KickStart: Emergency services (common in winter) can be a lifesaver IF you focus on calming a frazzled homeowner with my “4-C’s! Read on…
Every year, millions of Americans are slapped with sub-zero temperatures, violent wind or destructive rain during horrific storms. So, what two choices does the upcoming winter offer to you as a residential services pro?
1. Dread! For many of us, especially if you focus on exterior services, demand simply dries up. Plus, with the holidays, Super Bowl and simply surviving tough weather homeowners easily get “distracted”. Or you can pivot and make…
2. Profits! Lots of money as in potentially HUGE profits! I’m talking adding and/or promoting the emergency residential services winter weather brings.
You want examples? Burst pipe repairs for plumbers, emergency heating rescues for HVAC techs, flooded homes for restoration companies, frozen wildlife removals for pest control crews and so many more.
Steve’s Nostalgia Time: I cut my industry teeth in residential services first with house cleaning, then carpet cleaning and finally “just to keep our crews busy in winter” we cautiously tested out emergency water and fire damage restoration.
Guess what? 🤔 Our emergency restoration business became “the tail that wagged the dog”! 💲💲💲 How profitable was this division? Restoration services never were more than 40% of our company’s gross income and yet they produced over 80% of our net profits!
Now, you may not want to embrace emergency services to the extent I did! But trust me on the next few paragraphs…
Offering wintertime emergency services will help keep you and your crews stay busy during a normally slow time. Even better, you can (and should) charge super high “premium pricing” for emergency work!
NOTE: The airlines call this “demand pricing”. Trust me on this; a homeowner won’t price shop you when their living room has 3” of water in it!
True, early in my career, I occasionally felt a brief pang of remorse about being an “opportunistic vulture” during horrible storm events. But I healed my tender conscience when I recognized I wasn’t the cause—it’s Mother Nature’s fault!
So, like me, you can be the good guy stepping in to help people put their lives back together. And yes, there is absolutely no sin in cleaning up financially while you restore people’s lives and keep them safe. 😁
But here’s the catch along with a HUGE WARNING! ☠️ You can’t just send a tech out with a tarp, a few tools along with an invoice bill and expect a successful emergency services call.
Want to flourish (and be highly profitable) with emergency services? Then you (and your employees) must master the EMOTIONAL side of the job. 💖
I know. 😡 Since you’re a rough, tough, “take no prisoners” home services contractor you’re yelling right now, “Steve, I don’t have any time for this sissy, “boo-hoo-hoo” stuff!” I felt this way too! But then I (finally)🙄 learned that…
🗝️ The route to riches in ANY residential work is focusing on HOW your crews DELIVER a technically good job. (This goes double for emergency services!) For example…
The Secret to Handling Emergency Service Calls
Above all else, build your operation around the panicked, traumatized emotions of a frantic homeowner. Come on, admit it. You wouldn’t be perfectly rational if a frozen pipe just flooded your newly remodeled kitchen, either. 🫣
Homeowners coping with winter emergencies desperately need Emotional Reassurance. That means you, your dispatchers, and your field techs must deliver what I call my “Four C’s” of emergency response:
Calm
Competent
Caring
In Control
Starting with the customer’s very first panicked call, your team must calmly and competently in a caring manner guide the caller to pass control of the situation on to your capable (Hey, my new fifth “C”!) hands!
I know. These “Four C’s” (or now five “C’s”) 😁 are a lot to digest! And more difficult to consistently implement. The secret to handling emergency services flawlessly? Structure. For example…
Even if you’re shaking your head and saying, “Fuggedaboudit, Steve. I like my 8-5 routine. No way is my company going to offer 24-7 response!” GREAT! This just means more emergency profits for the rest of us! But read on for a HUGE…
HINT: You should apply my “Four (or five)🙄 C’s” approach to ALL your residential service calls! Why? Because even your routine service calls aren’t “routine” to your first-time clients! “First-timers” (especially) feel nervous, suspicious, vulnerable, and basically scared to death which leads to my big…
BONUS for you: Structure (there’s that word again!) all your customer contact procedures around silently answering common negative customer emotions and your business (and 5-star reviews) will explode!
🗝️ ProTIP: Create an emergency interview form for your office. Giving your CSR’s and first-responder technicians a structured information template brings instant order to the chaos of those first few crazy minutes on the phone with a frazzled homeowner.
Analyze the emergency services you will offer. What information do you need before you roll a truck out? And then, what logical questions do your “first responder” techs need answered upon arrival? Build checklists to get these answers.
See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? 👍 These forms help your team to ask the right questions by soothing/calming your customer while setting the stage for a smooth service call. The result?
Grateful clients will sing your praises from the rooftops with their ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ star reviews! Convinced? Then let’s delve deeper into how to structure your emergency restoration responses in our future KickStarts! 😎
Next Week: My 7 Rules for Profitable Emergency Work