Across the country, HVAC contractors are telling us the same thing: shoulder season showed up weeks early. It hasn’t been hot enough, consumer sentiment is shaky, and a lot of homeowners are already leaning toward “fix it” instead of “replace it.”
Add it all up, and you’ve got a shorter, tighter season than anyone was hoping for.
The weather hasn’t helped either. A few weeks back, the temperature was low enough that the measureQuick app alerted technicians in the Philly area that it was too cold to commission. Homeowners were sleeping with their windows open instead of running their AC in the middle of summer, which is good for their electric bills, but rough on your install schedule.
Slow seasons mean every job you have counts more
You can’t control the weather or consumer sentiment. Short summers happen, and there’s nothing to do about that but ride it out.
But when the season is short, there are fewer jobs to go around, which means each one carries more weight, and every callback eats directly into profit you don’t have room to lose.
The number you’re avoiding: the callback rate
Even if it wasn’t a conscious decision, the reality is that your business makes up the revenue it loses due to callbacks with volume. You take on extra jobs that cover the gap.
In a long, busy summer season, many contractors get away with this strategy. You’ve got enough work coming in that the extra jobs don’t feel like a crisis, and you can slide by without really examining just how much money you’re losing to callbacks.
But in a short season like this one, there’s no room to make it up before the season ends.
One of the overlooked benefits of a low callback rate is that years with an early shoulder season don’t hurt nearly as much. Fewer callbacks give you more room to weather a rough stretch and make the best of a down year.
“We don’t have a callback problem” (translation: you might just not be tracking it)
A lot of contractors assume their callback rate is fine because they’ve never actually measured it.
But now you’ve got a shorter season and more downtime than you expected. That’s not great news, but when life gives you lemons, there’s an opportunity to make lemonade: now you’ve got the time to actually look at your numbers instead of just powering through to the next job.
So before you write this season off as just a bad year, take a real look at what it cost you. Not a guess, but an actual number.
Finding out what your callback rate is really costing you isn’t as difficult as you think. ACCA has built an online callback calculator that makes it easy to see the true financial impact of every callback you get, and get a clear picture of where that lost revenue is coming from. It only takes a few minutes to fill out, and you can start with our prefilled estimates for a ballpark figure or plug in your actual numbers for a more exact calculation.
Try the Callback Calculator for your HVAC business and find out how much money you’re losing every year.
Once you know your number, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what to do next. And that’s exactly where we’re headed in Part 2 of this blog series next month.
The post Your summer ended early. Your callback rate made it worse. appeared first on ACCA HVAC Blog.