Her daughter was very young when Make-A-Wish Utah changed their family.
The diagnosis had come early, and with it a life that looked different from what Katy Higgins had imagined. Different in ways that required more, asked more, and quietly taught her more than most people are asked to learn. Make-A-Wish Utah came into that life and granted her daughter a wish, and Katy has been thinking about what that meant ever since.
Not sentimentally, though the sentiment is there. More practically. She watched what hope did to her daughter, watched what it did to their family, and she filed it somewhere she has never stopped drawing from. When Make-A-Wish later shared with her that nearly eighty percent of children who receive a wish show measurable improvement, she already knew it before she heard it.
"A wish gives something medicine alone cannot," she says. "It gives hope."
This is where Katy's story actually begins, not in the garage where she eventually started True Pros, not in the crawlspace that forced the question, not in the twenty-five years she spent as one of the only women doing outside sales and field representation in Utah's HVAC industry. It begins with a mother who understood, earlier and more completely than most, what it means to need something beyond what is clinically possible.
Everything she has built since then makes more sense through that lens.
True Pros started in her garage at forty, after nearly two decades working in every corner of the heating and air conditioning industry. The decision to build something of her own crystallized during a job gone wrong, when she nearly got stuck in a crawlspace and emerged with a question she could not set down: What is my fallback plan? She had dispatched, managed, sold, and led. She had done almost everything in the industry except put her name on the door.
So she did.
What distinguished True Pros from the beginning was not the service or the marketing. It was the license. Katy holds her own contractor license through the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing, a distinction that matters more than it sounds. Many companies that present themselves as woman-owned still have a licensed male contractor carrying the actual legal and professional weight of the work. At True Pros, the licensed contractor is Katy. The responsibility, the standard, the accountability, all of it sits with her.
"Holding my own license means I have earned my place in this industry," she says. "I am accountable for the work being performed. I set the standard for how things are done."
She says this without ceremony. It is simply the truth of how she built the thing, and she wanted to build it that way or not at all.
She mentors businesses that compete with her directly. The philosophy comes from her own early days, when she reached out to people who had been in the industry longer and some of them let her in and some of them did not. She has spent her career being the former. Friends at A+ Garage Doors are among the people she counts in that circle, which is part of how she ended up in a room last December that changed everyone inside it.
For years before that night, True Pros had been quietly donating a portion of every installation to Make-A-Wish Utah. No announcement. No campaign. Just a decision she and her husband made privately because they understood what the organization actually does to a family. They had been that family.
The idea of bringing the broader trades community into that giving grew from a visit to the Make- A-Wish Utah building that started without an agenda. What she saw there made the mission feel urgent and scalable in a new way. She started calling her friends in the trades. She told them what she had seen. She asked them to come together.
On December 12th, 2024, roughly a hundred Utah tradespeople gathered for the Day of the Trades. A nine-year-old boy named Kyson, who had surgeons remove tumors from his brain and taught himself to walk and talk again from scratch, learned his wish to visit Walt Disney World was being granted. Katy was in that room. She has seen Kyson since.
He is in remission.
"That room was filled with people who walked away changed," she says. "People who now want to be involved, to give back, and to be part of something bigger than themselves."
The vision for this December is larger. A major venue. Service trucks from across Utah's trades filling a parking lot. A drone overhead capturing what it looks like when an entire industry decides to show up for its community. Right now, more than 270 children in Utah are waiting for their wishes to be granted. Katy believes the trades can change that number, not because any one company is large enough to do it alone, but because together they are.
Her ask to other trades owners is a simple one. Reach out. Take the tour of the Make-A-Wish Utah facility and let it become real. Decide what contribution fits your business. Come on December 12th.
"It doesn't have to be big," she says. "It just has to be intentional."
Her daughter is twenty-seven years old and still beating every timeline. Katy has been paying that forward for two decades. She is just doing it louder now.
To learn more about Day of the Trades, visit Make-A-Wish Utah online.
Learn more about Katy and True Pros and the Make-A-Wish Mission at
https://truepros.com/ https://truepros.com/more-than-just-comfort-why-we-partner-with-make-a-wish-utah/
