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Steve Sewall, the president of TradeWinds, grew up in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. After graduating from the University of Maine at Orono, he
started working with his father, Alden Sewall, owner of Sewall Construction, where he learned the HVAC industry.
In the 80s, Steve left Maine for New York City. After a stint as an actor, a waiter and a bartender, he came back to his roots in the
HVAC world as the Facilities Coordinator for Lerner Shops, a division of Limited, Inc.
After four years with Lerner, Steve wanted to return to New England. "From my experience of hiring contractors to the Lerner stores,
I saw a need for a quality HVAC service company in the New England area." In 1995, Steve's company, TradeWinds Mechanical Services,
began with a loan from his father, a used Ford pick-up truck (with no air-conditioning), and the promise of one client, Dave Fanning from
Express. "Those first few months, my wife, Judi, dispatched calls, invoiced and paid bills while I fixed the units and did sales.
We then hired two employees, one of them, Adam Marson, is still working with us today. Currently, we employ over 100 professionals
and cover an area from Maine to Virginia.
"At one point, I had to make a decision about whether we would stay small or make a leap of faith and grow. We took that leap of
faith. We've invested in management training and management systems; we're a horizontal company, not vertical; and we are steadily
growing.
"HVAC is something you don't think about until it goes down," notes Steve. While it is not a glamorous business, to Steve
Sewall it holds the continual fascination of entrepreneurship - growing the business, providing a living for all his employees, branching
off into new markets, and the essential challenge of building healthy customer and employee relationships.
While a sailboat is not the usual logo for an HVAC company, it is a tribute to my grandfather, Alden Wallace Sewall, 1907 - 1997
(pictured here). My grandfather earned his living as a boat captain, and the boat pictured on our web site is the Escapade, the yacht
that Captain Sewall sailed in the Bermuda's Cup and the America's Cup. Gramp was an icon in the Sewall clan; a larger-than-life figure,
a man with a big heart and a loud voice, irascible and loveable at the same time. He is someone who truly lived every day of his life.
If he were alive today, Gramp would get a hoot out of the sight of his old boat once again going up and down the eastern seaboard.
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