The six weeks that decide your October
Cooling season is ending and most HVAC contractors will coast into a slow fall. Here is the fall tune-up push to run now, week by week, before the board empties
It is the first week of September. In most of the country the cooling calls have started to thin, the emergency board is manageable again, and there is a temptation to exhale.
Do not exhale. What you do in the next six weeks determines whether October is a full month or a month where you find work for people to do. Fall tune-up campaigns booked in September fill October. Campaigns started in October fill November, and by then you have already paid for three weeks of idle trucks.
Here is the run.
Week 1: call the base
Start with the people who already pay you. Every maintenance agreement holder gets contacted this week for their heating visit, in this order: text first, then email, then a phone call to anyone who did not respond within four days.
The text that books:
"Hi [name], [company] here. Time to get your heating side checked before it gets cold. We have openings the week of the 22nd. Reply with a day that works and we will lock it in."
Specific week, specific ask, no link to a booking page they will not open. Contractors who run this get 50% to 70% of the base scheduled inside ten days, which is most of an October board handed to you for the cost of some texts.
Week 2: the deferred quotes
Pull every replacement quote you wrote this summer that did not close. In a busy shop that is a list of thirty to eighty homeowners, most of whom got a scary number in July, decided to nurse the system through the season, and have not thought about it since.
They are thinking about it again now, because the first cold morning is coming and they remember the furnace is the same age as the air conditioner.
Call, do not text. The line: "You had us out in July on the system. It is still running, but you are heading into heating season on a unit we flagged. We are booking installs for the first two weeks of October and the financing terms right now are better than they were this summer. Worth twenty minutes?"
A 10% to 15% conversion on a stale quote list is normal, and each one is roughly $10,000. That is the highest-value hour on this list.
Week 3: turn on the fall offer
Now go outside your list. The offer that works in fall is a dated, specific tune-up:
"$89 furnace and heating system tune-up. 21-point inspection. Booking through October 31."
Put it three places. Google post on your profile, which takes ninety seconds. A Meta campaign aimed at homeowners 30 and up in your service cities, with a tech-to-camera video explaining what a heat exchanger crack actually is and why it matters. And a small Google Ads maintenance campaign, six weeks, low budget, on phrases like "furnace tune-up [city]" and "heating system inspection."
Budget for a two to three truck shop: $900 to $1,500 on Meta, $400 to $800 on search. Leads should land between $12 and $35. The Meta ads guide has the creative patterns.
Before you build any of it, check your co-op balance with your distributor. Most manufacturer programs rebate about half of qualifying spend and most have a year-end claim deadline, which means the accrual you have not touched is about to expire. Spending it now, on the season where you actually need demand, is strictly better than letting it lapse or burning it in July when the phone rang anyway.
Week 4: fix the profile before the traffic arrives
Two twenty-minute jobs.
Update your hours if your fall schedule differs from summer. And if you run a weekend on-call rotation, put Saturday in the profile. Only 47.2% of HVAC listings show Saturday hours, and heating failures do not respect a Monday-to-Friday week.
Then add photos. Furnace work, not condensers. A clean install in a basement, a tech with a combustion analyzer, your truck in front of a house with leaves on the lawn. Seasonally relevant photos on a profile perform better than the summer set you have been running since May.
Week 5: the review push
Every tune-up is a review. That is the underrated part of this whole campaign. A maintenance visit ends with a satisfied homeowner and no invoice shock, which is the single easiest review ask in the trade.
Add one line to the tune-up ticket: review link sent. No sent link, no closed ticket. A shop running 120 fall tune-ups and converting one in four generates 30 reviews in six weeks. Across 46,610 contractors the median is 30 reviews, so 30 in a quarter moves you meaningfully against the field. The reviews guide has the exact text.
Week 6: staff the phone for the first cold snap
The first genuinely cold morning of the season produces a call spike that looks like a small heat wave. It is predictable within about a week, and most shops are caught flat.
Decide now who answers the overflow. Turn on missed-call text-back if you do not have it, which takes an afternoon and costs under $100 a month. Then check the ten-day forecast every Monday from the end of September, and when the first sub-40 night appears, put a second person on the phone that morning.
The calculator will tell you what those unanswered calls are worth. For most shops it is more than the entire fall ad budget.
The point
None of this is clever. It is a list of six things that each take a couple of hours, done in September instead of October. The contractors who never have a slow fall are not running better campaigns. They ran the same campaign six weeks earlier.
If you want the fall push built and run for you, any of it is included in the free 14-day trial, no card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.