At 35, FARHAN PETTIWALA IS AN intense and energetic personality. The warm, gentle, yet highly-focused managing director of the Rs. 35 crore IAICO group has emerged as the flag bearer of the business of air conditioning solutions.

Pettiwala graduated with a gold medal in mechanical engineering with a passion for cooling systems. His three-year stint at Carrier Aircon made pettiwala adept with the marketing, production, and quality aspects of the cooling business. He quit Carrier to start his own venture – Intelligent Air Co (Norfolk Mechanical), an AC dealership, in 1994 with the help of two acquaintances. He was barely 23 then.

Pettiwala specialised in subjects like refrigeration and air conditioning and had written papers on ozone-friendly refrigerators and carried out research in 1992 on refrigerants like ‘R134a’ and ‘R141b.

Pettiwala was barely a 14-year-old when he evinved interest in entrepreneurship. This was when his father turned down his request to put money into his Plus-2 studies in a bid to rope him into the family business in Dubai. Pettiwala was determined to trade in coffee beans to pay his fees. He would pick up stocks from in –bound Indians at the Dubai airport and cart them to the marketplace on trolleys instead of taxies to cut costs.

Subsequently, Pettiwala enrolled himself with Pune-based Viswakarma Institute of Technology (VIT) and met his fees by off offering private tuitions to students.

Pettiwala has a passion for cooling systems even while he was studying engineering, Pettiwala joined Carrier Aircon Limited (CAL) where he underwent a professional training called Carrier Pet Training programme. During his training Pettiwala was oriented in various segments of the company, starting from manufacturing, marketing, servicing. He was even sent to Singapore to study the market and competition, to formulate a strategy to make CAL the numero uno brand in India.

During his stint with CAL, Pettiwala accomplished many breakthroughs with accounts like Breach Candy Hospital and leading PSU banks like ABN Amro, Aminex Chemicals, Simthkline Beecham, Citibank, Bank of America and to name a few.

While working with CAL, he studied management from ITM (SIES College).

It all started as a small idea. In India Airconditioners are normally installed and maintained by dealers – usually small entrepreneurs with small workshops or mid-sized businesses with showrooms. Their objective is to sell and offload brands that are in stock or offer higher commissions and incentives. In the process, the customer’s specific requirement inadvertently gets neglected.

This gives rise to disagreement between the end users provided with inapt cooling machines with the dealer or the manufacturer, leaving the customer with little choice to change the brand or the dealer, thereby making a loss in the bargain.

This feet-dragging attitude on the part of dealers to take full service and maintenance accountability of their sale caught the attention of Pettiwala, then a young executive of CAL, who realised the need for an unbiased service brand that focuses on customer orientation, Pettiwala has a mission to establish a pan-India conglomerate that would provide the customer the same level of service in metro or semi-metro areas, irrespective of the number and specifications of the air-conditions purchased.

This thinking resulted in the incorporation of Norfolk Mechanical, International Airconditioning Co, in 1994 – the name under which Carrier had commenced operations in Singapore in 1965 and further led to the creation of airForce and Airfield AC service benads. The two brands managed to position themselves as specialists in the servicing air conditioners and providing solutions with full accountability. Today, Norfolk Mechanical is a deemed public organization called AIRF (I) LTD.

The sole objective was to be a one point contact for providing solutions and maintaining airconditioners of all brands and capacities using the latest technology and software, better skilled and experienced people and above all working with a customer friendly attitude.

The name airForce was very thoughtfully chosen and trademark registered, as AIRF was in the business of air conditioning and has a force of people to render the services. Moreover, the very name of airForce registered easily in in the minds of the customer. The logo was very thoughtfully designed with air and force separated and with a ‘C’ in blue, to highlight the company’s temperature related business; similary airfield has alphabet ‘F’.

Very soon, corporate bodies realised that airForce was using genuine spares, has skilled people with better tools, was equipped with better infrastructure (30 land lines, 100 cell phones, 8 mobile vans, 18 two wheelers) and a vision of becoming a global service brand in last 20 years. AIRF also attracted senior managers and engineers from the service departments of the leading airconditioner manufacturing companies in India.

At first, airForce faced a stiff resistance as it had to fight against the preconceived notion that only the manufacturer could maintain the products without realising that several manufacturers merely engage in screw-driver technology, and they got their components manufactured by vendors who in any case cater to other manufacturers also or sometimes use imported spares.

Quite a deal of hard work went into making airForce a known brand among the corporates. Today, airForce has set service benchmarks by attending to all complaints within two hours, and works 24x7 to cater to a spectrum of clients, including software and BPO companies, discotheques, bars, hospitals and coffee bars that remain open late night. One of the bigger challenges that airForce has overcome is the compression of the time taken to attend to complaints and breakdowns. In the bargain it managed to give the small and mid-cap dealers a run for their money in the criteria of customer stratification.

AirForce has evolved one of the trusted names among top notch corporate groups like Wipro. City Bank, Standard Charter Bank, Cadbury, L&T, Star TV, Essar, Cipla, HDFC, IL&FC, PCS, PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Blue Cross, Labs Mariel, Barista. Tata Tele, Dr.Batra Clinic. UT Star and to name a few.

In the past decade, AIRF has grown from having five to over 1,000 customers and maintained over 30,000 tonnes of air-conditioning per day.

It has offices in more than six cities in India and has plans of becoming a pan-india company by 2009. The group also has plans to spread to Middle East countries that rely heavily on air conditioning and where the need for dependable service providers like airForce and solution providers like airfield is predominant.

AirForce employs approximately 500 people and expects this number to swell to 5,000 by 2009. The group did away with franchising in order to ensure high quality control and loyalty. AirForce and Airfield today handles air conditioning business worth over Rs 35 crore and plans to take this to over Rs 100 crore in next three years. AIRF also plans to set up a technical institute of its own in the near future.