started teaching here was a Atlanta area tech, and it was a part of Atlanta public school system, even though it was for adults.
18:35 But when the state took it over, it made an umbrella system that all the technical schools were going to be under the same umbrella.
18:45 And from that point on, we never called them trade schools anymore. I mean, our president would go crazy. You call it Atlanta Technical College, never Atlanta area tech again.
18:55 And she would literally, in meetings, if somebody said Atlanta area tech, which is still to this very day, you know, when somebody says Atlanta area tech, I have to correct them and go Atlanta technical college.
19:08 You know, it's a technical college now. And we are vying for the same things that the colleges are vying for.
19:16 You know, right young students who, you know, want the opportunity. Now, here's the difference and I always, because even with all of our partners, you know, they come up here and they're looking for techs, you know?
19:31 And most of them come, they'll be here the first school starts in two more weeks. They'll be here the first couple of weeks of school, looking for technicians.
19:42 Now, granted, we do have a class that's getting ready to graduate, but they'll take the applications from the ones who have just started.
19:50 And my thing is to them is that this person's goal was to come here and finish this program. That's what your goal set out to be.
20:00 Now here's the pros and cons. Granny's going to take up a year and a half of your time but they're going to give you this little piece of paper that says that you went through a technical college and when you go to HR and you're working for the city of Atlanta and the managerial position comes up and
20:19 it requires that you're a graduate from a credit at technical college and you haven't done that part. You don't want to have to go back and do that.
20:33 So if we're gonna fall like dominoes, then I would put that at the front of the cart and I to even tell the people who come up here and look for people.
20:43 I say, don't take this person away and you're telling them that they can do a half day and then all of a sudden you're telling well you know that you can go on the full time now and you know you can make more money and over time all you got to do is the quit school you know those people won't be invited
21:01 back as long as we're on the same page you know and I but one thing I do also tell my students I said I don't look down on a person who learned it out in the field you know because don't don't think that you can't learn something from them.
21:17 Because they're battle tested, they learn from a different curve that you're learning from and their experience is a lot different.
21:26 If they've been doing it for 10 years and they've been out in the field, believe me, that's something that you can learn from them.
21:34 But that's just the environment that we're in. and you have options of how you want to get into it. Yeah, that's interesting.
21:46 One of the ways I talk about this on the podcast and with technicians, when I'm talking with them, the young ones is a necessary part of falling in love with the profession is a couple of years of grinding.
22:01 I call it the grind. And it doesn't matter if you went to trade school or went to technical college, sorry, or not.
22:05 But I think the grind is a little shorter if you did go to technical college, but there's no escaping it.
22:15 It's like you're going to get out there, some ways it's frustrating, because you feel like you know more than you actually know when you put your hands on an actual unit out in the field and you know, you know, the system concepts, but you know, there's troubleshooting issues that are always unique and
22:34 and there's an intuition that hasn't really developed yet and that grind is just something you got to make it through.
22:42 Yeah. It's not the first two years it won't you won't love it it won't be fun they'll be you'll have your moments but there'll be somewhere in there year three-ish and depending how complicated it is could be year four or five but somewhere around year three you'll it'll the traction will start to form
22:57 and it'll start being really fun. You day after day, it's like, oh, I had another one. You come home and tell you're spouse, oh, you should have seen this thing today.
23:05 I nailed it. I pulled the cover off and I saw this and I saw that and the pleasure of the work itself starts to kick in.
23:15 But it doesn't happen without the grind. Right. And for me, and because it's, you really, I have a good opportunity because starting this is 17 years old and when I started 17, there were notes other 17 year old in my class.
23:37 My class was all the at non-vets you know who were finishing up their GI bill who really looked out for me because they weren't really there to take the class.
23:48 They were there to get their little supplemental pay from going to school and and and their whole objective for class was a lot different for me.
23:57 And they were like, no, you're here to learn this. We're here for other reasons. We're learning it. But your, your, your outcome is going to be different from our outcome.
24:07 And I really, I'm really glad that they were in the class with me because I was 17 years old, you know.
24:13 So I'm still all my friends that got off the college. So I'm still kind of hanging around the high schools a little bit, you know, going to the football game, still hanging out with my friends or seniors you know I just graduated so I'm still in that environment so it was a little bit different you know
24:30 for me but when just looking at like you were saying the grind part of it when I finished school we didn't do much hands on back then in our lab it He was all fundamentals, you know, the refrigeration cycle, ohms law, you know, it was the fundamentals, you know, convection, radiation, you know, conduction
24:57 , you know, he transferred the things that really made it interesting to me, the science, the science behind, I even make my students watch genius, you know, the Albert Einstein's, so I said, you're going to hear him talk about conduction, convection, you know, ohms law, he talks about the same things
25:14 that you, we talk about in here because we're really heavy into science but you can do this without knowing all of that but when you know all of that it's like you're the great eyes and you know what's going on behind the scenes you know the the in-depth part about it and with it constantly changing
25:33 you know tongue here comes a new refrigerant but if you understand you know pressure your temperature relationship, you know, you can adapt to the changes faster than someone who's learned on one piece of equipment.
25:49 You know, he's been there 20 years working on the same, he knows that equipment in and out, but if he has to move somewhere else, the curve might be a little bit different.
25:59 So the fundamentals and the foundation, you know, that's the most important part because if I can get you with a solid foundation and solid fundamentals, you're trainable in any area that you're trying to make it into.
26:16 Right. And I have to think that like if we talk about a tech on residential service, you know, every residential company's got an install crew, but they have the guy who's going to catch the call.
26:29 Sometimes they have a comfort, they have a comfort advisor that's only sales, other companies they want that person to be a real technician, you know, that that person goes out.
26:39 But that if you're going to be kind of in the better paid group, you're going to have to know enough theory properly troubleshoot a system you've never seen before.
26:50 So one thing I want to say in defense of technical college is you're going to make more money faster because you're going to be on a quicker track to getting the roles that pay more and pay better.
27:03 Yes, and it's, and it's, and it's, it's you get a, you get a, a timetable to build confidence, you know, you got it, you get, you got, you, you have a laboratory that you get to go practice and, and you get to listen to different people talk about their experiences.
27:22 It kind of gives you a understanding of where you're going versus just showing up there one day. And okay, these are gauges.
27:31 You know, okay, now, you see that zero there? That doesn't see you, from there, you see a gauge with zero on it, you think empty.
27:43 You know, no, no, there's 14.696 atmospheric pounds of pressure. There's pounds per square inch absolute. You know, there's different concepts that somebody won't even think about saying to you If you're just starting that day, zero means zero, you know, there's different things that you have to, that
28:05 you get to, you get the pond, you get the pond row in your mind, whether it's me asking you a question, or there's a test on it, or just me just talking about it all every day.
28:17 it gives you an opportunity because most people, if I found that out when coming back as a 17 year old to the place where I thought that these guys were HVAC geniuses, I'm like, wait, hold it.
28:32 That's not where we learned in school, which made them want me to get away even further that we were in school.
28:39 You know, we don't have to know about that. And I'm like, you cannot blow cool air into a building. You can only remove this process of removing heat, you know, they don't know that, you know, if you didn't go to school, that's not something that strikes you first.
28:58 You know, now somebody will tell you that. Norma got my hand right here and I feel you're telling me we're not blowing cool air in this building.
29:05 Exactly. You're removing heat from the air that's coming in through this return. You know, it's going, that's the same air minus the heat, you know.
29:18 And I just just to say the comment it, the refrigeration cycle is pretty remarkable. Like it is. Conceptually, it's pretty, pretty remarkable.
29:27 I tell my students every day when we explain it to them first semester, I go, I don't know how they came up with this.
29:35 You got to understand that that these people were doing these experiments out in the woods and people were looking at them as if they were crazy, you know, because of the different concepts that they had that nobody understood.
29:48 Who understood that he traveled from high to cold? Oh, no, I went outside this morning, that cold air. You know, no, no, your body's rejecting heat faster and the granite you overwhelmed with it.
30:02 But it's still heat removal. your 97 degrees, it's 20 degrees outside, you're rejecting he is based on your insulators, you know, what you have on that day is filed whether or not you're going to stay warm enough.
30:15 And if you can get people to start, like what I want my students to look at the very, very fundamentals that they already understand.
30:27 And then ponder over, not just and go to the next thing, but think about my grandmother used to have an ice box, you know?
30:41 And even though it's a picture in the book, I'm saying I look now just piece of ice. My mother's father, my grandfather, I never met, he passed when my mother was young.
30:52 But he delivered ice, didn't even have a vehicle back then. he has some kind of beast of burden pulling a wagon to live in ice and my mother told me about that.
31:03 I was like, oh wow, that makes me a third generation air conditioning, you know, because that ice was the refrigeration at the time, you know.
31:13 And here it is, this block of ice absorbing heat in an insulated box, which made it so you didn't have to store, you can actually store food for a longer period of time.
31:26 And to know that there are people living today that had those things in their life, you know, it's not, it's not that far gone.
31:37 And with being 59 years old and talking about some of the things, you know, I tell my students that we didn't have, you know, and how advancement It's how these dis equipment and stuff is advancing now, you know, it's just advancing so fast, but it's still fundamentally sound, if you can understand the
32:00 fundamentals of it, then you can, you can, you can, you can tell how it operates. They all operate the same because of the laws of thermodynamics, you know, he transfer only goes one way.
32:13 Interesting, interesting. Well, listen, normally just about out of time, why don't you let the audience know if they want to reach out to you, if they want to, if they're in the Atlanta area, they want to consider coming taking classes from you or they want to hire you on the side as a trainer or your
32:30 set of things that you do, how do they reach out and find you? Well I'm here at Atlanta Technical College and then that's Norman Van Johnson if you're in anywhere in the metro area now we do have service areas we only we don't go but so far past 20 we're like 20 anything south of 20 is is is our area
32:54 and basically linked in Norman Van Johnson and and I'm open. I love doing things like what you're doing here when I saw that you were interested having a podcast.
33:07 I was like cool, you know, because I like that was that's been my whole platform for the last year, you know, getting a bigger visible LinkedIn.
33:20 I'm pushing this HVACY, you know, I'm looking to help technicians. I'm going to roll out a little program, a networking program called HVACY for people in this area and hopefully out of this area where I can network with them, help them get more credentials and just grow in this industry because like
33:43 we're talking about, this industry is vast and wherever you're trying to go, you know, once again, I'm interested in trying to help you get there because I like to see the person getting where they're trying to get to and go wow man we I follow what you said and I'm there and I have students come back
34:02 to talk to my my my former students come back and talk to my presence students all the time and it's just that's just a big reward but like I said Norman Norman Van Johnson you know in Atlanta Georgia and LinkedIn and Atlanta Tech and if anybody wants to reach out and just talk about air condition or
34:21 see think they might have something that would be in my wheelhouse always interested in the opportunities. Outstanding. Well, Norm, thanks for taking the time to be on the podcast.
34:31 You're making a real contribution down there and it's you're helping a lot of people get their careers gone. Well, I thank you very much and thanks for having me and it's been it's been pleasure been thinking about it all the time and actually I'm off today but I figured I'd come in anyway, you know,
34:45 I did it from my from my office at the school and you know basically we're on vacation but I really wanted to really wanted to take part in your podcast and thanks a lot.
34:55 I really appreciate it. All right well thanks a lot Norm and everybody on HVAC JoyLab. We'll see you next time.
35:03 Thank you.