Growing Your Business With Home Performance
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It doesn’t matter why you got into home performance. Whether it was to solve customers’ comfort concerns, to increase revenue, or to be among the best in our industry, you are now a home performance contractor. You have made the investment, and you want to make your investment pay off. It’s important to recognize there are numerous ways your involvement in home performance contracting can contribute to the growth of your business and while revenue is an important part of the picture, it is not the only part.
CroppMetcalfe was founded with a mission to provide the ultimate in total comfort for our customers. In keeping with that mission, CroppMetcalfe began offering blower door testing in 1997.
We recognized that home performance, then in its infancy, was the next step in offering total comfort solutions to our customers. We noticed that even after installing high efficiency, state of the art equipment we were still not able to make our customers’ homes as comfortable, energy efficient and healthy as we hoped and our customers desired. Utilizing a blower door, we were able to identify problems, which were negatively affecting our customers’ comfort. We trained all of our technicians to recognize problems and to question customers regarding their comfort concerns and then offer them a potential solution and a way to discover the source of their concerns.
We finally had the ability to solve our customers’ comfort problems and be able to provide them with ultimate comfort. But at what cost? To remain a successful home performance contractor we invested heavily in equipment and training. The question became, how can home performance contracting help grow our business?
Locking In Your Customer Base
Simply put, you become the expert in making your customer’s home comfortable, energy efficient, and healthy. I can’t tell you how many times we solved a problem, which a customer had dealt with for years. Other companies told them the problem couldn’t be fixed; heck, sometimes even we told them the problem couldn’t be fixed, but now we fixed it and they love us. You made their lives better. They will turn to you again and again to satisfy their needs. They are as loyal as any customer could be. How much is this worth to your business? We calculate the 10 year value of a customer at over $11,000. On top of the revenue we have found that home performance customers recommend us at a higher rate than that of any other of our services. Remember, referral customers come to you with no outlay of marketing dollars.
Valuable tip: A well trained technician armed with a list of comfort questions and who has an eye out for potential issues can generate more opportunities in a week than you can handle in a month. Create a handout with pictures of problems such as duct, envelope, insulation, and health and safety issues. Have your technician circle pictures, which are similar to what he finds and then review those issues with the customer.
A Never Ending Stream Of New Customers
We have found there are many people who are looking for solutions to their comfort concerns and cannot find anyone to help. They may have tried adding insulation, replacing windows, putting in a bigger HVAC system; but they have not been able to solve their problem. There are very few companies out there which have the ability and knowledge to listen to their concerns, evaluate their whole home, provide a game plan, and correct their issues. If they can find you, they will buy from you, and they will become your loyal customer.
Valuable tip: Be certain to ask your customer if they know anyone else with similar problems who could use your help.
Revenue
When it comes to making your customers home more comfortable and energy efficient there are companies offering services such as insulation or window replacement and others offering HVAC based solutions, but there are very few offering whole house evaluations and whole house solutions. As the company who can provide a proper evaluation; as well as a game plan and proposal to correct issues plus a test to guarantee results, you stand alone.
Valuable tip: Be sure you are charging the right price for your testing and corrective services. Remember, you are providing a whole house solution and do not need to compete directly with single source providers.
There is no doubt home performance is a great way to increase your company’s revenue and profit margins. However, focusing only on those numbers can lead you to miss the greater opportunity to lock in and expand your customer base with new loyal customers who can’t find the solutions to their issues from other service providers
- Increasing Comfort, Energy Efficiency and Revenue by Properly Sizing Return Duct Systems - October 31, 2018
- Making Home Performance Work WITHOUT Rebates - January 20, 2017
- Growing Your Business With Home Performance - January 3, 2013
Posted In: ACCA Now, Building Performance
