The Story Behind The Howards.
Kathryn Pollock
Formerly Kathryn Howard, Kathryn was not always the stellar operator of a 50 million dollar + operation running through the heart of California. She had a troubled past and started at the absolute bottom. She was serving coffee at a Dunkin Donuts and had her first child at 16 years old.
Kathryn later became a 5-time convicted felon and at one point was facing 20 years to life in prison. She ended up getting out and started to turn her life around. She attended HVAC school and later, attended the Stanford executive education program and specialized in finance.
Against his better judgement, her brother Tom offered her a job setting up a call center in the country of Armenia. She took the job in a heartbeat and moved there to set up the team. She lived there for 5 months trained the team in her biggest strong suit, sales. The team in Armenia now answers the phones for Lee’s Air out of Fresno California. They start answering at 7pm California time and then the continue to answer until 2 pm California time the following day. This allows the Californian based call center to have double coverage from 7 AM to 2 PM which is when Lee’s experiences the biggest spike in call volume. When she left Armenia, 6 of the call center agents had an 80% booking rate or higher. It was a stellar launch and continues to prove to be one of Lee’s Air’s most profitable assets.
After coming back to the United States, Kathryn began working for another one of Tom’s companies managing a call center and later was promoted to Service Manager. She later went into sales where she held a close rate of over 55% for marketed leads, which usually have the lowest closing rates in the industry.
Kathryn eventually went to Lee’s Air Plumbing and Heating. She became general manager and the main location in Fresno California, was around 27 million in annual revenue when she took over and it is currently on pace for 54 million in revenue in the first year under her leadership. She now holds an equity stake in the company and has been instrumental in revamping the sales compensation plans, reorganizing the call center, and drastically improving profitability.
Tom got his start in the HVAC industry when he was 15 years old working for the refrigeration repairman that lived a couple miles away. He would ride his bike after school to the shop and sweep floors and clean out the trucks that came in after a long day. That quickly progressed into being an install helper and then installer and basic service technician. He graduate from a tech school in Air Conditioning when he was still attending college. He later went on to serve a mission for his church for two years in the country of Hungary and then went on to get a bachelors of Science in Management specializing in Finance at Brigham Young University
After graduating, he tried his hand being a financial analyst and working at a law office and didn’t care for either one of those professions and came back to the industry where he took a job as a GM of Lee’s Air in Fresno California where he had worked for a bit before attending BYU. After a year of being the GM, the owner of Lee’s offered to sell the company to Tom and offered to allow Tom to make payments to him to pay off the company.
Later, Tom went on to purchase companies in Arizona, Texas, Nevada, and several others in the state of California.
While working on his companies, Tom became an early user of ServiceTitan. It is the leading software provider for trades businesses across the United States and has recently moved in Australia. Tom was approached by ServiceTitan and was asked to be the voice of the customer at the company. Tom currently serves as a Vice President at ServiceTitan full time while overseeing his companies. Each of his companies is managed by a General Manager including, his largest company, Lee’s air which is currently managed by his sister, Kathryn Pollock. They have their good days and their bad days as you may hear about on the podcast and but the growth of that company is not short of exceptional.
Tom resides in Las Vegas Nevada and is the father to four wonderful sons that are the pride of his life.
