The chaos of summer is over. It’s shoulder season. For most contractors, fall is a time where the coffers are full from the summer. Trade shows, conferences, and dealer meetings beckon. Worried about seasonal slowdowns, many contractors pull back, conserving resources to make it through the next early season. Instead of scarcity, the fall should be a time of opportunity. The work down now, if done right, will set the state for a profitable 2024.

1. Market Tuneups to Build Service Agreements — Demand service recedes in the fall, so marketing should shift to furnace cleaning and heat pump tuneups. As many of these as possible should be converted into service agreement customers to build a long-term, retained customer base. The bigger the service agreement base, the stronger the company, and the greater the profits down the road. After all, every service agreement customer represents a future change-out and profitable repairs leading up to the change outs.

2. Work on Affinity Marketing — Affinity marketing is leveraging people’s relationships with a third-party organization to generate new business through your support of the organization. For example, you might make a $25 donation to a homeowners association for every service call in the neighborhood, provided the HOA promotes your company within the HOA community. Or you might make a donation for every service agreement sold by a church, church choir, high school band, football booster organization, VFW, etc.

Affinity marketing takes time to get set up. You must design the collateral, call on the various affinity groups to explain the program, get tracking set up, and give the group time to communicate with their patrons. The off-season is a perfect time to work on affinity marketing.

3. Expand Your Product Offering — Do you want to add to your product offering? This is the time to explore the options. Look at adding IAQ products, a connected home offering, expanding into light commercial, or adding plumbing or another service.

4. Expand Your Service Territory — Is it time to expand your service territory? You can add adjoining geographic areas or establish satellite operations in nearby towns, keeping CSRs, dispatch, and accounting centralized to minimize overhead.

5. Evaluate Your Brand Offering — Autumn, leading into year-end, is the prime time to consider adding or switching equipment brands. Explore what other brands are offering in terms of products and business support. Can you get better terms elsewhere? Is another distributor easier to do business with? Explore your options in the fall so that you can make changes at the beginning of the year and take full advantage of volume incentives in 2024.

6. Consider Changing Field Service Software — There is never a good time to change your field service management (FSM) software. The fall off-season is better than other times. It gives you the most time under the lowest demand to adjust to the software. Whether you want to change or not, this is a good time to see what’s available. The software field changes faster than the government regulations affecting the industry. You should know what is available.

7. Update Your Pricing — Hopefully you are updating pricing real time. With today’s software and digital price books, there’s no longer a reason to wait. If you have not updated your service or equipment pricing, do it in the offseason. If you do not update your pricing real time, price ahead making inflation assumptions. Also remember that we will have more equipment price changes with the new refrigerants.

8. Train for Heating Season — Training is like bathing. Both wear off, and both should be repeated on a regular basis. No one has thought much about servicing gas furnaces or heat pumps in heating mode for the past six months or so. Refresh everyone. Also, train everyone on the new refrigerants.

9. Work on Your Culture — Management guru Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What Drucker meant is great strategy must be executed to be effective, but culture is self-executing. Build a great culture in your business and your management requirements lessen, profitability increases, company drama declines, and life as the owner gets much better. The offseason is the perfect time to identify your company’s shared values that make up your culture and to begin the process of conforming to it. This might mean helping bad fits find opportunities elsewhere.

10. Work on Recruiting — Do you have a recruiting brochure? This should sell your company to prospective employees and their spouses. If you do not have one, you are not serious about recruiting. Use the offseason to build your recruiting collateral and expand your network of prospective hires.

11. Get Involved With Your Local Trade Association — Every contractor should join a local trade association. This helps you stay up on local codes and regulatory changes. It also places you in a community of like-minded contractors who care about the profession and can offer you help and moral support. Besides, it is a way of giving back to an industry that’s given so much to you.

12. Build a 2024 Profit Plan — The time to start working on next year’s profit plan or business plan is now. Project your sales from your existing product and service offering to existing customers and to new customers. How many replacements are built into your service agreement base? What can you expect from new products or services and new customers? How are you going to get them? Do you have the manpower necessary to support your desired sales levels? Is your marketing sufficient to bring in new business? Will you have sufficient cash to weather slow periods?

13. Go Hunting — The offseason is also time to “sharpen your saw” and take a few breaks. It’s hunting season. Go dove hunting, pheasant hunting, duck hunting, turkey hunting, and/or deer hunting.