Meet all of the 2025 Top 40 Under 40 HVACR Professionals
Chris Buttenham
Company: Reins
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Age: 33
As co-founder and CEO of Reins, Buttenham is leading a quiet revolution in how HVAC companies think about equity, rewards, and long-term retention. And his motivation is personal.
“My dad is a contractor, and I worked for him after college, so blue collar is in my DNA,” he said. “After seeing him struggle to incentivize his key employees and take a step back from the operations, I created Reins.”
Ask most contractors about their biggest challenge, and staffing is likely at the top. For some, it’s getting reliable staff through the door in the first place. For others, it’s holding onto the staff they have. Buttenham and his team at Reins realized this issue and tackled it head-on, creating the Modern Agreement for Rewards & Equity (MARE) — a framework that, combined with an intuitive incentive platform, helps businesses offer meaningful ownership-like rewards without giving up control.
Through Reins, Buttenham has helped contractors grant tens of millions of dollars’ worth of phantom equity and profit-sharing plans, giving employees more skin in the game and keeping top performers invested for the long haul. Additionally, he’s started a broader conversation around alternative equity, incentives, and succession in the trades.
But Buttenham’s entrepreneurial journey started even before Reins. When he was just 15 years old, he started his own business, and by 22, he had founded and sold his first tech company, Obie. Additionally, he’s an alum of 500 Startups and the Plug & Play accelerator program, ultimately raising millions in venture capital.
As if that weren’t enough, in 2025, Buttenham authored “Alternative Equity: The Owner’s Guide to Rewarding Key Talent Through Phantom Equity and Modern Incentives.”
“[My goal] is to support the people who keep this industry running — techs, managers, and owners — by making it easier to retain great employees and pass businesses on to the next generation,” Buttenham said. “I want to help modernize how ownership and incentives work in the trades.”