Choosing The Right Customer For Your Business: HVAC Monthly Tech Tip
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Alright people, choosing the right customer. It's super important. I've probably talked about this lots, but I'm going to tell you a story of a couple of instances that the same plumber that I had met about a year ago was at and introduced me to another high-end home customer. Now I think I'll be doing some work there and I might be able to continue on doing some more maintenance for this customer as well. So,

Let me explain how I met this guy. I'm not going to name his name or his company, but I was subbed out to go look at a boiler for a indoor pool. This was a high-end home. They had a pool inside and the boiler wasn't working. So why, why they got to swim in a colder pool inside the house. I mean, that's rich people problems, but working, they got money. You got money. You can pay for things. You throw money at stuff. So he, they called me out. He was there.

And he waited with me while I went through some troubleshooting and stuff like that. And there was all kinds of problems with them. I'm like, man, by the time we're done with this thing, you might as well have just had a new boiler in there and call it a day because they didn't care about money. And then you got no problems. You got warranty. You got all this kind of stuff. And we tried to do a few things, pull out the burner, clean it. Nothing seemed to jive. There was all kinds of alarms and weird things that were happening with this boiler that

And I'm like, I don't want to spend any more time on this because this is getting ridiculous. Anyway, they replaced it. Problem went away. About a year later, he calls me back and it's another high end home. These monthly tech tips. Well, this one's more of a business tip and story of attracting the right customer is listen, a sponsor by job or like always. And job is a CRM tool. It keeps me like in charge of my business from an organizational level and

I quote with it. I invoice with it. I keep track of all my money. It links to QuickBooks. If you need some technical advice on how to use it, they've got a chat that you can write a question into and they're fairly quick at answering the questions you need. So if you're looking to start a free trial on Jobber and get some savings within that, you can go to getjobber.com forward slash HVAC know it all. And I will leave the link in the show notes as well. So here it is. I'm mainly a service tech.

I don't like to install. I mean, it depends on what it is, but I don't really like it. I like pulling out my probes, my meter, manometer, and going through problems that have been haunting customers or problems that just started maybe a day or two ago and fixing them and moving on my way. Now, this plumber that I was telling you about calls me and asks me to come out. He starts going on, hey, they got three furnaces, they got boilers, they got refrigeration stuff.

ACs. I'm like, well, how big is this house? It's three furnaces. So I pulled up, the house is massive. I can't even, maybe I can guess the square footage is probably five, 6,000 square feet, something in that range, three furnaces. And they've got boilers all over the place. They've got like for, for driveway melting. Uh, they got ACs, they've got a wine cellar with three different refrigeration units. And as we're walking through it,

and they're pointing things out, I'm like, this is the kind of customer that I think I would want because there's space to work, even though it's residential. If a furnace goes down, it's not a big giant emergency because they have two others, right? If the wine cellar goes down, not a big giant emergency. They got three units for the wine cellar.

It's not about just the fact that they're rich and they got money. It's about the type of environment I want to work in. I don't like going up to a call and the furnace has a cracked heat exchanger and it needs to be changed that day or the next morning. That's not really who I am. That's not what I like. Okay, so I'm like, you know what? I don't normally do residential and these furnaces, they...

I have a lot of corrosion. It's hard to tell where all the corrosion came from. A lot of it may have come from the evaporator, but it's hard to say. But they've had some corrosion. The homeowner wants all the furnaces replaced. I'm not going to do them by myself. So I called up a residential sub that I use.

I said, hey, would you be interested in changing these three furnaces out with me? I'll work alongside you. You change them. I'll start them up. I'll come back in the spring, summer. I'll check out the ACs and make sure that there's no issues with those. And we'll get going on this high-end home. And they're like, yeah, we're down. Let's do it. And the reason I bring this up is because I've been so frustrated, especially last summer. People would call me up.

And want their AC swapped out. Hey, how much to swap out an AC? Mine's like 30 years old and it's not running that good. And I'll throw out a price that I think is fair. So I make some money, but it's fair for them and I'm not ripping them off. And I don't get the job. And I find out that some people are going in and charging less than three grand to swap out a two tonne.

So I said last summer, you know what? I'm not doing any more residential stuff. I'm going to stick with the commercial stuff that I do because I like it. I enjoy it. And I don't need the hassle of this nickel and diming stuff from the residential customers. It might take a while for you to land on a high-end home. I'm sure there's high-end homes in every area of the world at some point. You might have to drive to get to them, but I'm sure there's access to them. It took me a bit to get

into somebody that's into these high-end homes. But I mean, once you latch on and you grow a customer base in one high-end home, then they might tell their neighbors or their friends. And I mean, obviously these people hang out in groups where their other friends might have three furnaces in their house or a pool or a pool heater that needs to be serviced or a sauna or another wine cellar or something. So once you find that customer, latch on.

This is my message here. Latch on and don't be like a bloodsucker, but be there for them. If you can't be there for them, have a sub or a backup that can be there when you can't be. And this is how I'm going to go about the residential market, I think, going forward. I'll do friends. I'll do family. I'll do people that I know well. But all winter long, the phone's been ringing. Hey, my furnace doesn't work.

And I've said, sorry, I'm busy. I can't come. Even though at times I could have, I am just really, really sick and tired of the nickel and diming of the residential customers. I mean, yes, the times are tough, but at the same time, times are tough for everybody. Not just those customers. I also have to make a living and support my family. So I'm going to pick and choose the customer that I feel I have the best opportunity to do that with for the last,

year or so it's been a larger commercial company that I sub for I can call them on a Monday and they can fill me up with work pretty much all week long if I wanted to and that is the kind of work I enjoy residential now I'm going to stay service I'm going to try to keep keep on this high-end home march and if there's anything big that requires a couple of guys three guys moving stuff around

change in equipment or installation, I'm going to get a sub to help me out because I'm not equipped for it. The sub I called has a full trailer in the back. They got sheet metal. They got a threader. They got pipe. I don't have that stuff, right? So it makes a lot of sense to work with someone else that has it. Now I'm, I'm a bit different maybe than some of you guys out there. Maybe you install ant service and you're equipped for that.

I'm not. And I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy install whatsoever. So for the service techs that don't want to install, think about having a sub that you can rely on, that you can work along with. And maybe they only install. And when they come along some harder service stuff, they'll call you. This is how I met these guys. They were called out to a commercial building.

They didn't want to tackle it because that wasn't their bag. They recommended me and I went out and did it. Now I have a commercial customer five minutes down the road that will call me for problems, maintenance, so on and so forth. So, hey, even though the industry is small, it's big, it's small, and there's a lot of competition, there's still room to help each other out. And that's kind of my message here, guys. Happy HVACing.