From the Yellow Chair
From the Yellow Chair
Ugh, Another Slow Month?!? Is it Ops or Marketing?
Shoulder season has a way of telling the truth. When the weather stops handing you leads, response-based digital channels cool off, and the real drivers of growth—outbound effort and tight operations—step into the spotlight. We walk through a practical playbook for HVAC, pest, and home service pros to build demand on purpose, not by accident, and to convert more of the calls they already get.
We break down the three-bucket framework—call-to-action, brand, and cultivation—and explain why that third bucket is the force multiplier most teams ignore. You’ll learn how to spin up rehash programs, text and voicemail campaigns, and membership-driven maintenance that keep trucks rolling in mild weather. We also dig into content discipline and local visibility, showing how simple, consistent publishing outperforms perfectionism and one-off promos. Tools like CHIRP and emerging platforms help, but process and cadence matter more than the logo on your software.
Then we zoom into operations: booking rate by source, revenue per lead, technician close rates, and membership conversion. If your CRM and call tracking can’t tell you where revenue starts and ends, you’re guessing. We talk budgets that match capacity, pricing that supports profit, and leadership habits that prevent slow-season panic. This is an honest roadmap to align marketing with operations so every lead is booked, every visit is maximized, and every campaign is measured.
If you’re ready to turn a slow month into a systems win—and to plan proactively for 2026 with brand clarity, vendor selection, and a real budget—this conversation is your cue. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a nudge, and drop a review telling us your best shoulder-season tactic. Your next busy season starts with what you put in place today.
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From the Yellow Chair is powered by Lemon Seed, a marketing strategy and branding company for the trades. Lemon Seed specializes in rebrands, creating unique, comprehensive, organized marketing plans, social media, and graphic design. Learn more at www.LemonSeedMarketing.com
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We'll see you next time, Lemon Heads!
What's up, living heads? Welcome to another episode of From the Yellow Chair riding solo today. And I want to talk about something, guys, that I know is so prevalent right now as we go into the shoulder season, specifically for my HVAC contractors, my pest control contractors, people that are just gonna feel the hurt of being in the shoulder season, headed towards it. Maybe you're in it, maybe you're right on the cusp of it. But either way, we are gonna talk today. Because let me tell you, I know you're probably trying to blame marketing for this, and we're gonna talk through is it ops or is it marketing? And I have a little secret. So let's diseliminate. All right, guys, welcome to the show for this week. I need to tell you, um, it is a common fear, problem, thought going on for contractors uh that it is definitely slow season or getting really, really close. And here's one of the conversations I had with a contractor yesterday, um, large contracting business, but in a rural market. And she tells me, she said, Man, our marketing spin last month was 15%. She said, I almost like lost it. And she said, but I have no leads coming in. So I'm like, oh my goodness. So I was like, well, let's talk about it. This is not a client of Lemon Seed, this was just a friend. So I was like, well, what do y'all have going on? She's like, we're just dumping all this money into digital, like we've got everything going for SEO, we're doing all the new AI stuff. We are actively doing paid ads and and Facebook retargeting. And I was like, man, that's that's really good processes. But I was like, but what about like just straight up rehashing open estimates and things like that? And she was like, Well, you know, we never really could get that off the ground and we don't have anybody to pay attention to it. So I was like, mm-hmm. So I said, Well, can I be the bearer of bad news? And she's like, sure. I said, It's because there's no demand. So when there is no demand that comes in, then there is nowhere for you to send people, friends. Like, so if there's no one looking for you for your business and what you offer, you have to then go like grab everything you can and put more content out there, get more aggressive, right? So are people's heating and air conditioning units still stopping working? Yes. Um, is there still issues with pest and rodents? Yes. Do people still have trees fall through their roofs? Yes. So it's isn't that there's zero demand out there. We just don't have that little cocaine hit of weather, okay? We don't have weather helping us, right? So I want to tell you guys this is the importance of having a robust marketing strategy and the three bucket framework that Lemon T talks about all the time, because right now all of your hopes are not are in digital marketing, and you're pissed off. Like my digital marketing is it's not doing anything for me. And you're like, okay, the digital marketing is responsive marketing, right? It's responsive to the search volume. Yes, there are there are digital things that you can do just to build your brand and just to get awareness out there and to put other products out there for people to know that you have. But honestly, guys, like you know, you know what the shoulder season takes? Freaking grit, man. I like re like refocusing the mindset of your CSR team, of you as the owner, of your marketing people. Everything now becomes I gotta go ask for it. I've got to create urgency, I've got to create awareness, and I've got to go literally ask for the business. So, right now, this is when you should be rocking and rolling through. Um, and again, Lemon Seed loves CHIRP. We work with CHIRP a lot. A lot of our clients work with CHIRP. Um, I know that contractor in charge is launching a program called One Path that's gonna do also some of very, very similar things. I say very similar, there's a lot of differences between it and chirp, but still kind of different. Um, but similar in the sense of they are for grabbing leads, right? And chirp is for outbig, like literally grabbing everything that you can um with every opportunity. And so right now, I want y'all to think through this is probably not a marketing problem in the sense of your digital company, because a lot of you automatically think marketing digital, marketing digital. We don't think full circle. Um, so if I could encourage you, I want you to think more full circle. So, you know, you if every meal you set down, I only gave you meat and I never gave you any sides, you'd be like, okay, like I'm not a carnivore. I want more, I need more sides, right? So that's how like a lot of y'all sit down at your marketing plate and there's meat on it and nothing else. So you only have a digital strategy, and it's just not the best way to go about long-term growth. Like you live on the hamster wheel. But right now, marketing, you probably could have really good things in place, um, decent things in place. You probably need to diversify a little bit, like add other things other than digital into the mix. But right now, in my opinion, you need those things to be still rocking and rolling, like, don't back off of those. But you need to start an outbound campaign between texting, ringless voicemail drops, texting and email marketing, and all of those things. And when you start all of those things, you then start seeing like, okay, I am covering my, I'm I've got enough going on that I can stay busy and I can continue to build and build and build. This is why we need maintenance programs. This is why, if you've got the thermostat programs that are going crazy right now, this is why. Um, you need them to help you survive the shoulder season. And you know what? If you're listening to this podcast and you don't own a home service industry um style business, this still applies to you, right? What applies to you is the fact that we can't just be like, well, I have a website. I'm marketing. Y'all, marketing is hard. Um, I was telling my son last night, my son's starting to get noticed on Instagram because he does all these golf, he's a pro fitter um for golf clubs. So he works at our local country club and he does a great job. He's such a good kid, got a good personality, but he's starting to get noticed on his Instagram by these golf companies. So they're like sending him stuff. So the advice that I had to tell my night, well, 18-year-old is gonna be 19 in February. I had to tell him, I said, Ray, what you have to do is you have to stay diligent about that content because it's going to get boring. You're gonna run out of time, you're gonna be frustrated, you're gonna not think that everything looks perfect, so I'm not gonna do it. When I just need to tell him, put the content out.
unknown:Right?
SPEAKER_00:So it's the same advice I would give contractors like, listen, it gets old really fast. So, how many of y'all right now, a new business opened up in your town? And at first they were gangbusters, they were killing it with marketing, and then with every passing week, guess what happens? We just get lazier and lazier and lazier, and then we're like, what happened? We just couldn't make it. We had a local uh shop here that was like, man, we just couldn't make it. Nobody shopped here. And I literally, who I'm social, guys, like I'm on social media, I look around, I pay attention to what people are doing. Heck, I for sure noticed marketing. And I was like, I didn't even know you were open yet. I had no idea that you had even opened your business. And they're like, Well, we joined the chamber. And I'm like, Yeah, so that's a piece of a puzzle, not the whole puzzle. And so people just have this misconception that, oh, I have a website or I posted one time on social media, or I did a ribbon cutting with my chamber. Guys, it is it is like building a cake. You have to get more diligent. So I'm telling you right now, you need to look at your marketing and you need to say, okay, what am I doing that fills the bucket of call to action? You're probably all in that boat, but it's that third bucket that Lemon Seed talks about, the cultivation bucket. That is the bucket where inside of your business you have a lot of opportunity. And what are you willing to do to reach out to them, to text them, to send them pieces of mail, to send them emails on a consistent but not annoying basis. And how do you get them? And how do you keep them going? How do you keep them engaged with your business? Now, the other side of that coin is let's talk a little bit about operations right now, right? So, operations, if you want to talk about any time to be on your P's and Q's about average tickets and what you need them to be, how you need them to be successful, it is now, friends. It is now. And honestly, you should never take your eye off of this ball, right? You should never take your eye off of operations and key performance indicators, KPIs. So what I tell everybody right now is odds are I can go in and say, okay, are you making the most of every single lead? Half of you are, half of you are doing a good job because you're so desperate for leads that you're maximizing those. But the other half of you have yet to figure out that you actually have expectations alongside the marketing, right? So if your marketing is bringing in leads, whether it's social media, it's direct mail, it's inbound marketing, it's outbound marketing, it's um influencer marketing, whatever you're using, if it brings in a lead, your job as a company is to book the lead, if at all possible, right? So once you book the lead, then when your team goes out on that lead, they are able to actually convert it into something that generates revenue for you. So if you're sitting in there and you're like, well, I mean, but that's those were just tire kickers, man. Like, you know, these guys were calling in, they're just tire kickers. So freaking what? Run the call. Send your most talkative technician out there and sell something to them. Or go out there and at least perform what they called about, right? Get out there and and make the most of those leads, right? So it is there's all these people on social media with all of these fly-by night flash in the pan ideas. And let me tell you, I'm here for them. I love flash in the pan ideas. And listen, I am a chef, baby. Let me, I will roll something until it does not work anymore. But what I made up in my mind in 2014 when I went to work for McWilliams was that I was going to embrace all of the new things. I was gonna have foundational marketing, embrace the new things, try them and pivot and work. And I was constantly changing it. And you know what? We were going 40, 50 percent year over year, and not just because of marketing, marketing doesn't move the needle. You know what moves the needle? Freaking operations, operations moves the needle. Um, marketing is a great accompaniment to a great operations team. We are an additive to your business. We are not marketing adds to what you've already built foundationally. If your culture sucks, if your leadership sucks, if your operational expectations suck, if honestly, if your team sucks, like then you need to look at that because marketing and really dialing up marketing is only going to make it worse. It's only going to like flare it up, right? So, what I want to tell you today is now is the time to train, to refocus your culture, get people on board, get your marketing dollars in place, see if you need to refresh your brand. Do you need a local marketer on your team to help you do social media? Let's make plans right now for 2026. Don't sit back and wait till January. Some of you look up every January, surprised that it's a new year, right? Let's start right now. It's still October. We have two months to build out a fantastic plan. Refresh what your company is with its logo. Let's take a look at your culture. Let's see who we need to hire. Let's see what vendors we need to stack for you. And let's just see what we can accomplish in 2026 when we actually invest in the overall comprehensive and holistic approach to marketing and branding. Let's get some advertising tactics that work. And let's give you a plan, right? So I don't know if you need Lemon Seed to help you do that or not. That's what Lemon Seed does. We build out plans and we help you get the right vendors. We're not a digital company, we're not a billboard company. We are strategic planners for marketing. And we strategically plan out what vendors you need for your market and your budget size, what budget you need. But let me tell you, there's a couple of things that keep contractors from being successful. Number one, you have no CRM that is actually tracking, helping you track anything. If you can't look inside your CRM right now, your FSM, CRM, whatever you call it, Service Titan Field Edge, Service Fusion, Sierra, any of those, if you can't look into those and tell me what is driving revenue for your company, who's on your membership club and who's not on your membership club, you've lost 50% of any momentum moving forward. We can't read anything. We don't know what's working. We can't hold anybody accountable to something that we have no data on. That we have no data on. So I just want to encourage you like get a CRM in place at the bare minimum, call rail, converse that, get some call tracking in place, right? Um, that's number one. Number two, you've got to have a good budget. When you have a good budget in place, you can really start looking at it. But let me tell you what some of you are gonna do. Well, we I think we can do about three million next year. Okay, well, sir, you barely did a million. So we there's three things that are gonna help us build our business this year. It's gonna be pricing. So are we priced correctly? It's gonna be operations. So do we have good expectations of average tickets and how we're gonna roll this thing? And the third thing is marketing, and it takes all three to really grow next year. So to go from one million to three million is pretty ballsy. So let's talk about how we are actually going to do that. Do we have the capacity to do that? So y'all need to spend some time with budgeting. Go time. Success Group has a great budgeting platform, a budgeting class. Go figure those out. You need help with that, limiting marketing can help you with that. We can help you, but you I just want y'all to do it overall. And if you're not doing planning, it's just lazy leadership. And then all that crap rolls downhill, right? So, my encouragement to you if you're listening to this short little episode today is it is a slow month. And now is the time you need to dial up all of your marketing, especially your existing customer cultivation, outbounding, rehashing, texting, all of those things. You need a strategy, you need a message plan, you need all of those things to move forward. But also work on training, work on culture, work on your leadership, work on budgeting and work on 2026. Guys, you still have plenty of time. You can do it. Go run and go own 2026. Thanks for listening to another episode of From The Yellow Chair. I'm Crystal. If you loved what you hear, share us, give us a review, like us on social media. We will catch you next week.