Handling High Demand and Turning Busy Season Chaos into Cash

June 2024 was a banger of a month, hitting our highest single-sales days of all time. I can’t tell you how pumped I was to see that $200K day. We’re killing it, and the month isn’t even over.

We’re also past where we were in June 2023 regarding total sales. Big days.

That’s why it’s time to talk about peak season, keeping customers happy, and how planning ahead can help you capitalize on the hottest of weeks.

Key Takeaways

• Look at sales planning ahead of the busy season
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• Customer retention during hot seasons needs to become a focus
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• Use this selling at or over-capacity season to make hay

No Capacity? No Problem

There’s nothing like a heatwave to remind people that, “It’s time to get the AC going.”

I’ve never been happier to have ServiceTitan track all these numbers in one spot and give me the good news about our killer sales.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. We’ve actually sold over-capacity for HVAC, which is both a good and bad thing. Yes, that’s a bottleneck, but it’s also a good problem to be facing.

It’s a wake-up call in many ways. It was only two months ago on the podcast that I was talking about how the biggest issue going into peak season was the need to staff up on technicians.

We had six HVAC techs, and I would really prefer to have double that number. Jump ahead to June and we’re over-capacity with a cup that is running over.

But even with a need for more techs, I feel like we were prepared because we prepared ahead of time. Part of that preparation is having a sales plan and (like we are now) understanding your capacity limits.

This is where forecasting becomes your friend and having past data on things like past sales data during times of the year is crucial.

Having these numbers in mind is what will help you better plan for staffing and supply chain hiccups whenever possible.

But you also can’t just ignore the fact that a potentially heavy busy season can leave you stretched, no matter what. Could we plan for a heatwave two or three months ago?

Not really. Those surprises are great for business. It also means you need to be prepared on the customer service side to keep everyone happy…

…A thing that rarely happens when you’re bottlenecked by too many service requests.

Shiny, Happy People

We talked with HVAC big boss Rich Jordan recently and he emphasized one big thing that helped him grow that business to $50 million.

The customer service loop was a massive part of his game plan, not only offering up-sells on core services (increasing that average ticket) but also turning regular customers into monthly customers.

Here’s how Memberships at Wilson work, offering a ten percent discount and annual A/C and furnace maintenance.

However, they’re also a cheat code for keeping customers happy when the weather gets hot and things go south in a hurry.

Heatwaves bring in the people who either waited too long and are now willing to pay for a quick solution to their weather woes. That does mean you’ll get a larger-than-normal amount of angry customers.

This is where having Avoca AI coaching for our CSRs and techs has leveled up our entire call center. There’s something to be learned from every single call that comes into Wilson, and via Avoca we can help coach our call center to always be improving.

Better calls mean a better experience, as well as better sales.

That also means an opportunity to sell a whole new influx of people on that monthly service. After all, being prepared means fewer surprises when it is 100 degrees.

Ultimately, the real value of those membership programs isn’t just a reoccurring cash influx, but the promise of a returning customer.

These members are especially incentivized to turn to you during the heatwaves and disasters.

And in the case of Wilson, that ten percent off labor and parts is really nice.

The Reason for the Season

Growth from busy seasons should ultimately be a big goal, especially in HVAC. It’s a home service that relies heavily on that peak period and then slumps into three seasons of preparation.

It’s why, historically, even we’ve struggled to make the HVAC department profitable on its own.

It does, however, provide an opportunity to grow while the growing is good, figure out how to streamline and collect customer success stories that bolster marketing.

This is once again where a good project management system can help your teams plan for these busy seasons, but also see what is working really well when the weather is hot.

And this ties back into those other points: Using these busy seasons to fine-tune the process means you can do it bigger and better the next year.

Really, I think that’s why we’re already $400,000 above this time last year for the month.

Yes, the hot weather helps, but we’re prepared to beat the heat.

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