Brown Heating & Cooling celebrates 50 years

A local company was celebrated for its longevity in the community this week when Stratford Mayor Martin Ritsma presented Brown Heating & Cooling with a certificate commemorating its 50th anniversary.

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While five decades in business is a milestone for the company, the company’s success is also about the ongoing support of their staff and the community, co-owner Tom Clifford said.

“It’s been a family business,” Clifford said Tuesday. “We treat our people like family and, if they have a problem, we have a problem. We try to help them out, and that’s the way we run their business.”

The company, owned by Clifford, his son John and their partner Keith Thomson, actually dates even further back than 50 years. What started as Coleman Refrigeration was purchased by Brown Electric in 1971 and was then sold to Clifford and his wife Heather three years later for roughly $20,000 – the equivalent to about $121,000 today. Thomson joined the company in 1998 and, a few years later, they bought the old Ontario Hydro building on Ontario Street, building a new shop there in 2004.

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Running the company took a lot of sacrifice, noted Heather Clifford, who worked in the company’s office for a time before returning to her own teaching career.

“HASt the beginning, it was hard work,” she said. “(Tom) was on call all the time. You wouldn’t believe how many dinner parties we had arranged, and he’d get a call at the last minute and that would be the end of the dinner party. So I was very happy little by little that he was able to get other people to take calls.

For Thomson, the thing that keeps Brown Heating and Cooling going is the company’s ability to adapt, both by adding the heating aspect of the business to keep busy during the winter and by adapting new technology that has come along over the years.

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“We grew with it, but we had to have training. There’s ongoing training all the time too, so there’s some trial and error to it. But basically, we were getting equipment that was brand new to the field and some of it wasn’t properly tested before it came out into the field. We were the guinea pigs and so we learned that way too by doing repairs,” Thomson said.

The cellphone has also greatly changed how the company works, Thompson added.

“All of our guys now are doing work from their phones compared to when we used to (do it). We had our toolbox. One of their main tools that they use now is a phone, so that’s how it’s changed,” he said.

Now the business is mostly run by John Clifford since Thomson and the elder Clifford, a former city councillor, have taken a step back. While still providing guidance, Tom Clifford credited his son for continuing to take the company forward, particularity through his work with computers.

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“John really brought us into the 21st century. . . . He runs the business now. He just calls us when he needs the old people to help,” Tom Clifford said

The relationship the company has had with its longstanding customers is evidence of the quality of the work it provides, Ritsma said Tuesday.

“I know a number of the companies that he’s been with for many years and, unless you provide good service, those residents and those companies don’t call you back,” he said.

For new business owners who want to last as long as Brown, the key is having a passion for what it is they do, Tom Clifford said.

“My dad had a business. I had wanted business and I just worked hard at it. When there’s a problem, you fix it, and that’s what we’ve done. If someone has a problem, whatever it takes, we fix it,” he said.

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