Surviving the Shoulder Season: Keeping the Schedule Full

The months the phone stops

Every trade has them. The weather is mild, nothing has broken, and the crew you kept on through the busy season is standing in the yard at 9am. Payroll, vehicles, insurance and rent all carry on exactly as before.

The pattern is measurable. Samsara analysed roughly 65 million HVAC service trips between September 2023 and June 2025 and found October is the peak month for service activity, February is the slowest, and there is a noticeable dip in September (Samsara). Summer air conditioning service calls run 20% to 40% higher than baseline. The shape of the year is not a mystery, and it repeats.

Call behaviour shifts with it too. Off-hours calls peaked at 14.1% of inbound in June 2025 and fell to 9.8% in October, and weekend calls ran 4.9% of volume in August against 2.95% in October (ServiceTitan). Emergencies cluster; planned work does not.

The trap is treating the quiet stretch as bad luck. It arrives on schedule, and the work that fills it has to be created months earlier, while you are too busy to think about it.

What an idle crew day costs

Put a number on the gap before deciding what to spend on it.

Now compare the cost of filling it two ways. Home services averaged a $90.92 cost per lead on Google Ads with a 7.33% conversion rate (Dasher), and typical marketing spend in the sector runs 5% to 10% of revenue. Buying your way out of a shoulder season means paying peak prices for cold demand that is not there.

The alternative costs a text message. A customer you served in July already has your number in their phone, already knows what you charge, and is the single cheapest source of a February booking you will ever have.

What most contractors try

Cutting price. A 20% off spring special trains your best customers to wait for spring. It also drops margin in the exact months when margin is thinnest.

Turning ads up. Cost per acquisition in home services has been falling, from $34.84 in 2023 to $18.79 in 2024 and $9.01 in 2025 (MDM PPC), so ads are not the villain here. The problem is that shoulder season is a demand problem, not a visibility problem. Nobody searches for a furnace they do not need yet.

Laying off and rehiring. It solves the payroll line and destroys the crew. The good installer you let go in March is working for a competitor in June.

Chasing new verticals in a panic. Adding gutter cleaning in week two of a slow month means selling a service you have never priced to customers who have never heard you offer it.

Waiting. The most common one. The board fills again eventually, and the shoulder season quietly costs the same amount next year.

None of these are stupid. They are all late. The shoulder season is won during the busy season.

Build the quiet months during the loud ones

During peak you are in front of more homeowners per week than at any other time of year. Every one of them is a February booking you have not asked for yet.

Three things are free at the moment of a completed job and expensive to obtain later:

• Permission to contact them. A logged opt-in for texts and email, captured on the invoice, not a phone number in a job record.
• Proof on camera. The customer standing in front of finished work, describing it in their own words. This is the asset you spend in the quiet months.
• The deferred item. The thing you noticed and they did not do. The attic insulation, the second bathroom, the ageing water heater at 11 years.

That third one is a schedule you can build. A deferred item logged in July with a photo attached is a specific quotable job in February, not a cold call.

Eighty-three percent of consumers use Google to read reviews of home service businesses (Dasher), so the proof you collect in the busy season is also what convinces the strangers who search in the slow one. You are stocking two shelves at once.

How to run this, step by step

Steps 2 and 3 are the parts a technician does on a phone in 30 seconds at the end of a job.

1. Map your own year. Pull 24 months of completed jobs by month. Your quiet weeks are probably within a fortnight of last year's. Mark them on a wall calendar now.

2. Capture consent on every invoice, all year. One checkbox: "text and email me maintenance reminders and offers". No consent, no shoulder-season campaign.

3. Capture the walk-through video at handover. The customer is standing in front of finished work. Hand them a QR card, ask one question, 20 seconds on their own phone, and give a reward for honest feedback of any kind. Toutedly generates the code and the card.

4. Log every deferred item with a photo and a date. One line in the job record: what you saw, what it costs, when it becomes urgent.

5. Build a maintenance offer, not a discount. A fixed-price seasonal tune-up sold in advance, scheduled into a quiet week you already know about.

6. Text the deferred list six weeks before the gap. Reference the actual item and the actual photo.

7. Ask for one referral at handover. One name, two cards, once.

What good looks like

Seasonality and cost benchmarks below are published. Utilisation and capture targets are working numbers, because no primary source publishes them for small contractors.

Utilisation is the number to watch. Revenue in a quiet month tells you what happened; utilisation tells you how much capacity you paid for and did not sell.

Scripts you can copy

The technician at handover, 30 seconds:

"Before I go, two things. If you scan this card and record 20 seconds on your phone about how the job went, you get [reward]. Good or bad, it counts either way. And I noticed [deferred item] while I was up there. I am not selling it today, but I took a photo and I will text you before it becomes a problem."

The QR card left with the customer:

Twenty seconds, [reward]. Scan and record on your own phone. One question: what was the job and how did it go? Honest answers only. Complaints earn the same reward.

The deferred item text, six weeks before your quiet period:

"Hi [First Name], [Name] from [Company]. When we did [job] in [month] I flagged [item], here is the photo: [link]. It is [price] and takes [time]. I have space in [month] which is a quiet week for us, so it is the cheapest time to do it. Reply STOP to opt out."

The maintenance offer text:

"Hi [First Name], [Company]. Booking [season] tune-ups now, fixed [price], includes [items]. We schedule these in our quiet weeks so you get a morning slot instead of a four-hour window. Want one? Reply STOP to opt out."

The caption template for a customer posting their clip:

"[Company] finished our [job] in [Town] today. Turned up when they said and cleaned up after. I got [reward] for recording honest feedback. #[TownName] #[TownName][Trade] @[companyhandle]"

Anything of value received creates a material connection the customer must disclose in the post (FTC).

Your first 30 days

You are not filling this shoulder season in 30 days. You are building the list that fills the next one, and the deferred backlog usually pays for the effort immediately.

What you can and cannot do legally

Texting past customers needs consent. Promotional SMS requires prior express written consent under the TCPA, logged, with a working opt-out honoured promptly. A maintenance offer is promotional even when it sounds like a service reminder.

Reward the feedback you own, never a public review. Google removes review content posted because of an incentive from a business, including discounts and free goods (Google). Yelp asks businesses not to solicit reviews at all (Yelp).

Never condition a reward on sentiment. The FTC rule prohibits giving incentives in exchange for a review expressing a particular sentiment, positive or negative (16 CFR Part 465). Penalties reach $53,088 per violation (FTC).

Filming inside someone's home needs their say-so. Ask before recording, avoid house numbers and vehicle plates, and get separate written permission before using any clip in paid advertising.

Seasonal pricing is fine, bait pricing is not. If the fixed-price tune-up excludes parts, say so in the same message as the price.

Mistakes that quietly kill this

Starting in the quiet month. By then the list does not exist and the only lever left is price. Fix: build during peak, spend during the gap.

Discounting the core service. It resets what customers expect to pay all year. Fix: sell a different, lower-cost maintenance product instead.

Logging deferred items in someone's head. The technician who noticed the failing water heater will not remember in February. Fix: one line and a photo in the job record, every job.

Texting without consent. Legally exposed and technically ineffective, since carriers filter it. Fix: the checkbox on every invoice from today.

Blasting the whole list. A generic offer to 2,000 contacts trains people to ignore you. Fix: segment by the deferred item you actually logged.

Cutting the crew. You save six weeks of wages and lose a year of capacity. Fix: use the quiet weeks for maintenance work sold in advance.

Where Toutedly fits

Toutedly handles the capture step at handover, which is the part most contractors intend to do and never systematise.

You set one question and one reward and print a QR card for each van. At the end of the job the technician hands it over, the customer scans it and records 15 to 30 seconds on their own phone, and the reward goes out for honest feedback of any kind, including a complaint. You get the video file, a generated caption with hashtags and your @mention, and the customer's name, mobile number and email with consent to contact them again.

That consent record is what makes a shoulder-season campaign possible at all. Without it you have a stack of invoices and no legal way to text anyone.

What it does not do: it does not schedule jobs, it does not run your maintenance reminders, it does not auto-publish to Facebook or Instagram, it does not add a platform geotag, and it does not verify that a public review was posted.

Plans are Free at $0, Pro at $49 a month and Business at $99 a month. Run it through one busy season and count how many contactable customers you finish with.

Questions people ask