7 Tips to Grow Your Contracting Business

For home services, quality of service, customer acquisition, and profitability rate are all driven by the company’s most important role, the service technician. These ‘field ambassadors’ deliver the product and reflect the value of the company.

Here are seven practical suggestions for HVAC residential service business owners interested in growing their businesses in 2022:

1. Use aG target gross profit-per-man-day when pricing your services.
2. Consider a premium charge for weekend installs and an off-season discount to better handle capacity constraints. Let customer behaviour assist with your scheduling.
3. Set a target for new Google reviews based on the number of homes you visit weekly. For a company with five trucks, a 25% success rate means 1,000 new Google reviews in 2022. Don’t be shy to ask. Include it on the invoice.
4. Include your maintenance plan on every quote. Do not include your service for free, but consider your customer acquisition cost when pricing your plan to new customers.
5. Find five new friends in your community: a plumbing company, an appliance repair company, a garage door company, a gardener, and a locksmith. You do not need “an Angi” to create your own trusted community of service providers.
6. If you use a percentage of revenue to determine your marketing budget, make sure you factor in your selling cycle. May’s digital spend, for example, should be based on June’s sales forecast.
7. Build redundancies into your operations to ensure you never miss an incoming call.

Home services companies are an integral part of their local communities and small-scale services providers can continue to gain market share despite their limited advertising budgets.

A business strategy for home services companies should focus on specific building blocks of trust signals that will create high entry barriers for large consolidators looking to enter the market.

Nir Kushnir is vice president strategy and partnerships with SearchKings, a Canadian digital advertising agency that focuses on lead generation campaigns for small and mid-size businesses. searchkings.ca