It was September 2001 when Bill Murdy trekked to New York
to talk to a number of investment bankers about arranging a
high-yield bond deal to help pull Comfort Systems USA Inc. out
of massive debt.
Murdy says that when he took over as chairman and CEO of
Comfort Systems USA — a $1.1 billion company that designs and
installs commercial HVAC systems — in 2000, the company had
amassed about $350 million in debt brought about by, among other
things, aggressive spending on acquisitions during what Murdy
described as a “frothier time,” during the Internet-driven economic boom of the 1990s.
“The trees were going to grow to the sky; everyone had this kind
of exuberance (about the economy) from the Internet bubble and
all of the other things from the late ’90s,” he says.
The economy started to wilt throughout 2000 and 2001, and
Comfort Systems soon found itself in a large financial hole.
Internal spending cuts reduced the debt by about $150 million, but
Comfort Systems needed help from the outside to pare down the
remaining $200 million.
That’s why, on the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, Murdy stood on
the trading floor of JPMorgan Chase & Co. in midtown Manhattan,
attempting to hammer out a deal that would allow Comfort
Systems to pay off the remainder of its debt through manageable,
mortgage-style payments.
Then came the news flash. Airliners had crashed into the World
Trade Center, several miles away from the very room in which
Murdy was standing.
Manhattan was on lockdown. Towers were plummeting to the
ground. America was sent into a state of shock, both emotionally
and economically.
The previous year had been difficult from a financial standpoint, but things were about to get a lot worse before they
improved. Murdy knew right then and there that the road ahead
was about to get extremely bumpy for his business. It didn’t take
long for his hunch to be proven correct.
“When the buildings came down, the deal came down with
them,” he says. “We knew we had to do something because we
were headed for a big downturn in the commercial HVAC business.”
The months that followed were full of difficult decisions for
Murdy and his management team.