Phil Risher spent seven years in home services and found that the business with the easiest scheduling grows faster than the one with the best technicians. Even top HVAC trainers have idle trucks because they can't capture demand. His fix: online scheduling plus virtual estimates to turn idle time into booked jobs.
Here's what I found after 7 years of doing this. The home service business with the best technicians doesn't always win. The one that's the easiest to schedule does. I talked to a business owner last week, and literally the business owner is the number one HVAC trainer in the world. And he has technicians and trucks sitting around because he doesn't have the demand to fill those trucks. You could have the best technicians in the world. They could be great. They could get reviews. They could do upsells. They could diagnose any problem without you. But if they are not out on a job and they're not serving clients, then you don't have a business that's actually growing. You just have great technicians. What I found with a lot of businesses is that they're hesitant to put online scheduling on their website because they have route density. They don't want to be going over God's green earth trying to do all these services. And so what I recommend is set up online scheduling, but just do virtual estimates. And even if you have your technicians sitting around, have them do the virtual estimates, use their skill set, to create opportunity inside of your business. So here's what you can do today. Set up online scheduling, whatever CRM that you use, or use Calendly or another tool, and set up virtual estimates so that way at least people could book virtual estimates and they can get on your calendar and at least you can show them your great technicians and the opportunity. And then you have an at-bat to get into their home and start doing work for them.
