The standard advice for a shop that wants to get bigger is to put more money behind the phones in July. July is the most expensive month of the year to buy an HVAC customer, and the growth that shows up on next year’s books gets decided in April and October, when nothing is on fire and your calendar has holes in it. How to grow an HVAC business in a market like Atlanta is mostly a question of what you sell in the months when nobody has an emergency.
Home services carries one of the highest click prices in American advertising
Home and home improvement runs $8.33 for a single click in US search advertising, among the priciest categories there is 1. That is the price on an average day. During a heat wave, when every shop in the metro raises bids at the same hour, it goes up, and the searches you win are the ones your competitors were too booked to want.
Which sets up the part most owners will hate. When your schedule is already booked four days deep in the third week of July, turn the search campaigns off for those days. Paying peak prices to add a name to a waitlist is the most expensive way to disappoint a homeowner who will never call you again, and it also spends the money that was supposed to fund your September.
We have argued elsewhere that the summer spike is worth capturing and that the in-season game is being findable in the ninety seconds a homeowner spends comparing shops. Both things hold. Capture the spike up to the edge of what your trucks can serve, and stop at that edge instead of spending past it out of momentum.
In April you are selling a different product to a different person
The homeowner searching in July has a broken system and no patience. The homeowner searching in April has a working system and a memory of a $600 bill, which is a completely different sale, and running July’s ad against them wastes both of you.
The shoulder-season offer that does work is an assessment with a written result. Not a free inspection, which everybody offers and nobody values. A flat-fee visit, priced somewhere between a service call and nothing, that ends with a one-page report: current age, what is likely to fail, an estimated cost when it does, and a repair-or-replace recommendation with a date range on it. Homeowners who would never book a sales call will book a diagnosis, and a written report sitting in a kitchen drawer is worth more than any follow-up sequence, because it is your number in the house when the system finally quits.
The second shoulder product is the maintenance agreement, and it is worth understanding what you are selling. The customer is buying a smaller chance of a July emergency. You are buying the right to be the incumbent, and a February with something in it.
Price the two customers side by side
Our published benchmark for HVAC puts a lead between $45 and $130 with a $75 median and a typical shop closing about 30% of them, which you can run against your own figures on the HVAC lead cost page. At the median, one booked customer costs about $250 to buy. Hold that constant for both customers below.
Customer A calls in July with a bad capacitor. Assume a $410 ticket and $260 in parts and tech time, which leaves $150 in gross profit. You paid $250 to win them. You are down $100 on the first visit, and there is nothing connecting them to you afterward, so the odds they call you rather than searching again next summer are roughly the odds you get lucky.
Customer B enrolls in an $18-a-month plan after an October assessment. Assume $216 a year in plan revenue against two visits costing you $55 each in tech time, which leaves $106 a year in plan margin. Say they stay three years, so $318. Add one repair inside that window at $150 gross profit and you are at $468. Then comes the part that decides the whole thing. If one in five plan customers replaces a system with you inside three years, and a replacement leaves you $2,400 in gross profit, that is worth $480 a head across the group, which puts Customer B near $948 against the same $250 you paid for Customer A.
Now break the assumption that is most likely wrong. If your plan customers stay fourteen months instead of three years, plan margin drops to about $124, the mid-window repair may never happen, and replacement odds fall to something like one in twelve, or $200 a head. Customer B is now worth about $324 against $250 acquisition, which is a business you can run but not one you can grow on. The entire case for the maintenance agreement rests on a retention number, and it is the number shops are least likely to have in front of them. Pull your plan list from two Octobers ago and count how many are still on it. That percentage is the number that tells you whether any of the math above applies to you.
Atlanta hands you a longer selling window than the calendar suggests
Shops here run on a plan built for a shorter summer than the one we have, and they go dark for a stretch of spring and fall that in this climate is long enough to fill a quarter. April, May, September, and October are genuine selling months in North Georgia, plus the stretches in March and November when a mild week has homeowners thinking about the system for the first time since the bill arrived.
Compare that to a shop in Minneapolis working a compressed cooling season and a hard heating season with almost nothing between them. Their advertising has to be seasonal by force. Yours does not, and running a two-month summer program in a market with four shoulder months is leaving the easiest revenue in the trade on the table. This is the reason we set up HVAC accounts in Atlanta with a shoulder-season offer built before the summer one.
What to do with the money you pulled out of July
Take the spend you cut during the booked-out weeks and move it two places.
The first is the list you already own. Every customer who bought a repair this summer got a lesson in what a July breakdown feels like, and September is when that memory is still fresh and the phone is quiet enough to make the calls. Reaching one of those households costs a fraction of the $8.33 you pay for a stranger’s click 1, and they have already met your tech.
The second is the assessment offer, running from mid-September through October against searches from homeowners who are planning instead of panicking. Those clicks cost less than the emergency ones because fewer shops bid on them, and the customer who converts arrives with a report in hand and no rival quote.
Neither of those is complicated, and both take somebody to build them before the season turns. Our prices for building that kind of two-season program are posted on the services page, and if the number there is more than the revenue you expect from a shoulder-season offer, the program is the wrong size for your shop and you should say so on the first call.
So here is the question worth answering before the first cool week: what does your shop sell to a homeowner whose air conditioner is working fine today?