How Much Does an HVAC Business Coach Cost? The Published Prices, Compared

Almost nobody in trades coaching publishes a price.

We checked. Nexstar Network's membership page lists no dues. BDR's coaching page lists none. ActionCOACH's own pricing page says pricing "varies depending on your specific needs and goals." CertainPath, formerly Success Group International, points you to a discovery call.

That is not a knock on any of them. Most programs are bundles, most tiers are set by your revenue, and the price comes on a call.

But you are trying to decide whether to spend real money. And you cannot compare quotes you have not been given. None of that helps on a Tuesday night with a spreadsheet open.

So here is what IS published, the page each number came from, and the 12 month math on a $1.4 million shop. Then a way to judge any of it against your own numbers, not theirs.

The six kinds of help you will be offered

Membership networks. Nexstar, Service Nation (the Service Roundtable people), CertainPath. Dues buy a library, classes, events, peer groups and vendor pricing. Coaching is part of the bundle.

Cohort academies. Breakthrough Academy is the best known. A fixed curriculum, a coach, and a group of owners moving through it together over several years.

Benchmarking and profit coaching. BDR is the name here. Your numbers get compared to shops like yours, and a coach works the gaps.

Franchise business coaches. ActionCOACH, FocalPoint. A local coach running a national system, not built around one trade.

Solo coaches. Usually a former owner. Ask for the number in writing.

Fixed scope implementation. A defined deliverable, price and end date. Someone builds the system with you instead of coaching you to build it. This is where Polaris One sits.

The published prices, with the page they came from

Every number below comes from the program's own website, fetched September 23, 2026. If it is not here, they did not publish it.

Service Nation publishes the clearest price in the trade. Membership is $99 a month for your first trade group and $25 a month for each additional group. Their own example: a plumbing and HVAC shop pays $124 a month. It is on servicenation.com under Membership.

Breakthrough Academy publishes tiers in an article titled "How much does Breakthrough Academy cost?" The assessment is free. The Blueprint phase is $5,700, one time, over six weeks. Then Implementation, priced by revenue: Essential at $999 a month over $500,000, Accelerator at $1,999 over $1 million, Pro at $2,999 over $3 million. Stated program length: three years.

FocalPoint franchisees set their own fees, but the FocalPoint Business Coaching of Ohio page "How Much Does Business Coaching Cost?" publishes ranges. One-to-one weekly: $2,000 to $5,000 a month. Every other week: $750 to $2,500. Group and peer advisory: $250 to $1,500. One territory, and ranges rather than a price list.

Nexstar Network does not publish pricing. Its membership page describes the coaching, classes and events, then asks you to schedule a call.

BDR does not publish pricing. Its coaching page routes you to a Profit Coach Advisor.

ActionCOACH does not publish pricing. Its pricing page says the investment depends on weekly, fortnightly or monthly coaching.

CertainPath does not publish pricing.

Polaris One publishes one price. The Recovery Reset is $1,950 for two weeks. The 90 Day Operator is a flat fee quoted after the free session, because we will not quote a 90 day scope until we have seen your numbers.

The 12 month math on a $1.4 million shop

Let's build a sample shop. $1.4 million in revenue. Nine people: you, one in the office, seven in the field. HVAC only, one trade group.

Break even is the margin you must recover just to pay for the program: the 12 month cost divided by revenue. Published prices only.

The arithmetic, so you can redo it with your revenue:

Service Nation: $99 × 12 = $1,188. $1,188 ÷ $1,400,000 = 0.08 percent.

Breakthrough Academy: $5,700 + ($1,999 × 12) = $29,688. $29,688 ÷ $1,400,000 = 2.12 percent. Their six week Blueprint runs before dues start, so redo it with the dates they give you.

FocalPoint: $1,500 × 12 = $18,000, and $2,500 × 12 = $30,000. That is 1.29 to 2.14 percent.

Recovery Reset: $1,950 ÷ $1,400,000 = 0.14 percent.

Now put break even in hourly rate terms, because that is how a shop recovers margin. Our free Rate Calculator ships with 116 billable hours a month per tech. Say you raise your rate $5 an hour on six techs and nothing else changes.

$5 × 116 hours × 6 techs × 12 months = $41,760 a year.

One $5 rate move covers every row in that table. That is the point. Not that any program is cheap or expensive, but that the margin needed to pay for help is small next to the margin most shops leave on the table.

There is a second price on every row, and it is yours. A weekly coaching call is an hour, plus homework. At $150 an hour, two hours a week for 50 weeks is $15,000 of owner time on nobody's invoice. Count it before you sign anything, including with us.

What you still have to do yourself

This is the part no pricing page tells you.

In a membership network, you pick from the library, you attend, and you implement. In a cohort academy, you do the homework and implement between calls while the coach checks your work. In benchmarking coaching, you supply the numbers and close the gaps the coach shows you. With a franchise or solo coach, you get accountability and a way of thinking, and you do the work between sessions.

In all four, the doing is yours.

In fixed scope implementation, the deliverable gets built with you inside the engagement. Your rate math, your quote follow up rhythm, your weekly numbers. You run it when it is done, but you are not building it at 9pm.

None of these is wrong. A roofer with a strong office manager and a bad price book needs something different from an electrician with great margins and no second in command. Match the model to the gap, not to the brochure.

How to judge the return with your own numbers

Every pitch will show you a return. Judge it with three numbers you already own.

One, your break even rate. Loaded cost of a tech per billable hour, plus overhead per billable hour. Our billable rate guide walks it with a $25 an hour tech and lands at $94.17. If your rate sits under your number, that gap is your first return, and you need a calculator, not a coach, to find it.

Two, your quote close rate. Pull your last 60 quotes and count the ones that never got an answer. Our quote follow up guide shows the pattern: 27 of 60 die of silence at a $1,900 average ticket, which is $51,300 in a folder. The free Quote Leak Check sizes it for your shop in a few minutes.

Three, your owner hours, priced the way we did above.

Now the test. If the 12 month cost is a small fraction of the gap those numbers show, the decision is arithmetic, not faith. If nobody can show you the gap in your own numbers, that is your answer too.

The pattern I see in shops doing $500,000 to $5 million is that the gap is rarely under $100,000 a year. Shops your size leave at least that much on the table. So the question is rarely whether help pays. It is which model closes the gap, and how fast.

Where we fit, plainly

I spent seven years as a licensed HVAC technician, then eight years running operations for other people's companies. I have been the tech handed a new price book and the executive who had to make the number work.

We do fixed scope. The Recovery Reset is $1,950 and takes two weeks. We rebuild your rate math from your own payroll and overhead, install a follow up system on your quotes, and train your team on it, live. Two First Callback Blocks: we get on the phone and work your open quote list with you. It carries a written completion guarantee, printed word for word on How We Work.

The 90 Day Operator installs the operating system behind it: pricing, quote follow up, delegation, weekly numbers. Flat fee, quoted after the free session. The guarantee, in the words we sign: $20,000 delivered in margin improvement or recovered revenue within 90 days, measured against the baseline we sign in week one, or the next month is free until we hit it.

The Break-Even & Overhead Absorption Worksheet is the full version of this guide's math, beside the Rate Calculator, Job Costing Template and KPI Tracker. It is one of the documents we install when we work together.