The September checklist

Peak season is about eight weeks away. From late October the phone starts and doesn’t really stop until February, and whatever is loose in your business right now will be twice as loose when every second call is a breakdown.

This is the list we run through with customers in the last weeks of winter. None of it takes long. All of it is easier now than it will be in December.

Block out an hour with whoever runs operations and work down it in order. Most businesses find two items they’re fine on, three that need a fortnight of attention, and one that explains a problem they’ve been living with for a year.

1. Confirm every PM contract, and get the jobs on the board

Preventative maintenance is the only revenue you can forecast, and it’s the first thing that gets bumped when the breakdowns start. Confirm the contracts now, get the scheduled jobs generated for the next six months, and you’ll protect that work when the pressure comes on.

It’s also the cheapest sales conversation available to you. A customer whose PM is confirmed in August isn’t taking a cold call in October — and the ones who’ve let their maintenance lapse are exactly the ones who’ll ring you in a panic on the first 38-degree day.

2. Shrink the gap between finished and invoiced

Pick ten jobs from last month and measure it. Whatever that number is in August, it gets worse in December — the volume doesn’t change the admin capacity. Go into summer with the gap as small as you can make it, because peak season is when cashflow either carries you or squeezes you.

While you’re there, run the list of jobs marked completed but never invoiced. Almost every business has more sitting in that list than they’d guess, and clearing it before summer is the fastest money you’ll make this quarter.

3. Read last summer’s callbacks

Pull the repeat visits from last January and February and look for the pattern. Same site? Same asset? Same fault? That list tells you exactly where the training, the parts stock or the process will fail you again — and you’ve got eight weeks to do something about it.

Two patterns are worth acting on immediately: the same fault at the same site — usually a repair that should have been a replacement, and a conversation to have with the customer now — and the same fault across different techs, usually a training or parts-stock problem you can fix in an afternoon.

4. Check your asset records on the sites that matter

Take your ten biggest maintenance customers. Can you see model, serial and fault history for their critical plant without ringing anyone? If not, make it a standing instruction for the next eight weeks: photograph the plate, capture the details, every visit.

Eight weeks of that habit across a full crew adds up to a surprising amount of history, and it covers exactly the sites you’ll be sending unfamiliar techs to when everyone is stretched in January.

5. Tidy your quoting templates

Summer quoting is fast quoting. If your standard inclusions, rates and after-hours loadings are current before the rush, your techs can quote on site instead of promising to send something through — and the quote sent from the driveway wins far more often than the one that arrives on Thursday.

Check your after-hours and weekend rates while you’re in there. Plenty of businesses go into summer charging what they set two winters ago, then work every Saturday in January for a margin that didn’t survive the last two years of parts pricing.

6. Decide what you’re not doing

The businesses that cope best in summer are the ones that decided in September which work they’d turn down. Know your minimum call-out, your after-hours position and which customers get priority — before you’re making that call at 6pm on a 39-degree Friday.

7. Agree who covers what, in writing

Summer runs on goodwill until it doesn’t. Set the on-call roster for December and January now, agree the rate, and tell everyone in August rather than sorting it out in the second week of a heatwave. The same goes for the office: someone has to keep invoicing moving while the phones run hot, and that person shouldn’t also be the one dispatching.

If working through this list turns up things your current system can’t tell you — how many PMs are due, what’s unbilled, which assets you’ve touched twice — that’s worth a conversation now rather than in November.

Book a 20-minute demo before the season starts, or call us on 0457 228 884. Australian-founded, Australian-led, 30 years in HVAC&R and electrical.