Nearly 50 years ago, The Colony, Texas, a newly incorporated town of just 5,000 residents located 30 miles north of Dallas, was beginning to find its identity. Among its very first businesses was a small HVAC company founded by Larry Everett: Colony Air Conditioning & Heating. At a time when commercial development was scarce, and there was only one air conditioning contractor in town, Colony AC opened its doors with a simple mission: serve its neighbors well. Nearly five decades later, it remains one of the community’s few surviving founding businesses, still family-owned and operated under the same ownership.
After learning the HVAC trade from his father, Larry spent six years building a small five-person company before a blind date introduced him to his future wife, Kathy. What began as a lifelong marriage also became the foundation of a business partnership that would eventually lead to ACCA’s 2026 Residential Contractor of the Year honor.
While Larry focused on customers, technicians, and building strong relationships throughout the industry, Kathy built the company from the inside out. She managed the office, stayed on top of emerging industry trends and best practices, and cultivated the reputation for professionalism and customer care that quickly spread throughout the close-knit community.
Today, that partnership has become a true second-generation business. Their daughter, Elaine, serves as Operations Manager, while their son, Bryan, is a Senior Technician. Together, the family has helped guide Colony Air Conditioning & Heating through a period of remarkable growth, with company revenue increasing 182% over the past decade.
What 7,689 perfect reviews prove
The most concrete evidence of what Colony has built over the past five decades shows up in its more than 7,689 online reviews — a perfect 5.0 rating with nearly 100% of them tracked by employee name.
Kathy frames this as an accountability system rather than a marketing achievement. “We wanted to make sure the right employees received recognition for truly ‘wowing’ customers,” she says. “Every review is read aloud to the entire team at our staff meetings. The goal isn’t to broadcast the score, but rather it’s for the technician who made someone’s day to hear about it in front of their peers.”
That kind of reputation comes from what Kathy describes as a shift in philosophy, which she traced back to a single book. Years ago, she read Customers for Life by Carl Sewell, and it changed something in how she thought about disagreements with customers.
“Earlier in my career, I sometimes felt the need to defend what was ‘rightfully ours,’” she says. “But Sewell’s philosophy was different: within reason, take care of the customer, don’t argue over the small stuff, and do it cheerfully.”
That mindset eventually became part of Colony’s operating philosophy. Earning and maintaining a perfect 5.0 customer rating isn’t left to chance. It’s the result of a deliberate commitment to consistency. Detailed process checklists, phone scripts tailored to different customer situations, and internal quality-control procedures help ensure that no customer falls through the cracks. If a technician is running behind schedule, the customer is notified before they ever have to wonder where help is. On the technical side, major diagnoses, such as compressor or TXV failures, are routinely verified through an internal second-review process before recommendations are presented, providing customers with confidence that significant repair decisions are accurate, thoroughly evaluated, and made in their best interest.
That standard hasn’t loosened now that their children help run the place. “Being the boss’ son means you know your work will be held to a high standard at all times,” Bryan says. “At first that was intimidating, but as I matured, I became accustomed to it.”
The people who stay
Ask Kathy what the award recognizes, and she doesn’t point to the trophy case. “More than anything, the award reflects the efforts of our entire team, past and present,” she says. “My husband may have started the company, but Colony’s success has always depended on dedicated employees who genuinely care about doing right by customers every day.”
For Elaine, “This recognition feels less about a trophy and more about validation of all those years of showing up, worrying, learning, and pushing to be better meant something.”
Their employees tend to stay. Many have been at Colony for 10 to 20-plus years. David Whitson, service manager, has a plain explanation for why. “When you treat people with real respect and fairness consistently, not just when it’s convenient, they stop looking for the exit,” he says. “They put down roots.”
Respect for their employees is also built into the daily schedule, not just the sentiment. Colony scrapped the traditional “hell week” on-call rotation: one tech carrying a full week of nights and a weekend in favor of manageable shifts spread across the month. The logic, David says, is simple: a tech who got a decent night’s sleep takes better care of a customer than one who’s been up since 2 a.m.
The company’s pay structure removes another pressure point entirely. Colony technicians are hourly, full-time employees. “When a tech is working on commission, there’s always pressure to sell in the back of his mind that sometimes has nothing to do with what’s best for the customer,” says Whitson. “The only question our techs have to ask themselves is: what does this customer actually need? How can I help this customer? Homeowners pick up on that. They’re not being sold to, they’re being taken care of.” While technicians aren’t compensated through repair commissions, Colony offers competitive pay along with performance-based bonuses and incentives that recognize excellence in areas such as customer service, workmanship, quality, and overall contribution to the team. The goal is to reward technicians for doing the right thing — not simply for selling the most.
Protected togetherness
Most HVAC companies keep technicians in the field, eating lunch near their next call, which is efficient and makes sense, but Colony has leveraged their small service area with a population of about 750,000 and densely packed with homes to allow them to do something else: technicians are allowed to come back to the office, a.k.a. clubhouse, for lunch when feasible. “Those moments matter more to enhance our culture than people realize,” Elaine says. “As leaders, it gives us a real pulse on our team. Growth is exciting, but culture is what sustains it. Over the years, I’ve found that the hardest part about culture is protecting it while adding structure. When you’re smaller, culture happens organically because everyone is close together. As you grow, you have to become intentional about preserving what made people want to work there in the first place.”
Office Manager/HR Specialist and 20-year employee, Michelle Bettarelli, says that company gatherings and parties, whether on-site or off-site, are a highlight for her. “They bring everyone together and remind us how lucky we are to work in a place that values connection and fun as much as hard work.”
Pink shoe covers at the door
One of Elaine’s first initiatives when she joined the company was an awareness campaign inspired by Kathy’s own battle with breast cancer, which has now become an annual tradition every October, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Elaine came up with “Real Techs Wear Pink,” a campaign to bring attention and fundraising efforts to support the very breast cancer organizations that Kathy benefited from during her diagnosis and treatment.
For the past 12 years, in October, Colony Air Conditioning & Heating technicians show up to homes across North Texas in pink shirts, hats, and shoe covers. They’ve appeared on pink-themed billboards. The campaign has its own website. No marketing company created it, Elaine quickly points out. It came from a family experience that became a company expression, the way most things do at Colony.
The team has always looked forward to the campaign, “To see our tough, manly technicians proudly embrace the campaign and proudly wear pink was incredibly meaningful,” says Elaine. “They weren’t just supporting breast cancer awareness. They were honoring my mom, their boss, and rallying around something that mattered to our family.”
The calls they keep turning down
The HVAC industry has been consolidating for years. Private equity has moved through it methodically, buying up much of the competition across the country. Colony gets approached regularly, but they’ve never seriously considered it.
The reason isn’t simply preserving a family legacy. Independence is what makes accountability real. “There’s no hiding behind a corporate structure,” Kathy says. “You feel every mistake personally.” When the business and the family are the same thing, every customer experience reflects on your reputation and the values you hope to pass on to the next generation.
The next generation sees it the same way. “We’ve seen longtime competitors sell, and the speed with which their priorities shift toward growth targets and investor returns is shocking,” Elaine says. “Remaining independent gives us the freedom to make decisions based on people, not quarterly expectations, and frankly, I want us to keep proving that family-owned companies can still innovate, compete, and lead.”
However, “independent” has never meant isolated. Colony has been an ACCA member since 1988, and Kathy served on the North Texas chapter board in 2010 and 2011. Larry says, “Back when we first became involved, local best-practice groups weren’t nearly as common as they are today.” The local chapter gave them a place to learn from others’ successes and challenges instead of figuring out everything alone.
Elaine remembers what that commitment looked like from a kid’s eye view. One night a month, her parents dropped her and Bryan at a drop-in daycare so they could attend the ACCA chapter meeting together. “At the time, I probably didn’t think much of it,” she says. “But now, as a busy mom of little ones myself, I understand it very differently. They weren’t attending out of obligation. They believed in learning and staying connected to the industry.”
On any given day in North Texas, a Colony Air Conditioning & Heating technician pulls into a customer’s driveway carrying more than tools. They carry the reputation Larry and Kathy Everett have spent nearly five decades building. A reputation built one customer, one employee, and one promise kept at a time, and one their children are now entrusted with carrying forward.
“It’s very humbling to have nearly 50 years of hard work recognized by our industry,” Larry says. “There have been plenty of highs and lows over the years, and success took a lot of determination by all of us. This award isn’t just a reflection of where we are today; it’s confirmation that staying true to our values, learning from our challenges, and never losing sight of the customer was the right path for us all along.”
Nominations for ACCA 2027 awards are open until November 30 at www.acca.org/awards.
This article was originally featured in the Summer 2026 edition of ACCA Now Magazine. ACCA members can read the full magazine at https://hvac-blog.acca.org/magazine/.
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