Superior Heating and Cooling

Russ Van Paepeghem studied English at Carroll College. He has a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative nonfiction from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a Master of Science in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana. He workshopped with Rebecca Solnit, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez — some of the most important writers of his generation.

He runs a heating and cooling company.

English, "the direct path to owning an HVAC business," he says with a grin.

The path was anything but direct, though Russ would tell you it all connects. The writing taught him to listen. The teaching taught him to let other people lead the conversation. The trade taught him that most things aren't as complicated as you think they are. And the combination of all three turned him into the kind of HVAC owner who says things like, "If you ask me to tell you what to put in, I've failed you."

Russ started in the trade at fourteen. He attended Bishop Kelly, a private Catholic high school in Boise, and helped pay his own tuition by working afternoons and weekends at a family-owned heating and cooling company. They rolled about thirty trucks. They covered commercial, residential, new construction, service — the full spectrum. He started as a shop laborer, fabricating ductwork, building sheet metal fittings, and breaking down old equipment for recycling.

"In retrospect," he jokes, "I think I know how I'm going to eventually perish. Probably through fiberglass inhalation."

Russ's early days in the shop, tasked with the unglamorous recycling work — stripping refrigerant, separating copper from aluminum, drilling out compressors — taught him something that shaped everything after. He was taking machines apart, and he realized that if you take something apart the same way it went together, you're going to be a lot faster. And also that it's not as complicated as you think it is.

"Which is most of life," he adds.

After high school, Russ went to Carroll College for a year, then followed his first engagement to Eugene, Oregon. He managed an HVAC shop there by the time he was twenty — a couple million dollars in inventory, feeding three crews, teaching himself manual sheet metal layout from a book someone handed him. He tried the University of Oregon. Three hundred students in a psych class. It didn't fit.

"If the center's right here," Russ says, "you'll find me on the edges."

After his marriage ended he came back to Helena on a feeling he still describes as a dream — he just knew where he needed to be. He finished his English degree at Carroll, then left for Fairbanks to pursue his MFA. Three and a half years in Alaska, teaching writing, living in the cold, finding his voice. Then Missoula for his second master's, where he sat one-on-one with writers whose books he'd studied and realized this was as close to his dream of teaching as he was going to get.

Unfortunately, the dream didn't pay well enough. Adjunct teaching meant five classes across three departments — one at the community college, two on campus, two online — scraping together enough to qualify as one full-time equivalent so he could get benefits. The pay was a fraction of the poverty line.

"You get a couple dozen rejections for tenure-track positions," he says, "and it's like, okay."

He took a literal truckload of books to Half Price Books. Kept six. Then gave himself full permission to go all in on the trade.

In retrospect, Russ sees that decision differently now. "That was just you trying to shame yourself a little bit," he says. "It's only been the last few years that I've been able to say, 'that's part of you too. And it's okay.'"

The trade had been with him the whole time. Between teaching semesters, he was subcontracting HVAC work in Missoula and for Superior Heating and Cooling back in Helena. In 2013, he went to Dave Garding, the founder, and asked to join their team officially as a partner. Dave and his wife Marybeth welcomed Russ as a partner at twenty percent — he brought his truck, and his experience. The conversation about buying them out someday started then, though neither of them knew when.

Russ went all in. He's now been with Superior for over twenty years and has owned it outright longer than he expected.

Superior Heating and Cooling was founded in 1995 and has built its reputation almost entirely in residential work — ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent of their business. Russ has deliberately stayed in that lane.

"Uncontrolled growth is cancer," he says. "If you stay in your wheelhouse, it's still going to change. You still have to learn. But you get to be really good at that thing."

What sets Superior apart isn't the equipment. It's the philosophy behind the service call. Russ made a language change years ago that shifted how his technicians approach every job. He stopped calling them "diagnostics" and started calling them "system analyses."

"If you send a tech out to do a diagnostic, guess what they're going to do? Diagnose. But if you send them to do a system analysis, they analyze the whole system."

The difference means a technician doesn't just find what's broken. They evaluate whether the system is performing at the level the homeowner paid for. A home might have a furnace rated at a hundred thousand BTUs when it only needs forty thousand. The installation might never have been properly commissioned — gas rate, temperature rise, static pressure, none of it dialed to the manufacturer's specifications. A homeowner could be sitting on a ten-thousand-dollar investment running at five-thousand-dollar performance and never know it.

Superior uses proprietary tools including LiDAR scanning to build 3D renderings of homes, then calculates precise heat load analyses rather than sizing replacements based on whatever was there before. The approach is scientific, but the delivery is personal.

"Their house, their rules," Russ says. "The first option is always do nothing. You don't have to fix it. You don't have to fix it with us. We can lend you our heat until you're ready to make a decision."

He means it. A technician who walks into a home where the furnace is down in January is walking into a household under stress. Baby on the way. Company coming. Pipes at risk of freezing. Russ wants his team to lead with listening, not selling.

"I'm not selling them anything. They're making a choice, and I'm helping them learn what their options might be. If you ask me to tell you what to put in, I've failed you. I've absolutely failed you."

HVAC technicians, Russ points out, are really technicians in five trades at once — carpentry, electrical, plumbing, refrigeration, and sheet metal. But there's a sixth that matters more than any of them.

"Psychology," he says. "Because we're in people's homes."

Being invited into someone's mechanical room — sometimes through the master bedroom closet — requires vulnerability from the homeowner and trustworthiness from the technician. That trust is earned before the first wrench turns.

The team is small right now — Russ and two technicians. He's had as many as ten, and he's learned hard lessons about the difference between giving someone a chance and protecting the business. He's working with an industry-specific coaching firm, BDR, and has built his business philosophy around a book called "Built to Sell" by John Warrillow — the idea that if you build a business valuable enough to sell, it'll run well enough that you can stay with it as a lifestyle business or walk away.

"I've got 3,500 customers that I can count as friends," he says. "I didn't realize how rewarding the relationship thing would be. Being able to take care of people for dozens of years now."

Superior has maintained a partnership with Habitat for Humanity for thirteen years — close to a hundred projects. Russ is careful about the word "proud" but he lets it slip just a little.

"They don't ask for donations. They don't ask for a cut rate. They just know that the trades are really important in those builds."

He's also a thirteen-year plot holder at the Helena Community Gardens, a 4-H supporter, and a man who trades Alaska salmon for homegrown vegetables from his neighbors.

Ask Russ for advice and he gives the same answer whether it's for a new business owner, a graduate student, or a technician on their first service call.

"It's going to change. It'll be okay. Don't fight that. Be happy about it and adapt."

He pauses, then offers his closing thought on Superior — the one he wants people to understand.

"Superior Heating and Cooling is not me. It's not these technicians. It's not even the founders. It's the people who are willing to invest in us. They keep all of us going and wanting to serve and help. They are the business."

An English major and a master-level writer who found his way to the edges of the HVAC trade and built something there. Russ Van Paepeghem doesn't live at the center. He never has. That's exactly where he thrives.