Meet Kurt Hudson, ACCA’s new chair

ACCA in mid-March announced its 2026-2027 Board of Directors.

What’s happening: Kurt Hudson has stepped into the role of chair, taking the reins from Eddie McFarlane of Sila Services.

• Hudson is president of Boston-based LC Anderson, Inc., a commercial HVAC business that he and his brother took over from their father in 2013. It was named the 2020 ACCA Commercial Contractor of the Year, and last fall joined FirstCall Group, a private equity-backed platform. 

Catch up quick: “I kind of grew up in the HVAC industry,” Hudson told Homepros on a recent call. His father worked for Carrier before buying his own contracting business in 1995 at age 55. 

• The family looked to ACCA for guidance, and after attending its national conference in 2000, Hudson joined one of the association’s MIX Groups — peer groups of non-competing contractors who share open-book financials and critical business issues, which he has called “the best secret of ACCA.” 
• A contractor in Colorado “really took me under their wing, because we didn’t have much of a service division,” he said. “They were all service. And I had so much to learn. [They said], ‘Just come out and hang out here for two or three days. We’ll show you everything. We’ll let you go deep in our business, and maybe we’ll go skiing for a day.”
• Peers from the MIX group, he added, became “our board of advisors and some of my closest friends over the years.”

State of play: LC Anderson has grown to roughly $30 million in annual revenue with about 75 employees. “We were as high as $41 million, but we were doing a lot of construction,” Hudson said. 

• After implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), the business shifted, he noted, to a “smaller, leaner, more profitable, more sustainable, more steady state that we can actually plan and not have these huge peaks and valleys that we sometimes went through before.” 

What we’re watching: After volunteering on ACCA committees, Hudson moved on to ACCA’s executive leadership track, serving as treasurer and senior vice chair before taking the lead role this year. His priorities as chair include updating ACCA’s strategic plan, strengthening government affairs, and recruiting more commercial HVAC contractors to the organization.

• “One of the things the association can do for us is get on Capitol Hill and try to talk to people and say, ‘Look, all of us are very committed to protecting the environment, but we have to do it in a staged, systematic way,” he said. 
• “So, if we’re phasing out one refrigerant [and] bringing a new one in, we give time for the regulations to catch up, for the supply chain to catch up, for it to be done on a neat and orderly basis,” he added.   

Go deeper: ACCA has endorsed the Employer Directed Skills Act, a bill that would reimburse contractors for training new employees, and the Energy Choice Act, which would effectively prohibit state and local governments from imposing natural gas bans. 

What they’re saying: “Since I’ve gotten into the industry, we’re always pushing workforce… making funding dollars available,” Hudson said. “Being in Massachusetts, I can’t tell you how difficult it is to get apprenticeships done [because of required journeyman-to-apprentice ratios]. 

• Hudson is a “huge proponent of high efficiency equipment,” but suggested that some regulations, like the Department of Energy’s 95 percent efficiency rule for gas furnaces, may not make sense in practice. 
• “There’s so much talk about forcing efficiency of equipment,” he said. “I totally understand, but we overlook a lot of the installation quality versus if you force the box to get better. It doesn’t matter if you don’t install it correctly. And ACCA focuses on that a lot: The equipment can’t solve all the problems.” 

Looking ahead: Hudson encourages contractors to get more involved with the association, highlighting some of its perks, including position-specific training classes. “Like most things in life,” he said, “you’ll get as much out of it as you’re willing to commit and put into it.”

• Of note: Kate Wessels, a VP at ACCA, said the organization has about 3,000 member companies encompassing 40,000 to 60,000 professionals across the country. 

Fun fact: It is pronounced ACK-uh (rhymes with “back”), not Ah-ka! “Some people say [the letters] A-C-C-A,” said Wessels.