Field Management Software

HVAC usually has two up seasons (summer for cooling needs and winter for heating) and two corresponding down seasons (logically, fall and spring). Good news: You’re about to enter into a strong revenue season and you're no longer worried about boosting hvac sales. Bad news: If heating mechanisms even remotely falter, everything becomes “urgent client need,” and it will feel like you’re a rat on a treadmill. HVAC business seasonal downtime has some pros and cons and winters can get busy in this world.

The Best Marketing a Service Business Can Do We talk [...]

One of the bigger challenges of being a small business field service shop is marketing yourself. Most (not all) small businesses tend to operate within a specific region, and there may be “major players” (i.e. big or enterprise-level businesses) within that same sector. As a smaller company, how do you compete? Enterprise-level businesses can afford to spend (potentially) millions on marketing and getting their name out, and you might not be able to. Are there other, more cost-effective approaches to improving your brand’s visibility and thus, booking more clients?

Optimize Cash Flow with Field Service Software in HVAC [...]

If you’re a small business field service operation, let’s be honest: Many decisions are made on cost, and money, plus the opportunity for profit, is important. You want to deliver great service and get referrals and positive customer feedback but, at the end of the day, you need to make money. A part of making money, obviously, is keeping costs down.

In field service businesses, work order software is typically used as a way to track appointments, revenue, and customer information. Some even use the metric of completed jobs vs. invoiced jobs, which can speak to how effective your billing processes are. (You don’t want to have a lot of completed jobs that haven’t been invoiced yet.)

At the end of 2015, MIT’s Sloan School of Management did some research on organizational priorities. The research covers 11,000 senior executives at 400+ companies, including many service businesses. One of the most astounding facts was that 67 percent -- 2 in 3! -- of the senior managers could not name one or more of the company’s main priorities. Microsoft has done research, presented in an article called “The Paradox of Workplace Productivity,” that shows similar lack of priority in many different types of companies.

Boosting Sales in the Slow Season for HVAC Companies [...]

At a trade show recently, we met a small business field service owner. We ended up having a great conversation, and one aspect stood out. He told us that he searches the Internet all the time for solutions for small businesses, but most of the articles he finds are fluffy and generic. They’re full of buzzwords. “Don’t get me started on some of the groups and forums out there,” he said. “They used to be good, but now it’s all just people selling stuff to you.”

HVAC is an industry within field service where time and efficiency are crucial. If a client’s heat goes down in the winter (in most parts of the world) or his or her AC goes down in the summer (ditto), it could mean millions of dollars of lost revenue and affected parts and machines if an HVAC technician can’t be dispatched quickly and fix the problem the first time out.