Marketing an HVAC Business in a Town That Only Thinks About You Twice a Year
Ray Talbot runs two trucks out of a shop on the edge of Maple Run. In the third week of July he turned down eleven calls. In the second week of April he sat in the shop until two in the afternoon and then went home.
That is the whole problem with this trade in a town this size, and almost nothing written about HVAC marketing addresses it. The advice assumes the constraint is demand. In a metro area it is. Here the constraint is that demand arrives in two violent bursts, you cannot possibly serve all of it while it is happening, and then it goes away.
Walt Brennan put it to Ray this way. "You do not have a marketing problem in July. In July you have a scheduling problem. Your marketing problem is in April, and you can only solve it in January."
The peak is not where the work is
When the heat quits in January, the customer does not choose a contractor. They call whoever comes to mind first, and if that one does not answer they call the next one, and the decision is over in about ninety seconds.
This means almost everything you can spend money on during the peak is wasted. The customer is not comparing you to anybody. They are not reading your website. There is no consideration period to influence. Whoever answers the phone gets the job.
So the peak rewards exactly two things, and neither of them is marketing.
Answering. Not a voicemail, not a callback in the morning. A human, at ten at night in January, even one who says "I cannot get there before Thursday, here is what to do tonight so your pipes are alright." The contractor who says that on the phone gets remembered better than the one who never picked up gets forgiven.
Being already in their head. Which is decided months earlier, and is the actual subject of the rest of this.
Maintenance agreements are the only thing that smooths the year
Every HVAC guide mentions maintenance plans as a revenue stream. In a small town they matter for a different and much larger reason: they are the only mechanism that puts work in the two months when there is none.
Think about what an agreement actually buys you.
A reason to be in the house in April and October. Those are your dead months. An agreement fills them with billable, scheduled, non-emergency work that you set the calendar for rather than the weather.
A conversation about replacement that happens early. The worst version of the replacement conversation is the one you have standing in a cold kitchen in January with a family who did not plan to spend eight thousand dollars this week. The best version happens in October, on a system you have watched for three years, where you say plainly that it will probably not make it through another winter and here is what the options look like. Same customer, same money, completely different conversation, and you are far more likely to get the job because they had time to think instead of time to panic.
A list. After four years you have a few hundred households whose equipment you know. In a town of four thousand that is a meaningful fraction of the whole market, and no competitor can buy it.
The number worth watching is not how many agreements you sold. It is what share of your winter emergency calls come from people who were already on the list. When that share climbs, your January stops being a lottery.
The season before the season is where the money is made
Ray's best month, measured in profit rather than revenue, turned out to be September. Not because September is busy, but because everything sold in September was scheduled work at a normal price, done in daylight, with the part ordered ahead instead of paid for at emergency freight.
The work that fills September is not advertising. It is a list and an afternoon.
- Every customer where you replaced the furnace and left the air conditioner, or replaced the air conditioner and left the furnace. They have a known half-old system and you know exactly which half.
- Every repair customer from last winter where you wrote something like "will need attention soon" on the ticket. That note is a sales appointment nobody ever books.
- Every maintenance agreement due for renewal, contacted before it lapses rather than after.
This is a couple of hours on a slow morning, done in the right month, and it is worth more than any budget a two-truck shop can spend. The Friday marketing hour is where that afternoon lives if you want it to actually happen.
What the website has to do in this trade, and it is narrow
For HVAC in a small town the website has one main job and it happens on a phone, at night, in a cold house, by somebody who is upset.
That means the things that decide whether the site works are unglamorous. Does the phone number appear without scrolling. Is it a tap-to-call link, so a thumb on a phone actually dials. Does the page load on the weak signal at the far edge of the county. Does it say the towns you cover, in words, so somebody in the next township knows whether to bother.
Everything else on the site is doing a smaller job. The five second website test is the version of this you can run yourself in a minute, and the free check is the automated version.
The second job of the site is the one people forget: it is what somebody looks at after your name comes up in the town Facebook group. Someone asks who to call about a furnace, three people answer, and then everybody who is reading looks up all three. That is a real moment of comparison, and it is one of the few you get.
Your competition is not who you think
Ask a small-town HVAC contractor who they compete with and they name the regional company with the jingle. Sometimes that is right. Usually the more expensive competitor is one of these two.
The homeowner who waits. A system limping through one more winter is a job you did not lose to anybody, and the way to win it is the early replacement conversation described above.
The unlicensed guy with a truck. He is cheaper and he is genuinely faster to answer. You do not beat him on price and you should not try. You beat him on the specific things that go wrong when the work is done badly, said plainly and without insulting anybody, because in a town this size everybody knows him and half of them like him.
There is a longer version of this argument in the piece on what happens when a regional outfit opens in your county, and most of it applies to the cheaper local competitor too.
Three readings to take this week
- Count what share of last winter's emergency calls came from households you had already been inside. If it is under half, your January is still mostly luck.
- Pull every ticket from last heating season with a note about a system that is near the end. That stack is your September.
- Call your own after-hours number from a cell phone at nine at night. Whatever happens is what happens to a customer with no heat, and it is the single highest-value thing to fix in this trade.
Adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, out now on Amazon in paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).
Common questions
- How do I get more HVAC customers in a small town?
- Mostly by being the one who answers when the heat quits, and by having enough maintenance agreements that the phone rings in the shoulder seasons too. In a market this size there is no pool of strangers to advertise into. There are a few thousand households, most of them already have a heating and cooling system, and the ones who call you are the ones who remember your name at the exact moment something breaks.
- Are HVAC maintenance agreements worth selling in a small market?
- They are the single most useful thing in the trade here, and not mainly for the maintenance revenue. An agreement gives you a legitimate reason to be in the house in April and October, which are the months a small HVAC business has nothing to do, and it puts your name in front of the customer before the emergency instead of during it. It also turns the replacement conversation into something you raise early rather than something you spring on somebody standing in a cold kitchen.
- Should an HVAC contractor advertise in the off season?
- Advertising in the shoulder season rarely creates demand, because nobody buys a furnace in April. What works in those months is contacting people who already know you: the maintenance list, last winter's repair customers whose systems you flagged, and the houses where you replaced one half of the system and not the other. It is the same hour of work and it lands on people who have a reason to answer.
- How do HVAC companies compete with the big regional heating and cooling companies?
- Not on advertising or on financing, which is what scale is good at. On answering the phone yourself, on being twenty minutes away instead of ninety, and on being the person who installed the system rather than a rotating technician who has never seen it. In a small town the last one compounds, because after ten years you know what is in most of the basements in the county and nobody from three counties over does.
This article is adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, the complete field guide: fourteen chapters, every checklist, and the parts we do not publish here.
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