How Life’s Unexpected Turns Led a Father-Daughter Team to Build Denver’s Most Trusted Home Service Company
Sometimes the best businesses are born from life’s unexpected moments. For Maddy Fauth and her father Marcus, that moment came after a series of career changes, family loss, and a shared realization that they wanted to build something meaningful together.
“My mom actually passed in 2015,” Maddy shares, her voice softening. “My parents were divorced at the time, but what that created was a really tight-knit relationship between my dad and I and my brother.”
At the time, both Maddy and Marcus were working in Colorado’s cannabis industry. But as the industry evolved, they found themselves increasingly uncomfortable with the direction it was heading.
“There was a lot of big business coming in, and it wasn’t as much about taking care of people anymore as it was making as much money as possible,” Maddy explains. “There was a real misalignment there.”
That misalignment led them both to leave cannabis and pivot to HVAC, where Marcus had previous experience. After working for another company for about a year, they couldn’t shake the entrepreneurial itch.
“We finally just had the conversation and said, ‘hey, let’s start our own business,'” Maddy recalls. And so Great Guys Heating was born in 2018.
Building on Shared Values, Different Motivations
What started as an HVAC company has grown into a full-service home solutions provider, adding electrical in 2021 and plumbing just this past year. But the real foundation of Great Guys isn’t their expanding services—it’s the marriage of Marcus and Maddy’s different motivations for starting the business.
“From Marcus’s perspective, his goal was to provide options and educate and empower our client base,” Maddy says. “He’d seen homeowners getting pushed options they didn’t necessarily need, overselling, unwarranted work.”
For Maddy, coming from corporate healthcare, her focus was different: “I really wanted to build a place where our team understood what it meant to truly be supported, to truly care for them, not just be a number.”
This combination created Great Guys’ core philosophy: trust, integrity, community, and kindness, all guided by what they call a “win-win-win” approach.
“Not only does our technician need to win, our client needs to win, and the overall company and community needs to win,” Maddy explains. “That’s really how we make our decisions as a business.”
The Power of Personal Touch
In an industry increasingly dominated by private equity and large corporations, Great Guys maintains its personal approach by empowering their technicians to make decisions on the spot.
“We teach them how we do what we do, how we make decisions. We give them that same lens as to how we personally would take care of our clients.”
This includes giving technicians the authority to offer customer satisfaction discounts or even, in some cases, to help customers facing devastating circumstances.
“We see a potential person that’s either on a limited income or they’ve had a devastating life event and their heat is broken down, we’ll basically just say, ‘you know what? Don’t worry about it. Pay it forward.'”
And when customers have concerns? “Nobody is ever calling our line saying they want to speak to leadership and being told the line ends somewhere else. I talk to people all the time. I love talking to people.”
Stories That Break Your Heart and Make You Laugh
One story that particularly exemplifies Great Guys’ approach involved a retired woman who’d been living in a tent in her backyard for almost a year.
“She had a fire in her home, and she had hired a contractor who came in, turned off the water, pulled down all the drywall, started doing the remediation, and they skipped town,” Maddy recalls, the frustration still evident in her voice. “This woman was on a limited income, and she ended up living in a tent in her backyard before winter was coming.”
Great Guys stepped in with a new contractor to help put her house back together at a discounted rate. “That’s the opportunity we have to make a difference in somebody’s life.”
On the lighter side, there was the case of the mysterious bathtub shocks.
“We had gotten a call from a client, and the complaint was, ‘every time I get into the bathtub, I get shocked,'” Maddy laughs. “Us in the office, we’re like, ‘how does that even make sense?’ So we kind of chuckled when we first got the work order.”
But when they tested it? “Sure as all get out, we turned on the water, put one of our leads in the water, and then put one on the tub, and it was about 36 volts coming through the bathtub. It was pretty wild.”
The Real Challenge: Finding Good People
Ask Maddy about the biggest challenge in growing Great Guys, and she doesn’t hesitate: finding qualified technicians.
“For every one person that I hire with experience, I have probably 10 that are wanting to get into the industry. It’s not that I don’t want to take these kids or young individuals that don’t necessarily have the same amount of experience. It’s always a balancing act.”
It’s a national issue affecting all trades, but Great Guys approaches it by investing heavily in training—not just technical skills, but leadership, conflict resolution, and customer service.
“We do trainings on leadership, on how to have conflict resolution and tough conversations, on doing right by our customers.”
The Art of Mechanical Problem-Solving
One thing Maddy wishes more people understood about her industry? The breadth of knowledge required.
“We have a base set of skills that gets applied to a base theory of how mechanical equipment works. We may not necessarily know your specific piece of equipment in that moment, but we can apply all our experience and those theories to figure out how it works.”
She gets excited talking about the technical side: “I love being able to explain the process of how any particular piece of heating or cooling equipment works. I get to nerd out about it, explaining how the natural gas comes into the furnace, the series of operation, how it gets rid of the burned fuel and generates heat. When I get those opportunities to really share the specifics, that’s something I thoroughly enjoy.”
Beyond the Office: Vinyl Records and Main Street
When she’s not fixing homes, you might find Maddy digging through vinyl records (she admits to having a “very serious vinyl records addiction”) or exploring the local music scene. Born in Montana but raised in Colorado, she loves fishing, camping, and taking advantage of everything the outdoors has to offer.
Her hidden gem recommendation? “Pretty much anything on Main Street down in Littleton. Savory Spice is one of my favorites, Smokin’ Fins is great, there’s a crystal store, the Old Town Tavern. And Little Man’s Ice Cream, man, they get me in trouble. I’ll go get an ice cream and a vinyl record.”
Looking Ahead: More of the Same, Done Better
What’s next for Great Guys? “Continue to grow. I don’t know that we’ll specifically add any more verticals, but growing our team to be able to continue to serve our community and serve our homeowners and educate new homeowners.”
It’s a simple philosophy that’s served them well: do good work, treat people right, and don’t let ego get in the way when things go wrong.
“You’re going to make mistakes,” Maddy reflects. “It’s about not having an ego when those things come up and finding that solution that gets to that win-win-win. You can’t learn from a mistake that you don’t acknowledge or take ownership of.”
For Denver families looking for home service providers who genuinely care about getting it right, Great Guys Heating proves that sometimes the best companies are built not on flashy marketing, but on old-fashioned values and a simple promise: “We won’t stop until we have the answer for the problem.”
Ready to work with a team that puts people over profit? Contact Great Guys Heating for all your HVAC, electrical, and plumbing needs, and discover why Denver families trust them with their most important investment…their home.
Great Guys Heating serves the Denver metro area with comprehensive home services built on trust, integrity, community, and kindness. Founded in 2018 by Maddy and Marcus Fauth, the company has grown from a small HVAC operation to a full-service home solutions provider while maintaining their commitment to the win-win-win philosophy.