2.2 Business Plan, Marketplace & License Scope

2.2 Business Plan, Marketplace & License Scope

A Florida HVAC company that is licensed but unplanned still fails. Area A of the B&F exam expects you to treat the business plan as an accounting document, not a motivational essay, and to keep every bid inside the scope of the contractor license. The 2026 references that carry this cluster are Builder's Guide to Accounting (2001), the Contractors Manual 2025, Chapter 455 F.S. (2025), and Chapter 489 itself.

Accounting practices that belong in the business plan

Builder's Guide to Accounting and the Contractors Manual expect a start-up plan to quantify, in dollars:

• Startup capital and working capital. Working capital is current assets minus current liabilities. An HVAC shop that buys condensers, copper, and vans on 30-day terms while waiting 45 to 60 days for a builder draw is insolvent on paper even if every job will eventually be profitable. The plan must show a month-by-month cash-flow forecast, not just a revenue goal.
• Chart of accounts and job-cost structure. Direct job costs — field labor, materials, subcontracts, job equipment rental, permit fees — stay out of overhead. Overhead — rent, office salaries, general liability, unassigned vehicles, advertising — is recovered through markup. Mixing the two is the classic exam trap and the classic reason a “busy” HVAC company has no cash.
• Projected income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. Lenders and sureties underwrite from these three statements. A website and a truck wrap are not a plan.
• Break-even volume. Fixed monthly overhead divided by contribution margin per revenue dollar tells you how many changeouts or how many tons of install you must sell before the company covers itself.
• Tax calendar. Sole proprietors and single-member LLCs live on Form 1040/Schedule C and quarterly federal estimated taxes. Partnerships and S-corporations have mid-March federal deadlines (Form 1065 and Form 1120-S for calendar-year filers). C-corporations file Form 1120 and Florida Form F-1120. Florida also collects sales tax at a statewide rate of 6%, plus local discretionary surtax that varies by county. Do not invent a county surtax on the exam; know that the state rate is 6% and that local surtax is added by county. Installation-labor treatment depends on the transaction, which is why the business-plan accountant, not the qualifier guessing at the counter, maps taxable versus nontaxable billings.

CILB financial screening sits inside the same plan. Rule 61G4-15.006 (effective May 5, 2024) requires a consumer credit report, for the applicant and the business entity, with no unsatisfied judgments or liens and a FICO-derived score of 660 or higher. Below 660, the applicant completes a Board-approved 14-hour financial responsibility course. A 660-or-higher score with a clean report can satisfy both financial responsibility and stability. Those numbers must be consistent with the financial statements you put in the plan and with the credit file submitted on CILB 6-G or 6-H. Inflating first-year revenue to impress a lender while showing a thin credit file to the board is how applications stall.

Local marketplace

Florida HVAC is not a generic United States cooling market. Year-round latent load, humidity, salt air, and hurricane-recovery spikes drive demand. The 2026 trade reference list still uses the 2023 Florida Building Code — Mechanical and the 2023 Florida Building Code — Energy Conservation (8th Edition). A marketplace analysis that belongs in the business plan includes:

• Who the customer is. Production homebuilders want volume rough-in and changeouts at builder-set unit prices. Residential service-agreement customers want same-day response in August. Commercial property managers want a bonded, insured contractor who can document SMACNA duct construction and testing and balancing. You cannot be all three on day one without overhead the plan cannot carry.
• Who the competitor is. A certified statewide HVAC contractor can follow a national-account customer from Duval County to Miami-Dade. A registered contractor cannot. That is a market fact, not a marketing slogan.
• Permit and inspection friction. Local building departments still issue permits, inspect, and collect fees even when the contractor is state-certified. Certification waives local competency testing, not local permitting (F.S. 489.105(8)).
• Labor and supply. Environmental Protection Agency Section 608 technicians, sheet-metal mechanics, and refrigerant availability are capacity constraints. A plan that assumes unlimited labor in August is fiction, and sureties will treat it that way.

State and local licensure stack. You need the CILB certificate or registration, the local business tax receipt applied for in the name of the business organization and the QA (F.S. 489.119(4)), local permits, and, if you use a fictitious name, statutory fictitious-name compliance (489.119(2)(d)). The contractor’s registration or certification number must appear on permit applications, bids, contracts, and advertisements (489.119(5)). A local business tax receipt is not a contractor license.

Scope of the contractor license — Class A versus Class B

F.S. 489.105(3) splits contractors into Division I (general, building, residential) and Division II (including air-conditioning). HVAC is Division II. Certification allows the certificateholder to engage in contracting only for the type of work covered by the certificate and only while the certificate is on active status (F.S. 489.115(2)(b)). The attempted sale of contracting services and the negotiation or bid for a contract on those services also constitute contracting; if the services require licensure, the offering requires the corresponding license (F.S. 489.105(6)).

A Class A air-conditioning contractor (F.S. 489.105(3)(f)) has services that are unlimited in the execution of contracts requiring the skill to install, maintain, repair, fabricate, alter, extend, or design (if not prohibited by law) central air-conditioning, refrigeration, heating, and ventilating systems, including duct work performed as necessary to complete an air-distribution system; boiler and unfired pressure vessel systems; piping, insulation of pipes, vessels and ducts, pressure and process piping, and pneumatic control piping. Limited electrical work is allowed: replace, disconnect, or reconnect power wiring on the line or load side of the dedicated existing electrical disconnect switch on single-phase systems; repair or replace power wiring, disconnects, breakers, or fuses for dedicated HVAC circuits with proper use of a circuit-breaker lock; install, disconnect, and reconnect low-voltage HVAC control wiring; and install a condensate drain from an air-conditioning unit to an existing safe waste or other approved disposal other than a direct connection to a sanitary system. The Class A contractor may not install liquefied petroleum or natural gas fuel lines within buildings except for disconnecting or reconnecting changeouts of those appliances; may not run potable water lines or sanitary sewer lines; may not do swimming-pool piping; and may not do electrical power wiring beyond the HVAC exceptions above.

A Class B air-conditioning contractor (F.S. 489.105(3)(g)) has the same trade skills limited to 25 tons of cooling and 500,000 Btu of heating in any one system. Class B includes piping and insulation of pipes, vessels, and ducts, and the same electrical and condensate exceptions as Class A. Class B does not include boilers, unfired pressure vessels, or pneumatic control piping. Class B candidates still need the theory of larger equipment for diagnostic items on the trade exam, but the Class B trade outline drops installing systems of 25 to 100 tons, systems over 100 tons, and centrifugal compressor systems. Class A experience for licensure should include systems in excess of 25 tons cooling and 500,000 Btu heating.

Class C is a service-only grandfather. Only persons certified or registered as Class C on October 1, 1988 remain Class C. This study guide is written for Class A and Class B.

F.S. 489.113(9)(a) lets a contractor act as prime contractor when the majority of the work under the contract is within the license, subcontracting remaining licensed work (electrical, plumbing, roofing, and so on) to properly licensed trades. That majority-of-the-work rule does not let a Class B HVAC contractor take a 40-ton rooftop as “prime” and then pretend two 20-ton invoices are two systems. Capacity is measured in any one system.

Certified statewide versus registered local

A certified contractor possesses a DBPR certificate of competency and “shall be allowed to contract in any jurisdiction in the state without being required to fulfill the competency requirements of that jurisdiction” (F.S. 489.105(8)). A registered contractor has registered with the department after fulfilling competency requirements in the jurisdiction for which registration is issued and “may contract only in such jurisdictions” (F.S. 489.105(10)). A registered HVAC contractor who bids a job in the next county is unlicensed on that job. Unlicensed contracting is not a paperwork problem; F.S. 489.128 makes contracts by unlicensed contractors unenforceable in law or equity, and 489.127 supplies civil and criminal penalties.

Certified still means local permits, local inspections, and local business tax receipts. It does not mean you can advertise Class A work on a Class B ticket, or mechanical-contractor gas piping on an air-conditioning ticket.

Florida HVAC scenario

Coastal Air, Inc. is qualified by a certified Class B QA. A Panama City Beach homeowners’ association asks for a bid to replace a 30-ton air-cooled chiller serving the clubhouse — one system, 30 tons of cooling. The owner suggests “just put it under two invoices of 15 tons.” That split does not create two systems. The contractor must decline, bring a Class A qualifier onto the business, or see the work contracted to a Class A or mechanical contractor. Meanwhile Coastal’s business plan assumed $2.1 million of coastal-condo replacement work, half of which exceeds 25 tons. The plan is not a market study if the license cannot legally capture the market. The honest plan either funds a Class A path — including qualifying experience on systems in excess of 25 tons and 500,000 Btu — or it targets the under-25-ton replacement and service market that Class B actually owns.

The same company, if only registered in Bay County, cannot follow that association’s sister property in Walton County even on a 5-ton split system. Certification would solve the geography; it would not solve the 30-ton capacity problem. Scope and geography are independent limits, and the B&F exam tests both.