By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
APRIL 8, 2025 | People throughout Greater Atlanta have seen the colorful Bardi service trucks scooting around, as the Norcross-based company dispatches assistance to residential customers for plumbing, HVAC and electrical problems. There’re plenty of them, now totaling 90 vehicles, as the company has experienced major growth from its beginning in 1989.
Today the company is run by Adam Bardi, who purchased the firm in 2018, when he had 22 employees and 10 trucks. Seven years later, he has grown to 130 member-employees.
Adam Bardi
Inc. Magazine named Bardi among the 5,000 fastest growing companies in the nation in 2022 and 2023.
The company was founded by Italian immigrant Alexander Bardi, who came to Marietta from Trieste, Italy, when he was seven years old. He later graduated from Georgia Tech with a mechanical engineering degree, and took a job in the oil industry in Houston, where his son Adam was born. But during an oil crisis of the early 1980s, he lost his job. Contacting the Georgia Tech placement office, the senior Bardi joined Cherokee Heating and Air of Atlanta, where he remained for seven years before starting his own company in 1989. The firm has always been based in Gwinnett.
Trainees work on water heaters in classroom
Meanwhile, Adam Bardi, 42, graduated from Valdosta State University, and began a painting business, which proved successful for six years.“I didn’t want to be in dad’s shadow,” he says.
Meanwhile, he married a former fellow high school student, Heather. (They both graduated from high school in Henry County, though they did not date then.) He and his wife have two daughters, Reagan and Rylie, ages 6 and 8, and live in Peachtree Corners.
By 2010, Adam felt mature enough to join his father in the business, learning the various aspects, and taking courses in HVAC at Gwinnett Tech at night. He became familiar with all aspects of the company, including night service calls. He eventually became general manager of the residential side of the business. When his father decided to retire, Adam found financing and bought the business from his father.
Different HVAC systems become familiar in class
How has the company grown so quickly? Adam says: “I’m a driven person, and want to be the best. I gravitate toward sales and marketing and we have strong operational people. I also belong to a national CEO group and share data and bounce ideas off each other.”
Another reason: Bardi recognized the bottleneck of not having many qualified technicians. “Many are getting old and retiring, so we need to train people.”
Bardi hired a training director, who runs a 12 week academy to teach 15 employees at a time in all aspects of the business. A special classroom is outfitted with the mechanical units that are in homes, such as HVAC, plumbing, heat pumps, and toilets.
Heat pumps in training class
“These students take these units apart to learn how they operate. They are our employees who are paid by us to study in this academy, and paid more when they graduate. Once completing the training, they become eligible to make service calls and operate their own truck. Some can make over six figures. And our goal is to retain as many employees as we can as we grow our business.”
Happily, Adam says there is a waiting list of those who want this training. Bardi lets his employees take their trucks home, which allows them to be easily dispatched quickly the next day all over the Atlanta area.
Always with a goal, Adam Bardi hopes to double the size of his business within five years. So look for even more of those brightly-painted Bardi trucks in your neighborhood.
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