Connect with Tim on Linkedin – FALTA AÑADIR ENLACE DE LINKEDIN
Three Careers, One Industry
My name is Tim DeStasio, and I’m an HVAC consultant, trainer, and designer. I’ve been in the trades since the late 90s — close to thirty years now. It’s all I’ve ever done in my adult life. I started in commercial and industrial, but now I’m mostly in the residential space.
I tend to think of my career in three chapters. My first HVAC career was as a commercial and industrial service technician. I came up learning from senior techs, worked on hospitals, chillers, data centers, manufacturing plants. About ten years in, I was a lead tech, running jobs and managing customers.
Around 2010, I started feeling the pull to do things my way and started my second HVAC career: my own contracting business. I bought the tools, the vehicles, got licensed, and within a few months of going on my own, I had more work than I could handle. By the end of my first summer, I’d hired my first employee. I ran that company for about ten or eleven years, through good years and bad ones. During the pandemic, I got a buyout offer from a local owner and accepted. I worked through my one-year transition, and then started my third career as a consultant, residential systems designer, and trainer.
A North Carolina Upbringing
I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. My mom is from Ecuador, my dad is from Brooklyn, so I have an interesting cultural background — born and raised in the South, but not raised as a Southerner. My friends were Southerners, though, so I adopted a lot of that culture.
My dad was blue-collar — facilities maintenance at AT&T Communications. My parents always emphasized that a trade was as good as a college path, if not better, especially if you didn’t end up using the degree. I started taking HVAC and electronics classes at a vocational school during high school — get bused over in the morning, do trade classes, then back to my regular high school in the afternoon. By the time I got to community college, I had college credits already and finished my associate’s degree in HVAC technology pretty quickly.
What Surprised Me About Construction
What surprised me the most was that construction is incredibly chaotic. It is a miracle how buildings get built with the lack of communication and lack of organization that goes into it. I had grown up in a regimented home — everything had a schedule, everything had a place. Construction was a free-for-all. That was a huge adjustment.
It wasn’t just the operational side — it was being around the people, the way they communicated, the way they joked, the posters in the construction trailers. I came from a Christian household, so I had to be really careful in my twenties not to absorb some of the more colorful characters’ habits. Those years can shape who you become.
The Hair Salon Parrot
I told this one at an HVAC School Symposium and it always gets a reaction. I was working as a commercial tech and got sent to a little hair salon. There was an HVAC unit on the roof and a return grille down below. With all the towels and laundry in a salon, lint collects on the grille and restricts airflow. I wanted to be conscientious, so I figured I’d vacuum it off with my portable shop vac.
What I forgot is that a shop vac has a detachable air filter. If you detach the filter, you’re not collecting the lint — you’re just blowing it out the back end of the vacuum. I’m up on a ladder doing this during business hours, with the salon full of customers. Right below where I’m working, there’s a beautiful parrot in a cage. I’m vacuuming away thinking I’m doing a great job until the lady starts tugging on my pant leg. ‘Sir, sir, you’re throwing dust all over the place.’ I looked down and the shop vac had painted the entire room in lint. The parrot — that beautiful colorful parrot — was completely gray.
I came back a few months later for the next preventative maintenance and the parrot was gone. I asked the salon owner, afraid of what she’d say. ‘Oh, he’s at home — the health department said I couldn’t keep a parrot in the salon.’ The lesson? Always check your shop vac.
Educator, Not Influencer
I make a lot of educational videos — YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. I did a series called Psychrometric Saturdays — fifty-two episodes, a year of weekly training on psychrometrics. I also do humor videos where I’ll take something wildly inaccurate that someone posted and use it as a teaching moment.
I don’t like the word influencer. When people hear that word, they think of someone pushing a product they’re getting paid to advertise. That’s not what I do. I don’t take sponsorships. Every now and then I’ll feature a product, but I’m not compensated — I feature it because I believe in it and the company behind it does things the right way. I’m not an influencer. I’m an educator. The product mentions come because the right method requires the right tool, and when both exist, I share both.
In 2025 I was honored with HVAC Tactical’s Mentor of the Year award. People reach out to me on DMs asking for advice, and I try to give it as best I can with the time I have. In February 2026 I had the honor of presenting that year’s Mentor of the Year award to the new winner.
What the Industry Is Getting Right — And What It Isn’t
We’re finally attracting young people the right way and making the trades cool. We’re attracting more women, which the industry desperately needs — women are half the population and the trades are in a huge people deficit. In my experience, women tend to be more trainable and conscientious in this work. There’s still bad culture in places, but it’s improving.
What we’re getting wrong, especially in residential, is the epidemic of turning technicians into salespeople. A residential tech shows up dressed like a tech, with ladders on the truck and a tool bag — and their actual job is to upsell. They’re paid on commission. They have to do it. And with private equity moving into the space, financial goals are being put ahead of craftsmanship and ethics. There’s a very narrow middle ground where you can run a profitable HVAC business and still be ethical. We’re not getting that right.
A lot of trainers in this space — you can tell their sole purpose is to turn people into salespeople, not into diagnosticians. We’re giving scripts instead of technical training. That’s a path I push back on, sometimes with humor, sometimes head-on. It’s the tool I have to fight back.
The Jar, the Rocks, and the Sand
I reached balance, but I wasn’t always balanced. One of the reasons I sold my contracting company was that I had given too much to the business and not enough to my health, my family, my faith. When I started my third HVAC career, I decided I would not have employees. I’d run a consulting business, set hard limits on how much I work, and price accordingly.
I take enough work to keep me busy two and a half days a week. The other time goes to volunteer work and family. To make that work, I have to charge a lot — and I had to remind myself why. For me, that’s been a much better path. I’m not down in the trenches fighting for jobs that don’t pay.
My analogy for balance — and I didn’t invent this one — is the jar. You can fill a jar with big rocks, smaller rocks, and sand. If you fill it with sand first, there’s no room for anything else. The big rocks have to go in first: faith, family. Then work — that’s a medium-sized rock, necessary but second. Then the sand: recreation, fun. We all get the same twenty-four hours. Put them in the right order or it won’t all fit.
Faith
Spirituality is the most important thing in my life. I’m a Bible reader. I teach the Bible as part of my volunteer work, and I help design, construct, and maintain houses of worship. When I start to falter in my spirituality, in my routine, everything else starts to crumble — my marriage suffers, my decisions at work get worse. It all flows from putting the most important thing first.
Advice for the Next Generation
Persevere. Nothing in this life is easy, and the trades aren’t easy either — but they’re rewarding. When you start out as an apprentice, you might be making the same money as someone in fast food. But unlike fast food, the trades will quickly take you somewhere. If you prove yourself, you can own your own business within a few years and be very successful.
Don’t look at the near term. Look at the long term. Set goals, big ones and small ones. Goals are your GPS — without them, you’re aimlessly wandering. Be intentional. The people who do that are the ones who make a success of the trade.