Billy, in the field
Billy is a Houston native, and he learned this trade the old way, from his father, who owned a small HVAC company. That is a particular kind of education. You are on the truck early, and you learn what a system sounds like before you learn what the gauges mean.
From there he spent four years at a commercial HVAC company, then took a government contract in Afghanistan covering air conditioning, plumbing, electrical and custom fabrication. On a contract like that there is no supply house down the road. If the part does not exist, you make the part. That is where a lot of his problem solving instinct comes from, and it shows up now in the calls other companies have walked away from.
When he came home he worked alongside his father for nearly fifteen years before founding Air Star. End to end that is more than twenty six years with his hands on equipment. What people notice first is not the technical side. It is that he listens before he talks, and that he treats a family sitting in a hot house in August as people having a bad day rather than as a transaction.
Perla, in the office
Perla is also from Houston. Her family immigrated here from a small town in Mexico in the late 1980s, and she grew up in Pasadena. After high school she moved to the Clear Lake area, worked two jobs to pay for school, and earned a bachelor's degree in business from the University of Houston at Clear Lake in 2015.
Her career before Air Star was customer service, close to two decades of it: almost ten years in oil and gas, then four years at a chemical plant. Both are industries where a dropped detail is expensive and people expect a straight answer quickly. She joined Air Star in 2023 and leads the customer service representatives, which means she sets the standard for the first thirty seconds of your call.
That matters more than it sounds. Most bad experiences with a home services company do not start with the repair. They start with a phone call that went nowhere.
Two halves of the same company
Billy and Perla work together, and the split is clean. He owns what happens at your house. She owns everything before the truck arrives and after it leaves. Both of them are reachable.
Away from the work
Between them they have five children from previous marriages. When there is time they travel. When there is not, they eat their way around Houston at local places.
What they are building
Billy's stated goal for Air Star is not complicated: grow on referrals and on integrity driven work. That is a slower way to build a company than buying attention, and it puts real pressure on every job, because the next customer comes from the last one. It is also the only version of this business they are interested in running.