Built for what’s next – IdealAir helps support workforce capacity

Lori Kaye Lodes

Contributor

September 21, 2026

DE PERE – When IdealAir Heating and Cooling begins Phase 2 of a major office remodel in September, President and Co-owner Zak Manders said the project will give the growing De Pere company something it has increasingly needed: more room.

But the most important new space, he said, might not be an office at all.

At the heart of the forthcoming 1,750-square-foot remodel, Manders said, is a dedicated training center designed to help IdealAir develop its own workforce. 

This space, he said, will be an ideal setting to provide foundational skills to new employees – including those who arrive with little or no previous HVAC experience – as they begin/continue to build their careers.

The significance of the site, Manders said, means the project is about much more than updating an aging building. 

He said it is an investment in IdealAir’s ability to continue the period of growth that began with the company’s ownership transition four years ago.

“IdealAir has grown an average of about 10% annually since fellow Owners Chris Sigl, Pete Ladwig and Nicole Schounard and I purchased the company in 2022,” he said. “At the time, IdealAir employed about 37 people. Today, the De Pere operation alone has about 47 employees, with another two to four working from our Crivitz location, depending on the season. And IdealAir is looking to add more.”

Manders said he’s intentionally bolstered the company’s lead-generation efforts – going from two to three or four employees actively exploring potential customers – since purchasing the business from his father, Jim Manders, and his fellow Founder, Tom Orde.

“Now, the building that has served IdealAir for most of our three[-plus] decades in business is being transformed to support what the company has become and what we believe it can become next,” he said. 

A remodel driven by growth

Founded in 1992 by his father and Orde, Manders said IdealAir specializes in heating, air conditioning and ventilation work. 

He said the business operates residential and commercial/industrial divisions – with residential accounting for about 10-15% of its business and commercial/industrial making up the remainder – staying focused on HVAC rather than branching into complementary trades such as electrical or plumbing.

Manders said the De Pere headquarters includes a 14,000-square-foot fabrication shop and office facility, with the company also operating a 3,200-square-foot facility in Crivitz – established about 15 years ago.

“About 95% of the company’s business currently comes through the De Pere operation,” he said. “IdealAir generally works within about an hour of De Pere, although Door County extends that radius, and long-standing customers sometimes take the company elsewhere around Wisconsin.”

The Crivitz operation, Manders said, stretches IdealAir’s reach north toward the state border and into areas including Eagle River and Watersmeet, Michigan. 

“Growth in De Pere has been strong enough that employees based in Crivitz are sometimes brought south to assist rather than us having to seek additional work for them in the northern market,” he said. 

Manders said the company began conceptualizing the expansion project about two years ago, working with Keller, Inc. to assess the building and its needs. 

He said the facility had once been divided among three separate office and shop spaces before IdealAir gradually absorbed the entire building. 

Although improvements had been made over the years, Manders said the company was running out of offices, and portions of the building were dated or underutilized – which led IdealAir to a two-phase plan. 

“The first phase was completed in August 2025 and included a complete refresh of IdealAir’s main office, along with an expansion of our rear truck bay,” he said. “The truck bay project increased indoor vehicle and inventory storage, an important operational improvement for a company with a substantial fleet of service vehicles operating through Wisconsin winters.”

Manders said Phase 1 helped IdealAir keep more vehicles inside rather than exposing them to the elements, while the wash bay helped employees maintain the fleet. 

Another advantage of Phase 1, Manders said, was the fact that technicians can also begin winter mornings with warm vehicles instead of trucks and vans that have been sitting outside overnight.

“The office portion gave the front of the headquarters a significant facelift,” he said. “Phase 2 will tackle another section of the building. Construction begins this month and will continue through April 2027. Plans call for three additional offices, expanded archive and file storage, a larger conference room and refreshed finishes and work areas. Having said that, the training center is the focal point.”

Building employees from the ground up

For a company seeking continued growth, Manders said having enough people capable of doing the work is every bit as important as finding customers who need it. 

He said IdealAir’s new training center is designed around that reality.

“The focal point is creating an in-house training center, so we can take somebody who’s 18 years old and has no idea what an HVAC or mechanical company does, and work them through a three- to four-year apprenticeship, getting them up to speed,” he said. “We can cultivate our own people and bring them into the market.”

Manders said IdealAir already trains employees, but it has never had a dedicated place designed for that purpose. 

He said that will be complemented by the team’s technical adviser, who can work through any issues step by step over the phone and even travel to the job site and work alongside the employee.

Manders said the dedicated center should make training more intentional, consistent and efficient. 

“There are a lot of resources for training [today] – between distributors and technical colleges – but sometimes the timing is off,” he said. “This will make [training] as efficient as possible. We can have them here in the morning and on the job site during the rest of the day and get them what they need while keeping a certain level of productivity.”

The strategy is particularly important, Manders said, because IdealAir is willing to build employees from the beginning rather than limiting recruitment to experienced HVAC professionals.

He said this pipeline can even start before high school graduation. 

“IdealAir currently has one youth apprentice who will be a high school senior this year,” he said. “Another employee who began with the company as a youth apprentice during his senior year recently graduated from technical college.”

The company, Manders said, also works with employees attending Northeast Wisconsin Technical College’s two-year HVAC program – paying tuition and book costs to develop about one person annually through that route.

“The new training space should allow IdealAir to connect those educational opportunities more directly with the way work is actually performed inside the company,” he said. 

Keeping pace with the equipment

Manders said training is not limited to new employees, as the HVAC industry continually introduces new equipment, controls and systems, making ongoing education important for even the most experienced technicians.

Because manufacturers may change an equipment line or platform every three or four years, Manders said, initially, IdealAir relies heavily on distributors and equipment suppliers to educate employees about new products before bringing that knowledge in-house.

“Digital controls represent one of the more rapidly evolving portions of IdealAir’s commercial and industrial work,” he said. “The company handles commercial controls internally, allowing systems to manage heating and cooling equipment at increasingly detailed levels.”

He said that can include custom programming for sophisticated commercial and industrial systems such as boiler and chiller plants. 

The new training center, Manders said, creates a place where IdealAir can continually refresh those skills rather than viewing training as something employees complete once at the beginning of their careers.

“That matters to the company’s growth strategy, because expanding the workforce cannot come at the expense of the standards that helped generate the additional work in the first place,” he said. “A huge part of our company is quality, as we want it to be the best work you’ve ever seen.” 

If work does not meet the company’s expectations, Manders said employees are expected to correct it, even if that means removing something and doing it again.

The goal, he said, is for customers – and even other mechanical contractors – to look at IdealAir’s work and recognize it was done well. 

Manders said that standard extends beyond installation to service and the customer experience after a project is finished, helping the company retain customers and generate recurring work.

Growth built largely on relationships

IdealAir’s growth has come with relatively little traditional advertising, Manders said.

Instead, he said relationships, reputation and completed work serve as the company’s primary marketing tools.

“We let our work spread for the company, and it’s been our best marketing tool for 30-some years,” he said. “IdealAir occasionally takes advantage of marketing funds offered through distributors, including putting up a billboard, but the company does not invest heavily in conventional advertising.”

Instead, Manders said much of its commercial and industrial work comes through relationships with a relatively small core group of general contractors.

He said the company operates heavily in the design-build market, which allows IdealAir to become involved earlier than it would in a traditional plan-and-specification bidding process. 

In a conventional process, Manders said an HVAC contractor may receive completed plans, calculate a price and compete against other contractors for the work.

“IdealAir frequently takes a different approach, working alongside a general contractor and owner from early in the process to determine what the customer wants from a building’s mechanical systems, what those systems need to accomplish and what fits within the project budget,” he said. 

One thing that sets the company apart, Manders said, is they work closely with certain customers like Keller.

“We start the design process early,” he said. “That involvement can continue from the earliest stages of a project through completion, allowing IdealAir to balance performance expectations with budget realities.”

The company’s business is heavily weighted toward new construction through its general contractor relationships, Manders said, while customer-direct work accounts for another significant portion of its business.

He said that includes recurring work for companies IdealAir has served for years.

“Industrial customers are particularly important to that recurring business because their facilities and processes frequently change,” he said. “IdealAir also retains customers through service agreements and preventive maintenance intended to keep equipment operating efficiently. We have a lot of industrial customers where things are constantly changing, and we get service contracts in place to keep their equipment operating at peak efficiency.”

A transition that came earlier than planned

IdealAir’s current growth story, Manders said, has roots in an ownership transition that unfolded sooner than anyone expected, after Jim suffered a severe stroke in 2022.

“The circumstances accelerated the succession process and required the next generation of owners to quickly demonstrate to customers and contractors that IdealAir would remain stable,” he said. “Step one was figuring out how we [kept] our customers.”

The leadership team had considerable experience to draw from, as Manders said he had spent much of his life around the company, and he and Sigl attended technical college together.

He said Sigl has worked at IdealAir since the early 2000s, and Ladwig has been with the company since the 1990s.

“Our first challenge was reassuring customers that the ownership change would not alter what they had come to expect from IdealAir,” Manders said. “Relationships built over the years helped make that possible. We worked with a lot of GCs, and most of them never showed any hesitation. We developed a lot of relationships with them through the years that allowed us to continue the work and the growth.”

General contractors that had long worked with IdealAir continued to send work its way, Manders said. 

The four new owners, he said, focused on developing those relationships to generate business.

“We keep our core group of GCs pretty small, and they stuck with us,” he said. 

He said those relationships helped turn succession into a period of expansion. 

Four years later, Manders said, the company is averaging about 10% annual growth, its employee count has risen by roughly 10 from the time of the purchase and it is actively looking for additional employees.

“We came in hungry and looking for more, and that’s where the growth came in,” he said.