The Treasure Coast Builders Association puts on the Builders Showcase every year as part of its Parade of Homes, and it is one of the biggest events on the local building calendar. This year Family Air Experts was there with a brand new booth. The story of how it came together says more about how this company actually works than anything we could have printed on a banner.
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What the Builders Showcase is
The Parade of Homes is the TCBA’s flagship event, and the Builders Showcase is the part of it where the trades and suppliers behind those homes are all under one roof at the same time. Builders, remodelers, suppliers, lenders, and subcontractors from across the Treasure Coast set up booths and spend the day talking to homeowners and to each other.
For a homeowner, it is a rare chance to stand in front of a dozen companies in an afternoon and ask questions without anyone showing up at the house first. For a contractor, it is where a year’s worth of relationships get maintained in a single day. Both of those things matter, and they are the reason we keep committing to it.
A last minute change of plans
Mario was scheduled to run the booth. A conflict came up at the last minute, but Janelle and Bo stepped in and took the whole thing over.
Janelle runs dispatch and customer service, so most of our customers have talked to her on the phone without ever putting a face to the voice. Bo is an installation specialist with more than twenty years in the trade. Neither of them signed up to work a trade show booth. Both said yes anyway, learned the setup, and represented Family Air Experts at the show.
Setup started long before the doors opened
Anyone who has worked an expo knows the show itself is the easy part. The work is load in. Hauling the tent, the backdrop, the pull up banner, the table, and every box of printed material across a parking lot and building it all before the floor opens.
Janelle did not do that alone. Her boyfriend Emilio and her son Aiden came out and helped get the entire booth in and assembled.
They showed up because someone they care about needed help, and they worked as hard as anyone on that floor. We are genuinely grateful to all four of them.
Family Air Experts is a family owned company, and that is not a phrase we put in the name because it tested well in a focus group. It is how the place runs. Nathan and Dalton started it that way and it has stayed that way as we have grown. When something needs to get done, people step up, including people who technically had no obligation to be there at all, pulling a wagon full of tent poles across a parking lot before the doors opened.
A booth built in house
The tent, the backdrop, the pull up banner, the table cover, and the printed handouts were all designed by Mario. This was the first outing for the new setup, and it came together exactly the way it was drawn up.
The banner lists what we actually do, which is usually more than people expect from an air conditioning company: AC repair, new installation, indoor air quality, duct cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, and maintenance plans.
A home show is one of the few places where a homeowner will stand still long enough to hear that duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning are two completely different services with two different reasons to care. One is about the air moving through your house. The other is about a clogged vent making your dryer work harder than it should. People ask better questions in person than they do on a phone call, and you get to answer them without a meter running.
The people we ran into
The other half of an event like this is who is standing in the booths next to you. We got to catch up with the crew from Remnant Construction and from Proctor Construction, and with our good friend Mike Brinson at A&M Construction to name a few.
These are the builders and contractors we share a market with, and in a lot of cases the ones we end up working alongside on the same house. The Treasure Coast is not a big market. The same names come up over and over, and the relationships behind those names are worth more than any advertising we could buy. A day where everyone is in the same room is how those stay current.
Why we keep showing up for the TCBA
We say this often and we mean it: the Treasure Coast Builders Association is one of the best organizations in our area, and we recommend it to any contractor or trade business on this coast without reservation.
The Builders Showcase is one of the most visible thing they do. It is not the most important. The TCBA puts real work into the trades pipeline in this region, and that is a problem worth taking seriously. Every trade in Florida is short on skilled people, and the average age of a working HVAC technician keeps climbing. You cannot fix that with a job posting.
We have been part of that side of their work too. We talked with students about HVAC careers during Careers in Construction Week, and we have supported TCBA workforce development because the association is one of the few groups around here doing something concrete about the shortage instead of complaining about it. You can see more of that work in our TCBA archive.
What a home show is actually good for
Most homeowners meet an HVAC company on the worst day of their summer, when the system has already quit and the house is at ninety degrees. That is a bad moment to evaluate anyone. You are hot, you are stressed, and you are going to say yes to whoever answers the phone.
An event like this is the opposite of that. Nobody at the Builders Showcase needed emergency service. They were planning a build, thinking about a remodel, or just curious whether their ten year old system had another summer in it. Those are good conversations, and they are the ones where honest guidance actually changes the outcome. If you are anywhere near that decision, a free estimate is a better starting point than a guess, and our AC maintenance guide covers most of what buys an older system more time.
Being part of the Parade of Homes alongside the builders, remodelers, and suppliers who put up most of the housing on this coast is something we are proud of. Thank you to the TCBA for running it, to Janelle and Bo for stepping up, and to Emilio and Aiden for getting it all through the door. We will be back next year.
You can see everything we support around the Treasure Coast on our community involvement page, browse the rest of our community posts, or check where we work in our service area.
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