HVAC Industry Veteran Talks About Learning Opportunities

Dennis Baumgart is vice president of technical services for AirTight FaciliTech. He’s worked in the HVAC field for almost 50 years. He shares great insights on why the field and specifically ServiceLogic offer so many fulfilling opportunities for young people. 

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In high school I went to a vocational school half the day. I was involved in three separate classes. One of them was carpentry and masonry. Another one was heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration. And then the third was plumbing and electrical. My plan was to go into carpentry, which is what my father did. But once I got into the heating and air conditioning, I found out that I enjoyed it much much more. I just fell in love with it — I realized that was the way I wanted to go.

The way I met Greg was I worked for a company called McKinney's. Greg was an employee there, but he was from the Atlanta branch and we built a quite a relationship and friendship and he decided to start his own company. I went with him, and that's where the beginning of AirTight was. 

When we started we had no contracts — nothing. It was kind of a scary time for me. All we had were two trucks! So our first day we just went around, meeting different people telling them about our company and where we wanted to go. On the second day, we ended up getting our first service call. It was an exciting time!

Working for ServiceLogic gives us so many opportunities. ServiceLogic promotes a lot of education, so it's a great opportunity for employees to progress. I get the opportunity to train and to teach and to mentor. I received all those things from other people, so now it's a time to give back. 

Our industry is constantly changing and we always have to be on that curve of learning and progressing. With the new educational devices that are out there, it opens up so many new avenues. With VR [virtual reality], it gives us that opportunity to actually see what someone else is looking at from off-site and understand what needs to be done. 

My retirement, it's coming soon. I've been in the field for 46 years. I look forward to the new journey that we're going to take. We want to do a little bit of farming and and raising of livestock and things like that. 

From Nate Morse, service manager, AirTight FaciliTech: 

“Denny Bumgart has been many things to me over the years. He's been a mentor, a supervisor, teacher, and a friend. Training the younger generations of technicians has always been a very important part of the way that Denny works."

From Bruce Wright, projects coordinator, AirTight FaciliTech:

"Denny, congratulations on your retirement and thank you for everything that you have done for us as a company, for us as a group, and for me personally."

Denny's parting words on the subject of work:

My advice to everyone comes in with two words. Be good. Be good to the company. Be good to your fellow technicians, to your customers, be good to your families, to your friends. For new people who are starting out, understand that it's a long road and it's a good journey. [This line of work offers] many different great possibilities of where you can go and what you can do. 

I tell them to keep your eyes open, think about what you like to do and how you want to get there.