Creating Empires
Sarasota’s Clockwork Home Services has made millions selling home repair concepts and helping franchisees and clients improve customer service, profitability and efficiency
Today, James Abrams is president and chief executive of Clockwork Home Services, a company whose offices fill most of the ninth floor at Five Points Plaza and whose employees franchise a trio of home repair concepts throughout the United States and Canada.
Clockwork and its franchisees grossed $480 million last year.
But there was a time in the late 1960s when Abrams was a Detroit schoolteacher who took the 247 pounds overloading his 6-foot-2-inch frame and huffed it over to a local Weight Watchers.
He dropped to 170 and became such a believer in the franchised weight-control concept that he went to work for the owners.
As Abrams kept his weight down, he helped expand the Detroit franchise into the largest one in the world with some 8,700 customers — a week.
In 1975, he left Weight Watchers for a new challenge at Trane, the heating and air conditioning company, as an entry-level salesman. By the end of the decade, he was the company’s national residential sales manager.
His next challenge came in 1981. Abrams started Home Energy Savers in St. Louis and in a handful of years expanded it (renamed “Service Experts”) into the largest home air-conditioning company in the country with $786 million in annual gross sales.
A cold and dreary Missouri winter in 1988 drove him to Sarasota, where the sun was shining. In Southwest Florida, he bought longtime Sarasota air-conditioning company Air Comfort.
After eight years of commuting between Florida and Missouri, Abrams took both companies public in 1996.
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