Five Habits That Make Busy Season Last All Year

← All articles

By Brandon Aubey

In short: Reviews, fast lead response, a useful slow season, real commitment, and a clear win. Five habits that keep a home service business busy all year.

Most home service owners in El Paso have a busy season and a slow one. The phone rings for a few months. Then it goes quiet. I think a lot of that gap is habit, not weather. Here are five habits that stretch the busy season out.

1. Get reviews and make no excuses

Reviews come first. A review is a short note a customer leaves about you on Google. It is the first thing a new customer checks. Owners tell me they do good work but nobody leaves reviews. That is an excuse. Most customers will review you if you ask. So ask. Ask after every job, the same day.

It is fine to be honest about it. Tell the customer you don’t get many reviews yet. Tell them you do good work and could use the help. I would say yes if someone asked me that. Most people would.

2. Respond to every lead within 60 seconds

Speed wins here. A lead is a person who asks about your service. Maybe they filled out a form. Maybe they called. The first business to respond usually wins the job. So the goal is 60 seconds. Honestly, one second is the real goal. Just be first.

Say two El Paso roofers get the same lead. One calls back in a minute. One calls back in an hour. The first one wins. If you can’t answer that fast yourself, set up a system that does. The point is the speed, not who does it.

3. Use the slow season to fix what you have been ignoring

You know the list. Every business has a list of things it knows it should do. Nobody does them because they take time and don’t pay off this week. The slow season is for that list. Things like:

• Getting listed in directories. A directory is a site that lists businesses, like Yelp or Nextdoor.
• Checking your listings. Same name, phone, and address everywhere.
• Building a social presence. That means posting on Facebook or Instagram on a regular basis.
• Working on SEO, which means showing up on Google when people search.

A lot of this gets skipped for one reason. You don’t know how to do it. The pain of not knowing stops more owners than the work does. Here is what I have learned. Sit with the task for five minutes. Just open it and look. You will know more than you expect. Most people who sound like experts spent an hour or two learning. That’s really it.

And don’t wait for slow season. Chip away at one thing at a time. Just get one thing done.

4. Commit

This one is simple. If you have other things going, you lose. The owner who is all in beats the owner who is half in. Not sometimes. Every time. You can’t play to win if you’re not committed.

And the goal is not to win once. It is to keep the game going. The number one roofer in any city is not who it was ten years ago. Same with electricians. Same with home builders. The top spot is never locked. You have to keep earning it.

5. Define your win

A lot of owners say they want growth. I ask what done looks like. Most have never said it out loud. Not every owner wants a giant company. Honestly, more are fine with a good living than I expected. That is okay. But you have to pick.

Is done when you hand the business to your kid? Is it a number? Is it selling it? Write it down. If you never defined it when you started, now is a fine time.

Two things to keep in mind

First, perfect means complete. Your business is not complete, so it can’t be perfect today. The goal is to make it better every day. Good, then great, then better than that. Marketing works the same way. Nothing in SEO or ads is ever finished. You test it. It fails. You fix it. Big brands have lost a lot of money on bad calls. They fixed it and bounced back.

Second, don’t make yourself miserable to get there. I have done this. You start a business to be happy. Then you tell yourself you’ll be happy once you hit some number. Then you get there and hate the ride. That is not worth it. Remember why you started. You can grow and still enjoy it.

Share your goal with customers

One more idea. Pick a goal for the year and tell your customers. Something like, our goal this year is a review from every customer. People underestimate honesty. Sharing a goal makes it more likely to happen. It also builds trust. Customers like knowing what you are working on.

Want help with the first two habits? Start with the reviews guide and the lead response guide. If you want us to look at the whole picture, book a strategy call.

We can do this for you

You can do everything above yourself. Most owners do not have the hours. Dead River Management builds and runs it for home service businesses. We work in El Paso and across the country. You keep running jobs. We handle the demand, the follow-up, and the tracking. You judge us on booked jobs, not reports. See Demand Intelligence, read about the Demand Flow guarantee, or book a strategy call.

Questions