David Dunn has risen from driving AC units to sites to being the UK managing director of a multi-brand HVAC operation. Andrew Gaved talks about how his outlook continues to be shaped by his origins
It isn’t long in a conversation with David Dunn before the theme turns to customers. It soon becomes clear that the art of satisfying the customer is something that David, who is Managing Director UK&I, for Carrier Residential and Light Commercial, thinks a lot about. It also becomes clear that this is because it is something that he is very very good at. And, true to his Geordie background, he tells a good story to illustrate it too..
The first story demonstrates that when it comes to HVAC design the customer is not, contrary to the old adage, always right: “A longstanding customer wanted a big VRF for their own £26 million property. I designed it all, and gave them the names of three installers that they should speak to. But six months later I started getting phone calls that the system doesn’t work. It didn’t sound like the work of people I trusted, so I went down to look. It turns out he didn’t use any of the ones I recommended as they were too expensive!”
When he arrived, he found a host of changes – three tiny 200mm grilles instead of the 18 metres of linear discharge in the kitchen, because his wife didn’t like the look of the originals. “I told him, ‘It’s not working because you’ve got no air coming out and so it’s not going to cool the room,” David says. Between the customer’s wife and the installer, nearly every item of David’s design had been changed.
That, of course, is a perfect illustration of one of the biggest problems currently in the heat pump sector: badly installed heat pumps do not work as designed: “I think with installers, at the moment, it comes down to knowledge,” David offers, “The installer could change something, without knowing what impact it could have. Like with changing the grilles, they didn’t understand what impact that had on the system.”
After one anecdote, I can already see why David has been so successful as both manager and salesman – he knows how to tell a persuasive story. I worry that I might run out of time. As the story of his rise from would-be footballer to driver to national sales success unfolds, complete with incredible slices of luck along the way, the thought crosses my mind this could be a great comic strip from one of those boyhood comics. He is the HVAC version of Roy of the Rovers.
Career beginnings
Let’s start with the football. David played for South Shields from an early age and tried out for Newcastle as an apprentice, but the Magpies didn’t quite work out for him. Of course there was no structured academy system in those days, so he just put that behind him and kept trying.
Sadly any dreams of making it ended at age 22 when he injured his spine in an accident, putting him in hospital for quite a few weeks, including being put in traction. “That stopped me playing any kind of serious football. It turned out the bottom of my spine was fused and it put a stop to one of the best parts of my game – heading the ball – because I lost my spring.” Many who know him will argue that he has actually kept his spring, but he took a job delivering air conditioning units with a division of Taylor Woodrow primarily as a way to get him up and about and working.
The initial experience only lasted a few months, but David found the introduction to the world of AC to be fascinating and he immersed himself in it chatting to everyone around the site, to find out what was going on. And as we have already found out, the chat and the interest in the people around is one of David’s key skills. He believes that building familiarity creates more than just trust: “I found that when you chatted to the security people and chatted to the receptionist and everyone when it comes to getting unloaded, you got unloaded faster. And still today, if I go in somewhere I get to know everyone in the business because then they’ll tell you who’s in and who’s out – and it makes sure you’ll get a coffee too. Having that little bit of empathy with people helps you in your day-to-day work.”
As David tells it, it wasn’t too long before those chats with the site crew evolved into conversations around what kit they needed. This informal gathering of sales intelligence proved so successful that David was soon rumoured to be selling more as a driver than the sales person in the area. He got moved up to the trade shop, where the trademark David Dunn combination of interest in people and interest in improving their business saw him rapidly promoted to internal sales and then branch manager: “There was an etiquette in the office that everyone was quiet,” he says, “So I kept being shushed.”
Next steps
Unsurprisingly, David wasn’t restrained in the office for long. But it took a bit of serendipity to give him an opportunity to pitch his outlook to none other than the chief executive of Taylor Woodrow. “The chief exec Brian Abrahams was coming to one of our offices, which was near Newcastle. But the manager at that branch had let all his staff go on holiday at the same time, so there was no-one to pick Brian up from the airport.”
Long story short, David volunteered to be the driver. Over the ensuing drive, the captive chief exec was left in no doubt that he had an enthusiastic, capable and ambitious colleague at the wheel. Whatever went on in that car-based strategy meeting, it made an impression, because a few weeks later, he was summoned to Brian’s hotel for another drive, this time to Leeds.
The only problem was that David had injured his arm the night before and he couldn’t change gear, so he had to borrow an automatic car from his dad. When he turned up to the hotel, Brian was clearly impressed that he had still come to work with an injury – and an executive saloon rather than the company Astra.
During the journey, David outlined his ideas: “He said: ‘What do you know about air conditioning?’ And I said ‘Nothing, except that the boxes are heavy on one side…I was delivering them a few months back and one side’s heavier than the other, that’s all I know. If someone is giving you a lift, always make sure you’ve got the light side, which will have only one strap.”
After that lesson for life, Brian suggested that David should get to know Taylor Woodrow’s air conditioning business Greenham properly, and so he got enrolled in Newcastle College on night classes. while working in the business during the day.
Whenever he encountered industry bosses during this period, he asked whether he could come and help one of their installations: “I got to know the people in these companies who are placing orders,” he says, “They never speak usually to a salesperson. But they’re the ones that actually make the order.”
David would go and ask folk like Brian Corn of Acrol which brands they were fitting and attempt to persuade them to take Fujitsu units from Greenham instead. “We actually built up a huge sales portfolio in Newcastle at the time with that kind of approach,” he says, “Then Brian Abrahams called to ask whether I wanted to run the air conditioning division. I said ‘I’ll give it a go’.”
The upwards trajectory continues
The David Dunn story continued on its upwards trajectory from there at a startling pace. He says simply, that the longest he went without a promotion was about five months, before ultimately reaching a national sales role.
He puts this success down to an unswerving self-belief. “Don’t take this wrong, but I actually think I can do anything. And even things that are physically not possible, I still believe I can do it!”
Lest we don’t believe this, he recounts how he was driving with his family and found a fallen tree. To the howls of his kids he attempted to lift it single-handedly. “It didn’t actually cross my mind at all when I approached it that I couldn’t do it. And that’s repeated throughout my career.”
This going the extra mile, is definitely a David Dunn trait, as he acknowledges: “With the air conditioning business, I had to go and find out how the system worked, but I didn’t have to go and install a system on a weekend, or work on a night time shift with engineers, but I would after work because it increased my knowledge.”
After hearing this, you won’t be surprised to learn that when there’s DIY to be done, he heads straight for the YouTube instruction video too.
But the paradigm shift in David’s career was the opportunity to run his own business –or actually the opportunity denied. He was persuaded to join, a family-run distribution company with the brief to accelerate its growth. He did what he was asked all right – trebling its turnover in year one, and then in year two making more profit than the previous year’s turnover. He puts this down to replacing most of the family with new fresh salespeople. Sadly, however, the family rowed back on their promise for David to ultimately take over the company and it all ended badly. Or rather it didn’t, because David cut his losses and set up his own company and took the customers with him, financing the deals with a credit card that eventually racked up a £250,000 tab.
That was 2002 – and, fortunately for his credit limit, the very next year Toshiba Air Conditioning came a’calling, buying him out of his company as part of the plan to build UK distribution. At Toshiba Air Conditioning, as many will know, he rose from specification to running the operation, propelling the cooling business to number three in the UK.
One of the things that has changed now he has reached the managing director’s chair, is that the job isn’t tied to the office like it used to be. Neither is the paperwork that goes with it: “I actually do the bare minimum of reporting that I can,” he says, “I’m not one of these that need to ask people to do something. I just do it and then ask for forgiveness!”
A multi-brand strategy
Fast-forward to the present day and David Dunn is no longer just running the Toshiba Air Conditioning brand. His title of MD UK&I of Carrier Residential and Light Commercial EMEA means that he oversees a multi-brand business with a portfolio that now encompasses Toshiba, Carrier, Vokèra and Viessmann. He points out that he already had a taste of multi-brand portfolios with the integration of air handling and chiller businesses CIAT and Carrier HVAC in 2018.
This saw a restructuring of the business with multi-sales channels – Toshiba for DX, CIAT for Airside and Carrier for Chillers – with a central specification team. This integrated approach, which has now been expanded to include the Viessmann and Carrier Solutions brands, is, to David, the right way to approach the customer: “We should be able to go to our customer and come away with an order regardless of what they’re doing next week. Because next week there’s something that they’ve installed that we supply because we’ve got everything. That is successes of this multi-brand approach – for instance APP who are a significant Vokèra account, are now a significant Viessmann account as well.”
And this, he says is the aim of Carrier Solutions’ new Stockport Training Academy – putting an end to heating and cooling sector silos, by offering BPEC courses for plumbing, alongside heating courses and ultimately F-gas courses for those working with refrigerant. “What we are trying to do is to bring these worlds together…The aim is to help installers understand how a system actually operates, so that they have a better understanding why it doesn’t work in the coldest months of the year or why it relies on electric heat for too many days of the year.”
It is, he says, determinedly technology-agnostic in approach: “We don’t only want to sell a heat pump, and we don’t only want to sell solar or battery storage, we want to sell a solution. No other business today has all these different technologies with one control platform. It isn’t one app for heating and one for solar and one for underfloor heating. We make it easier for the homeowner. The problem is that getting that message to the end user isn’t as easy as it perhaps should be.”
David is confident that there is power in a portfolio that integrates so many brands: “We’ve got probably the most diverse product range of any HVAC manufacturer globally. And we’ve got some of the best trained people in their own fields today as customers.” And this translates into ambition, he adds: “We want to be the number one supplier for HVAC equipment in the UK and we want to do it in the next five years.”
With that portfolio behind them, the challenge is to empower the installers – both on the heating and the cooling side – to come with Carrier on the heat pump journey: “The AC installers are saying that the plumber is charging £40 an hour, whereas their charge rate is £65 an hour, so they can’t make the numbers work for installing a monobloc heat pump [where no refrigerant handling is needed]. What we need to do is to encourage them to look at the longer term – not just look at the price of the equipment today, but look at a five-year, or 10-year service plan with remote monitoring and make it a system compliance setup, where they can make money for many years.”
It all comes to selling the solution, he concludes: “I think at the end of the day, the market is determined by the end user, so all we’ve got to do is to facilitate that. The end user can get the right equipment installed in the right way, looked after correctly – and then not only will they buy our brand again, or one of our brands again, but they’ll recommend our brands to someone else..”
And this, naturally will be driven by David in his inimitable style – determinedly connected to the technology of the business and the people within it: “I was sorting out a query with a customer, when he said to me, ‘People who do your job don’t usually mix with us…’I think that’s why I’ve got a bit of affinity with customers – because I can sit there and talk to them and I can picture their problems, as I’ve actually been there on site.”
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