Meet the Contractor: Owen Krebs Grimsich, 1-888-Heat-Pumps

After spending seven years in Ecuador, where he taught math and set up a football league, Owen Krebs Grimsich returned home to Berkeley, California. 

He quit a teaching job there — with nothing else lined up — because “I had a radiating energy throughout me that was telling me something big was going to happen,” he recalled in a conversation with Homepros. 

What’s happening: Grimsich is now owner and CEO of 1-888-Heat-Pumps, which serves the East Bay region of the Bay Area and has grown to over $6 million in revenue in roughly four years. 

• He’ll be speaking at the US Heat Pump Summit in Massachusetts on September 16.

Catch up quick: In 2023, Grimsich was selling solar door-to-door when he was introduced to a New York investor who thought there was potential to build a billion-dollar heat pump company in California. 

• Grimsich said he “didn’t know what a heat pump was” and declined to join the investor, but started researching the industry. He took all of his personal savings — $6,000 — and went to school at Alabama-based Champion Technician Institute for a month. He also trained under an HVAC mentor and his father, a general contractor.   
• Along with two friends — who each kicked in $1,000 — he set up an HVAC company called Yellowjacket Heating and Cooling, inspired by the local high school mascot. (The company was later renamed after a legal challenge from a similarly named Ohio company.)
• But after a frustrating incident one day with a more experienced helper — “He intentionally unplugged something on the unit so that it wouldn’t work on a Friday afternoon when I was trying to get it up and running for the customer, so that I could then call him back and have him save the day” — Grimsch vowed to hire fresh workers and train them himself.

Go deeper: “That moment was a defining moment for me,” he remembered. “I just went to a local trade school and found our first hire, Drake, who was 18 years old.”

• Drawing on his educational background and related master’s degrees, Grimsich built a six-level curriculum pegged to technicians’ salaries, so they could start at $20 an hour and work their way up to $50. 
• After passing each level, Grimsich would test techs in the field — and time them. After each job, he’d debrief like a coach: “Let’s talk about 20 things you did well and let’s talk about three things you can work on.” 
• “One of my business partners at the time was so mad at me because he was like, ‘That’s overtime, Owen!’” Not long after, Grimsich and his co-founders went separate ways. 

State of play: 1-888-Heat-Pumps has benefited from being in Silicon Valley. 

• “We had a guy from ChatGPT — OpenAI — who actually ended up spending $250,000 with us,” he recalled. 
• California has a mandate to install six million heat pumps by 2030, and a Bay Area rule is set to effectively require failing gas furnaces to be replaced with heat pumps. Grimsich partners with local nonprofit and utility programs that help subsidize installs for low-income households.
• His biggest challenge is selling to middle-income customers. “Sure, we’re in the heart of the Bay Area, but you still have these middle-class people that are like, ‘Do I really want to pay $150 a month, monthly installments, for this heat pump?” 

What we’re watching: Grimsich said technicians kept recruiting their friends and, thanks to referrals, the company did $1.3 million in its first year. “Now we have probably 24 employees, and we’re going to be on pace for $6.7 million” — and $10 million next year. 

• The company has expanded into heat pump water heaters and electrical, and is exploring doing installs for a Google-backed program that will subsidize battery-enabled heat pumps to free up electricity for AI.  
• He said he’s developing a California-specific curriculum that will halve the six-month timeframe he typically needs to train techs.  
• “I’m more than confident that we can get all this streamlined to three months,” he said.