That's how we got through shoulder season.

Phil Risher's service business filled slow season by mining old estimates and offering limited-time pricing, announcing neighborhood visits with travel credits, tracking email opens, and having reps call interested contacts. No new advertising needed.
Chapters
Yeah, what I found was that the slow season usually starts 6 months before the calendar actually gets empty. You are not selling the same amount of people, you don't have an offer going into shoulder season, and you don't have a system to get through shoulder season. You just say, oh, it's just shoulder season, that is what it is. So my first shoulder season, I had never experienced it before, and we had 28 technicians, 14 routes, and the owner's like, shoulder season's coming, shoulder season's coming. I'm like, what does that mean? He's like, there's not going to be any jobs, we have to send guys home. And I said, no sir, not on my watch. We got to have a system. So here's what we did. The first thing that we did was we took all the estimates that we did not close the year before and we sent them an offer in shoulder season. So we basically said, hey, it's your last chance to lock in last year's pricing because the supplier has new pricing coming in this year. We basically created urgency for doing it now. We did an offer like, hey, we're going to be in your neighborhood next week doing this service. Since we don't have to pay for gas, we're going to give you a $15 credit towards your service. Do you want us to stop by and take care of this for you? And we sent that out to the entire database. Then everyone that opened that email, we gave it to our customer service representatives. We have 4 of them since they were slow. And we said, call these people and tell them we're going to be in their area next week and see if we can get on the schedule to come do the service at their house. This is how we got through shoulder season. It wasn't a new ad channel. It wasn't trying to create some random demand through Meta ads. It was literally by working our database for the opportunities we already had.










