Many HVACR business owners get their start as expert technicians working for someone else. Once they decide to start their own business and are ready to scale it, they are faced with a whole new set of processes and considerations they may not have any experience with. There are also those who come into the HVAC industry from the outside and decide to purchase a franchise business. They may have a background in growing a business, but for many, it’s still a new concept with many facets to address.

In both cases, the challenge is all about how best to scale. How do you cross that chasm from the initial group of founders and employees to growing revenue and creating a business model that can be replicated in additional locations? After countless conversations with HVACR professionals who are looking to do just that, I’ve boiled down the process to a simple acronym – GLASS.

• Goals – Growth doesn’t happen if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve. Setting growth goals stretches your thinking about what needs to be done to accomplish them.
• Leads – Feeding the growth machine is imperative. That means having more opportunities to create revenue and tracking which marketing channels are working. Moreover, you need to create and manage sales opportunities developed while interacting with customers.
• Accountability – You must be accountable for keeping your customers happy. Understand everything about them before a technician visits and fixes their problem completely.
• Streamline operations – As you grow, eliminate the friction from how you do business.
• See yourself in the mirror – How are your efforts panning out? Analyze the business to see if you are on track or need to make adjustments.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps and how to maximize them:

Goals

If you speak with a lot of different companies in this industry and ask them about their goals, you will find that they don’t actually have any. They are taking a day-to-day approach rather than spending the time to break it all down and define what success looks like for their business. And while day-to-day may keep the lights on, it’s not going to help you grow beyond survival mode. For that, you need established goals and a set of objectives to reach them. Write those goals down on paper. Use your business software to capture revenue and budget goals and work with your technicians to set targets that will support their goal-setting.

Leads

Once you decide you’re ready to pursue significant revenue growth for your company in order to scale, you have to feed the beast with leads. This is an area where having the right business management software can really support you by helping you understand what channels are working best. When those leads come in, you want to be able to attribute them properly to the channel and the campaign, as well as understand the costs associated with it. Even more important is a smooth sales workflow to manage sales opportunities developed out in the field. Your techs are hopefully identifying potential upsells – “I fixed your ducting but you need a new AC unit; our comfort advisor from the home office will come out and quote that for you.” To fully capture these opportunities, you need smooth coordination of the quoting process from the field to the back office and back to the field.

Accountability

Happy customers are happy to pay and happy to give repeat business. Successful companies treat the customer right and fix their problems, driving a lot of the profitability in this industry. It ultimately doesn’t matter how fast you dispatched or if the technician had the most ironed uniform; you must fix the customer’s problem and treat them right to get their business again. More importantly, for those in growth mode, they will trust you. If you think about driving economics for home service companies, a lot of it comes from follow-along business. For example, the customer trusted you to fix their first problem, so they will depend on you for the next. Or they have trusted you to do maintenance agreements on their two AC units, so they believe you when you recommend it’s time for a replacement. Establishing that trust relationship drives overall economics more than how many jobs your technicians hit in a particular day or how optimally they were routed.

One way to set up your technicians for success in the field is to use a mobile platform that will put every piece of information at their fingertips when they are at the customer's location. They need easy access to details of the equipment, age, warranty, parts information, etc. When the technician is properly armed with everything they need, it goes a long way in making that experience as satisfying as possible for the customer.

Streamline

Business owners often underestimate the friction that builds up as they hire more technicians, sign more clients, dispatch to more jobs, process more invoices, and create more reports. They must be able to continue focusing on the overall goals and big-picture moves, not just the behind-the-scenes work of running the daily operations. Tap into software and systems that do the heavy lifting on all of that. One prime example is the convenience of having a completely integrated accounting platform, which saves the headache and time lost in trying to integrate different systems or worrying about how each transaction is being coded.

See Yourself in the Mirror

Ask yourself, am I doing what I set out to do? If not, how do I change things so I can be more successful? You want to be able to analyze the business to see if you are on track or need to make adjustments, so make sure you have robust and flexible reporting capabilities that will allow you to see how you are doing and support you as you scale.

You’re never done. There’s always going to be something else that can be made more efficient and help you reach that next level. However, there do tend to be phases of business growth focus depending on number of technicians:

• 1-4 techs – the focus is on survival. Can I make enough money to live? Can I coordinate with a few other people?
• 5-12 techs – the focus is on revenue growth. Can I grow that top line and demonstrate I can do it year over year? You want to be able to add more techs beyond what can be coordinated with telephone calls and sticky notes.
• 12-25 techs – the focus is on profit optimization. Are my agreements and club memberships profitable? Am I upselling appropriately? Do I have the right back-office expenses?
• 25+ techs – the focus is on multiple locations and multiple service lines. How do I take our operations from this one location and stamp it out to location two/three/four?

Field management software with feature-rich functionality is important for scaling. Businesses may start with smaller tools, but they eventually outgrow them because they don’t have enough features. Some tools are too complicated for a smaller business that doesn’t have 19 lines of service. A modern technology platform in the back office will integrate easily with partners and allow for more accessibility from different locations. The right mobile app will provide that perfect level of useability and complexity for technicians in the field that doesn’t overwhelm them.

Just remember, wherever you are with your business software and your growth journey, it’s always a good idea to take some time to reflect with GLASS.