Honest Heating and Cooling recognized as small contractor of the year by NCI
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Since they launched their business together in Marshalltown just over five years ago, Honest Heating and Cooling Co-Owners John Whitehead and Dustin Wood have worked hard to go above and beyond for their customers, and their efforts were recently recognized by the National Comfort Institute (NCI) as the small contractor of the year during the organization's annual summit in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. earlier this month.
During an interview late last week, Whitehead told the T-R that their company isn't simply focused on sales but rather solving deeper issues with performance and ensuring comfort.
"We're always gonna be repairmen and repair people first, so our goal is to restore service immediately like the ambulance that gets the machine back on its feet. And our goal is never to do anything other than educate and offer solutions," he said. "We're doctors of performance, and so that's what the NCI looks at, the high performance level of taking a lot of measurements while performing an investigation, assembling a hypothesis and then writing a prescription to solve problems."
The act of performing basic repairs can be taught relatively quickly, he added, but the goal at Honest is to take a deeper, more systemic look at the issues with any given HVAC system. Each year, NCI awards a contractor of the year in small, medium and large categories based on annual revenues, and in 2025, Honest took home the runner-up recognition before capturing the top spot this year.
"The biggest piece of any puzzle is how you put the pieces together, and we find ourselves in situations where all of the pieces for transformation are free. They're available. The world is a buffet of knowledge. Very few people are willing to take the pieces and build a foundation and create a puzzle, and that's something that we've been fortunate, with the help of NCI, to really look at the system performance and see things," Whitehead said.
Both Whitehead and Wood are MHS graduates, and they currently employ six coworkers other than themselves. Whitehead described the company as a family with a deep level of mutual respect among the team, and as he looks forward, he intends to continue learning to provide better solutions to "the deeper needs of comfort, safety, health and efficiency."
"Anyone can fix a furnace, but few can dive deep enough into the performance of the system to ensure probable, almost certain measurable outcomes through math and science," he said.
Contact Robert Maharry at (641) 753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.