Catherine Bares

As a Service Coach and Trainer, Catherine has over 20 years of HVAC experience, with 19 years focused on service operations & sales. 

Hired as a seasonal summer employee for a business where everyone does everything, Catherine worked directly with the owner to grow his company into an award-winning, process-driven, customer-focused business from $700,000 to $4 million in revenues. She has held numerous positions over the years: dispatcher, commercial maintenance sales representative, service manager, marketing director, sales manager, and general manager, before pursuing her dream of coaching others at BDR. 

While service is her passion, Catherine has proven total-company operations knowledge and her ability to manage, coach, and inspire. In her capacity as a service dispatcher and service manager, Catherine generated many achievements: 

• Increased service tech efficiency through dispatching skills and techniques.
• Installed BDR’s 8-for-10 Performance Program – designed to track and drive service tech efficiency.
• Installed and refined an Accessory Sales Program designed to increase service profit by a minimum of 25%.
• Increased pricing as growth allowed service delivery to improve and consistently meet the budget for the service department.
• Maintained a minimum-average-annual service technician efficiency rating of 6.4+ billable hours per day.
• Built a preventive maintenance contract base from less than 100 contracts to over 1000+ contracts.

These accomplishments, among others, enabled Catherine to reduce the service tech headcount by 25% while increasing call counts and revenue generated. Her practical leadership skills were reflected in stable and dependable employees with high morale. 

Catherine worked directly with the owner on strategy, planning & budgeting, HR, and Marketing. As such, she built her company’s business plan using BDR’s Profit Launch program for seven straight years. She has also been coached in BDR’s Profit Coach and Service Coach programs for 12 years. She has attended several BDR business management classes, including Service Dispatch University (which she now teaches), Managing & Growing Service Profitably, Commercial Maintenance Sales, and others.

Catherine led marketing and PR and was the local spokesperson for her former company. Her PR efforts gave her many professional successes: 

• Training Member of the Louisiana Heat Pump Association for 2014-2015, where she developed and conducted member training classes on dispatching customer service and marketing strategies. 
• She was an award presenter at the annual Louisiana Heat Pump Association banquet. 
• Her employer hired and trained a true rarity – a female service technician – who was NATE certified and a top employee performer. Catherine leveraged this into national and local press coverage, driving positive press and community awareness for her employer and team, leading to that female service tech being featured in HVACR/Hydronics Distribution Business magazine as one of the Top Women in HVACR. 
• Her marketing strategy and execution drove an average of 107 new monthly customers for two fiscal years.

Catherine understands business planning, job costing, financial reporting, and HVAC-specific performance metrics. She manages by the numbers and knows how to structure incentive plans that benefit the company and employees while protecting the company.