According to StatsCan, only 50 percent of businesses in BC will make it past year three.
In Langley, the survival rate of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) companies is slightly longer – three generations – if your name happens to be Gandy Installations (gandyinstallations.net).
Started in 1957 by Charlie Gandy, the venerable Langley company has outlasted 10 prime ministers and 10 BC premiers.
Chuck Gandy, the current Gandy custodian, says the secret to success for the 54-year-old company is remarkably simple: treat your customers like gold.
“When I was 19, I worked a short while at Safeway, and it was drilled into my head about the importance of customer service and customer satisfaction,” says Chuck, 52. “I really took those principles to heart and brought them to the company when I started working full-time for my dad.”
Chuck recalls hanging out at the store when he was five years old, but wasn’t put to work until he was 10, folding “S” pipes for piecework.
When Chuck took over the reins of the company in 1987 there were only two employees. Today there are 60. And the company continues to grow at 10 percent a year – rain, shine or recession – under Chuck’s watch.
“My dad was real old-school. He just expected people to remember who we were,” Chuck says. “I had a little more of a marketing mind. One of the first marketing tricks I tried was putting stickers on the furnaces. We started immediately getting a lot of referrals that way.”
Over the years Chuck has tried to mix up the marketing mix even more.
“We do Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising, but there’s a real cap on how much you can grow with those,” he says. “We also tried the Vancouver Giants hockey team for a couple of years.”
According to Chuck, word-of-mouth about great service is Gandy’s greatest growth driver.
“I would say 50 percent of our growth is that way,” Chuck says. “We treat our customers fairly and honestly.
“And I’d say we hire people based on their moral fibre as much as on their talent. We hire good people to do a good job and to treat everyone fair. In fact, if I ever caught one of my employees selling something to a customer they didn’t need, I would fire them on the spot.”
According to Chuck, in Langley, his industry is unregulated. Anyone can hang a shingle that says they do HVAC work.
“It’s kind of ironic, but when others do unscrupulous work, we actually benefit because we’re the opposite. Often we’ll ending fixing their mistakes.”
So dedicated is Chuck to the notion of customer service that he deliberately slowed the growth of the company in 1998 because growth was getting ahead of doing good work.
That’s not to say that every move has been a success. In the ’90s, Gandy tried expanding into retail with a fireplace showroom. It was soon evident that this wouldn’t be a strength of the company’s, and he made a hasty retreat.
The survival of any family business often comes down to Darwinism and math. You have to produce enough offspring to get one who is interested to take over the business. Then he or she has to be competent enough to not run the ship ashore.
Chuck, who has two sisters, was always interested in the customer-service part of the job.
“The hero part of doing service work appealed to me,” he says. “I got hooked on helping people out, often in emergency situations.”
And his son Taylor, 25, is being groomed to take over the business. Taylor has the interest and the technical-skills part of the job down. Now he is learning the management side of the business.
“I started with Gandy as a parts driver when I was a teenager. I really enjoyed the guys who worked here,” Taylor says. “I did a brief stint at Zellers when I was 19, but knew that I wanted to work in the family business.”
Taylor spends his days working at Gandy as a lead technician, and taking night school business classes to prepare him for the day when he will take over.
As far as a fourth generation? There are no guarantees in this Darwinian world, but Taylor and Chuck are certainly hoping for it.