HVACBossPro Blog — Running an HVAC Business

Surviving the Shoulder Seasons: Keeping an HVAC Business Busy in Spring and Fall

The shoulder seasons are when HVAC companies find out what kind of business they really have. In the rush, anyone with a van and a phone stays busy. In the mild weeks of spring and fall, when nobody's system is working hard enough to fail, the busy companies are the ones that planned their work ahead. Here is how a small shop keeps the vans rolling and the payroll covered when the weather is nice.

Why the Shoulder Seasons Feel So Slow

The full shape of the year is covered in HVAC Business Seasonality: Planning the Year Around the Summer and Winter Rush. The shoulder seasons are the gaps between the peaks.

In spring, heating is done and cooling has not started. In fall, it is the reverse. Systems are idling, so they are not breaking, so the phone is quiet. A company that depends on emergency calls feels it right away. A company with a full maintenance list barely notices, because spring and fall are exactly when tune-ups belong.

Tune-Ups Are Your Shoulder-Season Work

Spring is for cooling tune-ups: checking capacitors, cleaning the condenser coil, clearing the condensate line, changing the filter. Fall is for heating tune-ups on furnaces, heat pumps and boilers. A maintenance agreement set at 180 days between visits naturally lands one visit in each shoulder season.

In HVACBossPro, those tune-ups show up on the Waiting List on their own as they come due. Pins are colored by status: not due yet, due now, or overdue past a 7-day grace. Nobody has to remember who signed up last March. The list is the work.

Watch the overdue pins closely in the shoulder seasons. A tune-up that slips past its grace period in April often turns into a no-cool call in July, which is the most expensive way to do the same work. Booking overdue visits first keeps the summer calmer.

If the Waiting List looks thin heading into spring, that tells you something important: you need more agreement customers, and the next rush is when to sell them.

Book by Area, Route From the Shop

Tune-ups are planned work, so plan them well. Use the Waiting List map to see which neighborhoods have the most due visits and book a whole area on the same day. Assign them to the tune-up van on the dispatch board and auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the shop. A tight route means more visits per day, which is what makes a maintenance plan profitable.

Customers get a reminder the night before, an on-the-way text and an arrived text automatically, so fewer people forget and fewer techs knock on empty houses.

Follow Up on Replacement Estimates

Plenty of replacement estimates are written in the middle of a rush and forgotten in the next one. The customer patched the old system to get through the summer and said they would think about it. Spring and fall are the right time to reach back out, because nobody wants to replace a system in the middle of a heat wave.

Look at estimates still waiting on approval. HVACBossPro sends estimate follow-up emails on its own, and the office can text customers directly with two-way texting. When a customer approves online, the approved estimate becomes the scheduled job, which is a much better way to fill a mild week than waiting for the phone.

Other Ways to Fill the Calendar

• Property managers and landlords. Rental homes need tune-ups and filter changes too. A property manager on monthly billing gets one statement covering every address. Adding Property Manager and Landlord Accounts to a Residential HVAC Business covers it.
• Commercial accounts. Small offices and shops often prefer service in mild weather, when the building can go without cooling for an hour.
• Add-on work found on tune-ups. A weak capacitor, a dirty coil or a sagging drain line found in spring is a planned repair instead of a summer emergency.

Use the Quiet Time on the Business

Even a busy shoulder season has some slack. Use it on the work that never gets done in the rush: review your prices, clean up client records and equipment details, follow up on past-due invoices, train a newer tech on a ride-along, and service your own vans. Many owners also do their hiring in the shoulder seasons so a new tech is trained before the rush instead of during it.

Keep a short list of these jobs on hand all year. When a mild Tuesday opens up because two tune-ups canceled, nobody has to think about what to do with the time. The list is already waiting, and the slow day still moves the business forward.

For the tools that keep the shoulder seasons booked, visit the HVAC business software page.