Phil Risher kept his 28 technicians fully booked during a slow season by texting, emailing, and calling every past customer to bring them back. He also ran extra routes himself and built new referral partnerships, refusing to let the team sit idle and treating slowdowns as a chance to create work instead of waiting for it.
Stop hoping for good months, build them. I was at my home service business. We had 28 technicians and it was shoulder season. And the owner said, well, this is shoulder season. This is just what we have to do. Unfortunately, the guys might have to go home. I said, bro, not on my watch. These guys have kids, families, all that stuff going on. I'm not sending them home. I made it my mission to make sure that we did not miss a single day during shoulder season and that they had jobs to run. And I will go out and run routes if we overbooked. How do we do this? We did what's called no-look book. When someone called us, we booked it. Novel, I know, crazy. Someone called us, we booked it for the same day whenever they could do it, and then we said, hey guys, you have stuff on your books, you might need to run a couple extra jobs today, but we're going to get through shoulder season. The other thing we did was we took everyone in our database and we text them, email them, and called them and had them come back into our funnel to work with us again. We knew that if they hadn't worked with us for the past year or two, now they can work with us. I also doubled down on our referral partnerships and I went out and build a bunch of referral partnerships and got all their technicians so excited. I actually got thrown out for doing this from one of the companies. If you do not have a system and you're just going on hopes and prayers, you probably feel like you're just praying for people to call you. That is not a good system. You need to be proactive.
