This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Ditching the Degree series, where women who have built six-figure careers without a bachelor’s degree reveal the secrets of their success. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com.
Shelley Oelrichs went to college hoping to become a teacher and basketball coach.
But her plans changed when, two months before graduation, she learned she was pregnant and dropped out of school, married her husband and joined the workforce.
The tough decision to leave school led Oelrichs to eventually become a sales leader, and later business owner, in the field of heating, ventilation and air conditioning, or HVAC — a male-dominated and lucrative space that some enter right after high school. Sales representatives are some of the highest-paying jobs in HVAC, where workers can earn over $100,000 per year without a bachelor’s degree, according to Ziprecruiter data.
Oelrichs, 50, is now the owner and president of Comfort Care Heating and Air Conditioning in Cole Camp, Missouri, which provides heating and A/C repair and installation services for residential and commercial properties around the Lake of the Ozarks. She earned roughly $111,000 last year.
Here’s how she built her six-figure career in HVAC without a college degree.
Getting started in HVAC sales
Oelrichs began working a minimum wage job at a supermarket through her first pregnancy; after her son was born, she needed a higher-paying job and found one answering phones and scheduling service appointments for a local HVAC company and earned about $7 to $8 an hour, she says.
Oelrichs was completely new to the field: “I wouldn’t have known what a furnace really did, or that you had to change a filter, or anything like that.”
She learned on the job by asking the technicians about the work they did for clients. Oelrichs saw it as a way to become more knowledgeable and valuable to the business.
Over the next seven years, Oelrichs expanded her scope to helping the business bid on large projects.
An opportunity with a new business came up that moved Oelrichs to selling parts and services directly to clients. While women often worked as secretaries for HVAC businesses, they were underrepresented on the sales side, she says. Her prior knowledge of parts and equipment was not required but was the deciding factor that helped her stand out to land the job.
She became the assistant manager and earned just under $30,000 per year, she says.
Subverting expectations
Oelrichs’s salary soared when she moved within the company to a role in outside sales, which involves meeting with customers in-person at their homes or businesses to sell HVAC systems and related services. Oelrichs became the first woman to be a full-time territory manager with the company and earned a salary between $65,000 to $110,000 per year, depending on sales commissions, she says.
“It wasn’t that you were not being encouraged to do those things,” she says, “it’s just that I don’t think the right person was ever in the right spot.”
It was a demanding job, especially as a parent to three kids, and involved traveling as much as 75 miles away from home to meet with her 40 clients around Missouri. Her clients ranged from small two-person HVAC shops to contractors with dozens of employees.
“There was a lot of going out and and earning people’s trust and earning their business,” Oelrichs says.
Oelrichs says she built her credibility by proving “if I didn’t know the answer, I would find it out for them. But I never let it slip through the cracks. Once they learned that I wasn’t going to make something up, I was honest with them, [and] in the end, they were some of my most loyal customers.”
Oelrichs says that while the role only requires a high school diploma, her success both professionally and financially were due to her extensive field experience and prior knowledge of the industry by that point. She was also willing to learn and participate in every kind of training offered by her employer, including specific training with Mitsubishi Electric, which makes HVAC systems.
Oelrichs says she crossed the six-figure salary threshold for the first time in 2016. Her salary fluctuated over the years due to commission-based pay, but it was enough that she and her husband, Brian, eventually bought out the owner and took over Comfort Care Heating and Air Conditioning in 2019.
The business took an initial hit during pandemic lockdowns in 2020, but by the summer was “bombarded” with requests to provide heating and cooling to people who were now spending more time in their homes and money to upgrade them.
“It has not slowed down since then; it made the economy here just absolutely go crazy,” Oelrichs says of the mid-Missouri area her company services, noting that her business has worked on 120 units in two condos since then, generating a “significant amount of revenue,” she says, and helping gain new customers.
Encouraging young women to enter HVAC: It ‘isn’t all just technicians work’
Oelrichs says she’s motivated by people who underestimate her HVAC sales knowledge. She co-owns her company with her husband, who has a quality control background. “Still to this day, I love when people are talking to us as business owners, and then I’m the one that takes over the HVAC business conversation,” she says. “They’re just kind of [shocked].”
After three decades in the field, “I love making that statement and being able to have these really relevant conversations with people that are men,” she adds.
As for representation in the field, “there are so many opportunities for women,” including jobs to become installation techs, or a service dispatch job that “can lead to so much more,” Oelrichs says.
She’s committed to helping get more young women in the HVAC field. She belongs to several women’s business groups like Little Black Book and Women in HVACR. To encourage young people to work in HVAC, her business hires an intern every year from a local trade school and donates $1 for every hour they work with the company.
“HVAC isn’t all just technicians work,” Oelrichs says. Distributors need branch managers, product managers and sales people, “many of whom are women,” she adds.
She adds that finding the right employer support your early career or transition into the field makes a big difference: “I was very fortunate that I went and worked for people that were very welcoming.”
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