View story at The News & Advance...Everyone who interviews Dana Marr always asks her about being a female in a male-dominated industry. Including this News & Advance reporter, admittedly.

“I kind of laugh, because I don’t know any different,” Marr, the CEO of Wooldridge Heating, Air & Electrical, said recently. “I entered it when I was 15 years old, part time, and I’ve always worked with the male-dominant industry here, whether it’s our vendors or the employees. So it’s just never felt like a challenge or anything different to me, because I don’t know anything different.”

She’s always lived by The Golden Rule, just treating others the way she wanted to be treated.

“I think that earns you respect quicker than anything,” she said. “I know I have to have a backbone when it comes to somebody not doing their job or holding people accountable, that’s when you have to be stronger. But mostly I just try to treat everybody with respect around here and appreciate them as an employee.”

The company has created a family-like atmosphere and many employees call Marr their “work mom.”

“So I’ve tried to find that balance,” she said.

Marr’s parents, Lester and Patricia Wooldridge, started the business in 1975 because, simply, Lester Wooldridge couldn’t work for anyone else, Marr said.

“He just had that dominant personality himself, so he ended up becoming a businessperson himself and started his own company,” she said.

He started it in the basement of his home and a little back porch was the office. The basement was the duct shop.

As the company grew, they rented a little cinderblock shop and moved there. In 1996, they moved to their current location at 14179 Wards Road.

That was nearly 50 years ago with two employees. The business now has 70 employees.

In the early days, it was just HVAC service and only Lester Wooldridge would price, sell, install and service everything himself.

He later added team members to do those services as Wooldridge became the manager of the company and had members go on-site to do the work.

They also added electrical service 25 years ago and have an entire division that does electrical work and standby generators.

As of early September, the company now offers plumbing services.

A high school graduate in 1989, Marr had planned to go into banking and finance but by June of that year, the only service dispatcher had quit, leaving Wooldridge in a panic.

“He pretty much woke me up and said, ‘Hey, you’re coming to work for me and be a service dispatcher,’” Marr recalled. “So I did that that summer and I’ve been here ever since.”

Marr did everything from answering the phone to dispatching and typing up proposals to unloading trucks. She moved into inventory control to job costing, setting up sales and overseeing the entire install department. Later, she transitioned into accounting where she did payroll.

As the company grew, it needed a human resource staff member to handle benefits, discipline and compliance.

“Because as we grew and got over 25 and 50 employees, you had different rules. So then I kind of wore the HR hat and payroll hat for a while, and then I guess it was in about 2016 he wanted to transition me to CEO as he wanted to transition out,” she said.

By the time she became CEO, Marr had nearly worked for the company 30 years.

Though it wasn’t her initial plan to work for her parents’ company, Marr became a natural fit.

“I enjoyed talking to customers and helping people,” she said. “And I liked helping him because it was growing and getting organized. He was more of a fast-paced salesperson and I was more of, ‘let’s come up with a process,’ so we kind of balanced each other.’”

She said they do things a little differently in the top leadership role.

“My dad was more of a ‘work comes first, we gotta have our work done before we can play,’ and I feel like as we’ve grown as a company we can implement more of a fun culture,” she said.

As of 2007, Wooldridge is an Employee Stock Ownership Plan or ESOP company meaning it’s employee-owned and no longer technically “family-owned.”

The Wooldridges poured their heart and soul into their company, Marr said, and love seeing their daughter flourish as its CEO and grow the company into what it is today.