Arkansas HVACR NewsMagazine March 2025

HVACR NewsMagazine March 2025

State National Chapter News

But it was far from easy. Trammell, who is now in federal prison serving a three year sentence for bank fraud, left behind a jungle of unpaid bills, including hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to the IRS. “We called all the vendors, told them what happened,” and slowly started paying the debts off, she told Arkansas Business . “We just kept at it.” The HVAC installation and service company showed a net loss for the first couple of years. “And then we eventually paid everybody back, including the IRS,” she said. The company’s revenue has increased 52% since it discovered the theft, and it now has 35 employees. Trammell, 48, pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud and was sentenced to prison in November. A judge ordered her to repay $435,539 to AAF and she will be on probation for two years after her release. She reported to begin serving her sentence Jan. 21 in Pekin, Illinois. Creating Distractions Trammell had been referred to Arkansas Air Flow to replace an employee who was retiring. Trammell’s starting pay was $14 an hour, but it didn’t take long for her to start helping herself to the company’s money, according to her indictment. When Trammell was hired, AAF had about 15 employees. “She was the only person in the office and answered the phone,” Kelly Brown said. “I mean, that’s how small it was at that time.” Darren Brown had been in the sheet metal and the HVAC industry for more than 40 years and created AAF after his father retired from the industry.

Arkansas Air Flow Overcomes $1.8M Theft Business Rebounds

Mark Friedman – Arkansas Business

Darren and Kelly Brown, the married owners of Arkansas Air Flow, discovered that their former bookkeeper and employee, Amy Trammell, embezzled from their business over six years. (Karen E. Segrave) Arkansas Air Flow Inc. of Sherwood hired Amy Trammell in 2012 in part to handle its payroll. Within about six weeks, she was embezzling company money. By the time her thefts were discovered six years later, they had cost the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning company more than $1.8 million, Kelly Brown, the company’s CFO, said. The situation left company founder Darren Brown with two choices. He could file for bankruptcy liquidation, closing the business he’d started in 2005, or he could fight to make it profitable again. “We chose the latter,” Kelly Brown said. “It was just a fundamental approach to banking basics is what I call it. You bill, you collect.”