10 Tips for Effective HVAC Business Management

1. Hire qualified HVAC techs (and keep them!)

Your technicians are the heart of your HVAC company–whether you choose HVAC contractors or employees. It’s essential to make sure that the HVAC professionals you hire are qualified to perform their job and deliver a positive customer experience.

But hiring qualified technicians is just the first step. The real work in HVAC business management is in retaining that great talent. This includes providing your techs with the best tools, addressing their concerns, and fostering growth.

READ MORE: HVAC technician job description: Free template and guide

You should always help your HVAC techs improve their skill level by providing continuous training. This ensures that you are always sending the most qualified HVAC technician for the job.

Other ways to ensure you retain your HVAC professionals include:

• Welcome feedback and keep technicians in the loop about the business
• Offer employees competitive salaries and benefits
• Mentor less experienced technicians

READ MORE: Retaining top employees with bonus programs

2. Create flexible team schedules

One way to keep your HVAC techs happy is to provide flexible scheduling that balances the needs of your team and your customers. 

The best way to do that is with an online schedule that’s quick and easy to edit and share with your team. That’s where HVAC software can help simplify your HVAC business management.

Here’s how to use software to successfully create and manage an HVAC schedule that helps you schedule jobs faster:

• Use an editable calendar that lets you quickly move service visits when you need to reschedule jobs or reassign one to a different technician. A drag and drop calendar, like this one in Jobber, makes it easier to squeeze in emergency service calls when they come up:
• Keep your crew informed on scheduling changes. Use a job scheduling tool that sends automatic team reminders to let your HVAC techs know as soon as a job is added to their schedule—or if an existing visit gets rescheduled.
• Personalize your calendar with color coding and filters to quickly see what’s important. To get a clear view of your team’s availability and prevent mistakes like double booking, Jobber lets you choose from five different views—including a weekly view like this:

3. Develop your marketing strategy

Growth is central in HVAC business management. One of the best ways to grow your HVAC company is through attention-grabbing marketing strategies.

From sending newsletters to leveraging the power of social media, there are several ways to market your HVAC business and garner more business, such as:

• Creating a Google Business Profile or updating it if you have one already
• Use good-better-best HVAC proposal pricing
• Showcase your work and connect with your community through social media platforms
• Capture the attention of prospects with HVAC ads and enhance the customer experience with educational HVAC content
• Design personalized email marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience and meet their specific HVAC needs

To send effective marketing emails faster, use a tool that prepares email templates and audiences for you.

When you use Jobber to create email campaigns, you can choose from premade templates that are built for specific goals and customers—and that includes your company branding.

4. Dispatch and route your team efficiently

Another key element of HVAC business management is dispatching—especially when it comes to retaining your technicians.

Before each work day, plan how you’ll dispatch your technicians to their jobs. Planning routes in advance will help your techs spend less time on the road, save fuel, and fit more work into the day, resulting in higher profits for your small business.

Here’s how to improve your HVAC dispatching using the tools you have:

• Create a list of your visits and pin them on an online map. Add your service visit locations to Google Maps or your other route planner app as location pins. These pins give you a bird’s-eye view of customer properties so you can plan out the fastest route between locations.
• If you’re dispatching multiple vans in a day, group your pinned locations into regions that each vehicle can cover. If you get an emergency service call, you’ll be able to quickly dispatch whichever crew is closest to that location.

While these options will improve your dispatching, manually pinning locations on your route can get tedious.

Instead, you could save time by using a route optimization tool. Route optimization software like Jobber will automatically create the most efficient schedule for your crews based on the location of each visit.

Then, when service techs arrive at the job site, an organized HVAC van setup will help them find the tools they need faster.

Better yet, you can use GPS tracking to check that every technician makes it to the job site and to keep customers informed about possible delays.

5. Let your team access job and client details from anywhere

Communication is crucial for successful HVAC business management, especially if you’re managing a field team and office staff. A skilled HVAC business owner can communicate effectively with their crew without getting stuck on the phone all day.

To share details about jobs and customers with your crew—without anything slipping through the cracks—store it all in your client relationship management system (or CRM) with a mobile app.

6. Use checklists to ensure high-quality work every time

HVAC technicians are human, meaning they can slip up or forget a step in the project—it’s normal but preventable. That said, there’s nothing worse than a customer calling your techs back because the job wasn’t done right the first time.

Checklists are essential to effective HVAC business management. Using job checklists, you can make sure your team completes consistent, high-quality work every time and prevent callbacks.

Create a standard inspection checklist for all types of HVAC jobs, like furnace repairs or ductwork replacement, then customize it to fit different HVAC systems. You can also create a protocol checklist that helps you follow your manufacturers’ preventative maintenance schedules.

Here’s an example of a digital checklist created with Jobber that your technicians can take with them to the job site:

7. Keep track of your HVAC parts and inventory

Your technicians and customers aren’t the only ones who need managing. An HVAC business management plan should also include a process for managing your parts and inventory.

Use these tips to manage your HVAC parts and inventory:

• Categorize and label your inventory and HVAC equipment
• Keep your inventory records up to date as parts are used, ordered, and received
• Use the First-In, First-Out (FIFO) method to ensure older stock is used before newer stock

8. Send professional, detailed estimates

Estimates are often the first impression your business makes on a customer, making them a key part of HVAC business management.

Whether you have a team of estimators or it’s just you, you can do more profitable HVAC work when you save time by building your service estimates with a reusable template.

Once you’re done planning the work and estimating costs, plug all that info into an HVAC estimate template that’s professional and easy to read.

Jobber’s estimate template lets you add your services, pricing, product photos, and estimate terms and conditions to a professional-looking document like this one:

9. Simplify invoicing and payment collection

We can’t talk about HVAC business management without financial management. If your finances aren’t organized, your business is in trouble.

Keep these tips in mind when managing your HVAC finances:

• Keep track of cash flow–know what is coming in and what is going out (and to where!)
• Create a detailed budget to outline expenses and revenue
• Produce regular financial statements so that you can see what’s going well and catch issues sooner
• Leverage AI tools to spot key business trends so you can make informed decisions

The biggest part of financial management for your HVAC business is invoicing. When you make it easy for HVAC customers to receive and pay invoices, you can get paid faster and improve cash flow. That makes it easier to invest in your company’s success.

You can instantly improve your HVAC invoicing by:

• Learning how to write an invoice that’s accurate, professional, and easy to read
• Setting up a process to follow up on unpaid invoices

To write your invoices faster, use a customer-friendly HVAC invoice template you can customize with your company branding, contact information, service pricing, and invoice payment terms.

You can use Jobber’s HVAC software to track which invoices are sent or outstanding and get reminders to send invoices for jobs you’ve just finished.

10. Keep customers in the loop

Our last HVAC business management is simple: communicate with your customers throughout the job.

When you keep your customers updated at all stages of the job, you give them peace of mind that you’re getting the work done. It shows you’re responsible, professional, and trustworthy.

As a guide, follow this schedule to communicate with each customer consistently:

• A few days before the job, send an appointment reminder email to prepare them for your service visit. Include instructions to help them remove any obstacles to your work.
• On the first day of the job, send a quick text message saying you’re on your way or running late. This can prevent last-minute cancellations and keeps customers confident that you’ll be there.
• A week after the job, follow up with an email to check if your customer’s HVAC system is working the way it should. Checking on customer satisfaction after a visit shows that you care and gives you the chance to make any corrections.

After you’re confident that your customer is happy with the work, send a customer feedback survey to collect testimonials you can use in your HVAC marketing.

READ MORE: How to write better customer service follow-up emails [with templates]

You’re on your way to success

Feeling ready to run a more successful HVAC business? Start by testing out these management tips and keep looking for opportunities to create more efficiency.

Soon, you’ll be managing jobs, customers, and teams like the best in the HVAC industry.

Want to go even deeper on this topic? Listen to the Masters of Home Service Podcast Episode: How to Run a Highly Efficient Business.

Originally published May 2020. Last updated on July 24, 2024.