Our First Holiday Lighting Season

How did Frosty's Holiday Lighting get started?

Frosty's Holiday Lighting LLCwas our very first business, and it started in 2017 — a full year before Frosty's HVAC. The truth is, I didn't set out to start a holiday lighting company. I saw an opportunity and I grabbed it. A buddy of mine was doing Christmas light installations and making good money in the fall. I thought: I'm not afraid of heights, I'm not afraid of hard work, and I need to feed my family. Let me figure this out.

So Mariafernanda Jacobo and I scraped together enough money to buy some commercial-grade LED lights, a ladder, clips, extension cords, and a timer setup. That was our entire inventory. No training manual. No business plan. Just two people who were tired of working for someone else and ready to bet on themselves.

What was the first installation like?

Our first customer was a homeowner in Irving who found us through a local Facebook group. They wanted their roofline, front porch, and two trees wrapped. I showed up that October morning with my ladder, my lights, and absolutely no idea how long this would take. I told the customer three hours. It took seven.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The roofline clips I bought didn't fit the fascia style on this particular house. I had to run to Home Depot mid-job for different clips. One string of lights had a dead section that I didn't catch until it was already mounted. I had to take it down, swap the string, and rehang it. The tree wrapping took three times longer than I expected because I was learning on the fly how to spiral the lights evenly.

But when the sun went down and that customer turned on their lights for the first time, they looked at their house like they were seeing it for the first time. The wife actually teared up. She said it was the first year their house looked like a magazine. I stood on the sidewalk looking at what I'd done and thought: this is it. This is what it feels like to build something with your own hands and watch someone love it.

How did you handle Texas weather on rooftops?

Texas weather in October and November is unpredictable. One day it's 85 degrees and sunny. The next day it's 40 with wind and rain. I learned fast that you don't cancel jobs because of weather — you work around it. Customers have deadlines. They want their lights up before Thanksgiving, before their family arrives, before the neighborhood lighting competition.

There was one installation in Flower Mound where a cold front blew in while I was on the roof. Temperature dropped 20 degrees in an hour. Wind picked up to 25 mph. I was on a two-story roofline with a strand of lights in my hand and no good way to get down fast. I just kept working. My fingers were so cold I could barely grip the clips. Mariafernanda Jacobowas on the ground yelling up at me to come down, but I was already 80% done and I wasn't about to leave a job half-finished.

I finished that install. And the customer who saw me working through the cold front without complaining — they became one of our most loyal repeat customers. Sometimes the hardest jobs build the strongest relationships.

What did you learn in that first season?

I learned everything the hard way that first year. How to estimate jobs accurately (my early estimates were wildly off). Which light clips work on which rooflines. How to wrap trees without gaps. How to run extension cords safely without creating trip hazards. How to price a job so we actually make money after materials. How to schedule installs back-to-back without overcommitting.

But the biggest lesson was about being my own boss. For the first time in my life, when I did good work, the reward went directly to my family. When a customer was happy, that was my customer. When a referral came in, it came because of my work. That feeling of ownership changed something in me. After years of working construction for other people, of building things that had someone else's name on them, I was building something of my own.

Mariafernanda Jacobosaw it too. She told me that first season: “You're different when you're working for us.” She was right. I had more energy, more patience, more drive. Ownership does that. When it's your name on the line, you find another gear.

How did holiday lighting lead to starting Frosty's HVAC?

Holiday lighting is seasonal. You're busy from October through January — installations in the fall, takedowns after New Year's. But from February to September, there's no holiday lighting work. We needed year-round income, especially with our growing family.

I had 10years of HVAC experience from my construction days, including commercial work on the Amazon warehouses in DFW. The seasonal gap in the lighting business lined up perfectly with HVAC: summer is peak air conditioning season, which is exactly when the lighting business is quiet. And winter, when people need heating repair, overlaps with when I'm finishing up lighting takedowns.

So in January 2018, Mariafernanda Jacobo got her Texas HVAC Contractor License (TACLA126718E), and we launched Frosty's HVAC LLC. One business fed the other. The confidence from that first holiday season — the proof that we could find customers, do good work, and build a reputation from nothing — gave us the courage to do it again. I wrote about the HVAC launch in the Frosty's origin story.

Where is Frosty's Holiday Lighting today?

Still going strong. Every fall, when the HVAC calls slow down and the temperatures drop, I switch gears back to Frosty's Holiday Lighting. We serve homes across DFW. Our installations are a lot better now than that first seven-hour job in Irving— I can do a full roofline in a fraction of the time. But I still get the same feeling when the lights come on and the homeowner smiles.

That first season in 2017 gave me something I'd never had before: proof that I could build something from nothing. Proof that Mariafernanda Jacobo and I were a team that worked. Proof that the name Frosty could be more than a nickname. Now it's on four businesses. It started on a rooftop in Irving with a ladder and a dream. If you want the full picture of who I am, read my story.