Matt Tooley

Matt Tooley has a curious mind. So curious that he spent six years at the University of Florida. “Eventually, the university tried to charge me out-of-state tuition,” he laughs. “I was taking a lot of classes I was interested in that were outside my required curriculum. I was a mechanical engineering major, but ended up with three minors. I completed all the pre-med and pre-law requirements. I took the MCAT, the LSAT, the GRE, and the GMAT — and I still had no idea what I wanted to do.”

Thankfully, his third minor — sales engineering — served up a Eureka moment. “I took a seminar course that featured speakers from the technical sales world. One speaker was a district manager for the Trane company. It was an interesting presentation. He spoke a little bit about commercial air conditioning, but a lot more about racing cars and boats and planes. I thought, well this sounds like a pretty nice gig.”

Tooley scrapped his plans for graduate school and landed a Florida post with Trane. “It was the only job I actually interviewed for,” he adds. Soon, he was headed to La Crosse, Wisconsin for six months of intensive training. “It turns out I had a little bit of a knack for sales and I really enjoyed it.”

Tooley leveraged his technical background and deft people skills to good effect. He built trusted, long-term relationships with customers that made him Florida’s trusted go-to Trane rep for eight years. He also developed a solid rapport with colleagues, competitors, and industry contacts alike. Those relationships laid the groundwork for the entrepreneurial phase of his career. Teaming up with a fellow ex-Trane colleague, he became an independent commercial HVAC manufacturer’s representative.

“When we started, we only represented two product lines, but had 20 manufacturers on our line card before he retired and I joined the Florida office of Insight Partners.”

When Insight Partners divided into two separate entities in 2022, Tooley became part of Insight Partners Florida — a wholly owned subsidiary of Meriton. Eager to expand its reach into Miami’s commercial HVAC rep market, Meriton Chief Executive Officer Jerry Braun sought Tooley’s advice.

“I said there is only one team down there I would be interested in working with,” Tooley recalls. Jerry said, ‘Me, too. I hope it’s the same one.’ It turns out it was — David Fernandez and Max Marrero, the cofounders of Integrated Cooling Solutions.”

Tooley knew Fernandez from their overlapping stints at Trane. After both men had left the company, their paths crossed over the years. “We were just friendly neighbors,” he explains. “We talked often and helped each other secure product lines so we’d have a good working relationship across the territory divisions. David and I have been working hand-in-hand even though we were in separate businesses from 2011 to 2019.”

Tooley set up a meeting between Braun, Fernandez, and Marrero. “By July 2023, the deal was done,” Tooley adds.

Now with everyone under the Meriton umbrella, Tooley runs the ICS sales teams in central Florida, as well as the Pensacola and Mobile, Alabama markets.

“I wasn’t trying to become a leader, but we found there was a need for a sales engineering coach. I started when I was still selling equipment and taking care of customers I’ve served for 20 years. But now, I’m focused on recruiting and training our growing team.”

It’s no surprise that Tooley makes a trip to the University of Florida every fall and spring semester to be a guest speaker in the sales engineering class he took as a student — extolling the unique combination of skills that made the profession such an intriguing career choice for him.

“It’s not pure sales, it’s a Venn diagram between technical background and personality – someone who’s interested in meeting people, connecting with them, building relationships, and helping people,” he says.

For more than 20 years, helping people has been Tooley’s playbook for life. “There are people who approach life as a series of transactions and others as a series of relationships. I lean on the relationship side. Life is short. I’ve tried to build a great life by leaning on the relationship side.”

 

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