Fire & Ice Puts New Techs in Vans in 3-4 Months with Zero Callbacks

In North Dakota’s Bakken oil field region, where unemployment sits at 1% and competitors are closing their doors, Fire & Ice uses measureQuick to turn inexperienced hires into productive service technicians faster than anyone thought possible.

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The Challenge

Dickinson, North Dakota sits in the heart of the Bakken oil formation. The state unemployment rate hovers around 2%; in the Bakken, it drops to 1%. Oil field jobs start at $100,000 a year. For Tevis Deschamp, owner of Fire & Ice Refrigeration, Heating and Air, that means every potential HVAC technician has a standing offer from the oil industry before he even makes a call.

The labor shortage has already claimed his competitors. One company relocated from Minnesota, operated in the Bakken for 15 years, and eventually retreated because they could not staff a single local service tech for two years straight. Three or four other long-time companies have retired or shut down. Fire & Ice, serving 2,000 residential customers across western North Dakota, needed a way to get new hires productive fast, or face the same outcome.

We’re competing here in the Bakken with guys that can come out here and start at a hundred grand a year. We’ve had three or four long-time companies that have retired or just quit because of lack of employees.

Tevis Deschamp, Owner, Fire & Ice Refrigeration, Heating and Air

The Solution

Tevis discovered measureQuick through founder Jim Bergmann back when Jim was still working with iManifold. When measureQuick launched in 2017, Fire & Ice started experimenting. By 2019 the company was 100% digital, with no analog gauges left in the shop. Today, measureQuick runs on every unit they service and install, including mini splits.

The training pipeline starts with one month of ride-alongs where new hires do the hands-on work while a more experienced tech rides along. They focus on deploying probes and operating the equipment. After that month, they move to easy calls on their own. The entire process from zero experience to running independent service calls takes three to four months. Tevis has since hired people ranging from a 19-year-old fresh out of high school to a 50-year-old safety coordinator from the oil field, and is putting them through the same pipeline.

Fire & Ice uses Housecall Pro as their CRM, integrated directly with measureQuick. When a job is dispatched, the tech opens it in measureQuick and all the customer information transfers automatically. If the equipment has been benchmarked on a previous visit, the historical profile loads too. Tevis estimates this saves 10-15 minutes per job. The company also uses measureQuick’s streaming feature so any tech in the company can pull up live readings from a colleague’s job on their phone, enabling remote support from any colleague in the company.

The Results

The numbers from Fire & Ice’s first cohort of new technicians tell the story. In January 2020, Tevis hired two people with no HVAC experience: a 19-year-old who had tried college and decided it wasn’t for him and a 23-year-old grocery store manager. By July, both were on call and running service independently.

In their first month on call, the two new technicians handled roughly 50 service calls between them with zero callbacks. They also earned 8-9 five-star customer reviews. These were people who had never touched an HVAC system before January. The test-in and test-out workflow gave customers visible proof of the work performed. When techs show customers the before-and-after reports, the reaction is consistent: the previous company never came inside, never took readings, never showed them anything.

You can train almost anyone to do this in a really quick hurry, and it teaches them. All we did was teach them how to hook all the probes up, and basically measureQuick tells you what to look for.

Tevis Deschamp, Owner, Fire & Ice Refrigeration, Heating and Air

Fire & Ice now runs 10-14 service calls per tech per day across western North Dakota. Tevis has hired five more new technicians, ranging from age 18 to 50, and is working them through the same pipeline. The install team benchmarks every new system at startup through measureQuick, which means future service visits can verify performance using temperature readings alone, without ever breaking the refrigerant circuit. Combined with BluVac for vacuum verification and the Housecall Pro integration for dispatch, the entire workflow runs from dispatch to diagnosis to customer report with significantly less paperwork. While competitors close their doors, Fire & Ice keeps hiring.