Business is naturally cyclical – it picks up, and it slows down. It’s okay to experience slow weeks and slow months. It’s normal, especially for home service companies.
For example – the traditional slow season starts around Thanksgiving and runs through January-March, depending on the market. Colder markets typically have a longer slow season. At the end of the day, households are hunkering down over Thanksgiving and Christmas and are less likely to want a handyman or contractor in their house.
And, throughout the year, it’s normal to experience slow weeks or have a bad month.
The good news is, a slow spell can actually be a positive. It gives you an opportunity to shore-up future growth and profitability in your handyman business. Or, if properly planned for (i.e. your finances are in order), spend more time with family or however you choose to spend your free time.
In this article we’ll cover what to do when your business slows down. It is an inevitable part of being in business.
Having a playbook to keep calm and improve your current position will alleviate anxiety, stress, and worry. Having a plan can actually provide relief, and feelings of hope and excitement, as you have time for things you have been putting-off or just forgot to pay attention to.
Coaching Call From The Handyman Academy
Here is a detailed discussion on the subject of Slow Season Mindset, which is a from a coaching session in Allen Lee’s Handyman Academy.
Immediate Lead Generating Marketing
Having a consistent, awesome marketing plan will make future slow spells less likely, and future slow seasons… Well… Less slow. Thanksgiving and Christmas are surely coming every year LOL!
Here we’ll cover marketing that is most commonly overlooked throughout the year, and also works great to combat a slow season. We aren’t going to cover the importance of a website, SEO, Google reviews, brochures, Facebook community groups, etc. These are mainstay marketing tactics that are assumed to have taken place. If you aren’t doing the fundamentals, then I recommend starting with our Handyman Marketing Guide. Don’t build your house on sand, build it on a strong foundation.
For those with a solid foundation in place, this is for you. The vicious winds of the slow season can beat against your house, but it won’t fall down. Keep your head up and try some of these tactics.
Contact Leads That Ghosted Your Estimate
You have dozens of estimates throughout the last 12 months that were never accepted. Maybe you never heard from them, maybe they said “now is not a good time”. Regardless, this is low-hanging fruit. Contact folks that already exhibited buying intent and see if they’d like to move forward on the project, or if there’s anything else you can look at for them.
Email And Text Your Database
Your past leads and clients are the best customers – they’ve either already hired you or showed interest in your services. If you are using a CRM, you should have a nice database of emails and phone numbers to send mass communications to.
“Hi Frank, this is Jason w/ Jason’s Awesome Handyman. Just wanted to reach out to see if you had any projects I could help you with? Have a great day!”
Text is obviously more invasive, but for previous clients, they won’t mind hearing from you. Worst case, they say no.
Don’t overthink this. Reach out and see if there’s a need. If so, it’s a win-win.
Networking
Networking costs time, so it’s usually the first marketing tactic to go out the window when things get busy.
Use the slow seasons to engage with your local community – Chamber Of Commerce, BNI, Realtor Associations, stop by local property management and real estate offices, sponsor a booth at an event, start posting on Facebook groups, or reach out to your fellow contractors that might need a reliable referral for a handyman.
The networking opportunities are vast! And nothing comes close to the marketing power of a friendly smile and a handshake.
Book Repeatable Work
Gutter cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, and other ongoing maintenance tasks that you service for your clients are fantastic projects to schedule during the slow season.
Throughout the year, as you help customers, you can ask if they’d be interested in a maintenance program where you conduct this work for them.
Reaching out and booking this work over the slow season is a great way to pad the schedule!
Improve Your Customer Experience
Taking a hard look at your customer experience is a valuable use of your time, at least a few times per year.
I’m talking the full experience – from initial lead contact, to how you provide the estimate, show up to the job, follow-up for a review, and what you’re doing to stay “top of mind” when the job is done.
Be honest with yourself. What kind of experience are you offering your clients? If you listen to our Handyman Success Podcast, you know what we preach – you need to be attracting ideal clients that WANT to pay a premium rate for a premium service. Is your customer experience conducive to this?
The solutions to this equation are too many to list here. From your attire, to the cleanliness of your vehicle, to the software you’re using – the list goes on.
If you honestly assess how you are conducting your customer experience, you’ll be able to find many ways to improve. When you do this exercise throughout the year, it will give you confidence knowing that your business is constantly improving.
If you are already successful in your business, AND you never stop proactively improving, that is an unbeatable recipe that can give you confidence moving into the future.
Create Efficiencies And Profitability
Doing things better – more efficiently – ultimately creates a more profitable business.
For example – say you give 100 estimates per month. If you shave off 3 mins from your estimate process, you just saved yourself 300 mins per month. That is 5 hours of time that you now can use elsewhere. Or instead of working 60 hours a week you only work 59 LOL! JK… I am not an advocate of regular “full time plus” weeks, especially with a family. Though, there are certainly seasons that call for this.
Or, rather than manually ask for a review from all your clients with a text message, you drop off a QR code review card and politely ask them to leave you a review when you walk out the door. Add in an automated review ask from your CRM and that’s at least a minute saved, plus the mental space of not having to worry about. If you do 100 jobs per months that’s nearly 2 hours.
These “minutes saved” from repeatable tasks truly add up!
Ultimately, creating efficiencies produces a more profitable business. All else equal, you are generating the same revenue but using less time.
Further, when it comes to hiring and scaling, these efficiencies are absolutely critical to better understanding, and having confidence in, your numbers.
Wrapping Up
Do you have other thoughts of ideas to productively use the slow season to improve your business? We’d love to hear them!