HVAC: from no marketing lead to a 12-decision growth plan

The challenge

A South Florida HVAC company with about 40 trucks and $10M+ in annual revenue. It covered three counties from two offices and competed with private-equity-backed rivals.

It had vendors, but no one leading marketing. An outside agency ran paid search. Reviews came from techs handing out QR codes. Nobody was managing the Google Business Profile listings, which turned out to be the company's biggest source of revenue.

The owner wanted to grow. What was missing was a plan everyone could be held to.

The strategy

Write it down. I wrote short, decision-ready memos for the owner and leadership: a channel strategy, a budget, a 2027 revenue plan, a paid search review and a site plan for new listings. Each one ended in a decision, not a menu of options.

Measure the listings. I tied Google listing leads to closed jobs in the CRM. In its first two months of tracking, one listing produced $394K in revenue from 403 leads. That made the listings the number one channel and set the priority for everything else.

Fix the listings. I audited every listing. The second office's listing covered 3 service areas instead of 7, had no booking link and had stopped replying to reviews in May. I fixed all three, cleared the reply backlog and started two posts a week with real job photos.

Find out why reviews stalled. Only 5.2% of jobs produced a review. Installs almost never did. Google was also quietly removing about a third of new 5-star reviews, more often when they named a tech. Google's April policy treats staff-named reviews as solicited. I set up an automatic review request after every job and recommended a new ask that doesn't steer customers to name a tech.

The results

The plan was adopted. At one strategy meeting, the owner signed off 12 decisions from the memos. Those included one Local Services Ads profile per county, judging paid channels on cost per customer, and a performance target for the paid search agency. Two weeks later, leadership set its 2027 revenue target from the plan.

A closed location reopened. One memo showed a dormant listing still earning reviews with nobody working it. The company reopened it in September. It collected 11 reviews in its first two weeks and ranked 6th of 130 listings on its first map scan.

The second office came back to life.

The main listing gained ground on high-ticket searches. Its share of the local map for "ac replacement" grew from 11% to 30%, and peaked at 50% in late August.

Hidden money surfaced. One memo found $2.18M quoted on unsold estimates over $3K. Only 42% of those got a follow-up within two weeks. Another found that 40% of paid search spend went to areas that never paid back. The agency cut those areas within two weeks.

What the numbers don't show

Company-wide review volume has not recovered yet. The automatic review requests went live in mid-September. The second office has turned around. The main listing has not caught up.

Some gains are mixed with other changes. The second office's listing gained a paid Local Services Ads profile in September, the same month its revenue jumped. The map gain on "ac replacement" also faded from its August peak.

Four months is early. The estimate follow-up program and the cancellation fixes are agreed but not yet measured.