These guides are written for HVAC owners who want to check their marketing with a calculator rather than a dashboard. Each one takes a single idea, explains it plainly, and walks through a worked example with hypothetical numbers you can replace with your own. None of them requires you to hire us, and all of them are marketing and business coaching rather than accounting advice.
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How to calculate cost per booked job, and what yours should be
Cost per booked job is your marketing spend divided by the jobs that marketing actually put on the schedule. This guide shows how to calculate it by channel, how to set a ceiling from gross profit, and which errors to avoid.
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Job mix and the shoulder seasons: budgeting marketing month by month
The profitable way to plan HVAC marketing is month by month: start from a gross profit target, check it against technician capacity, choose the job mix that reaches it, and only then set the budget.
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Maintenance agreements as recurring profit: the member maths
A maintenance member is worth far more than the annual fee. This guide shows how to put a number on a member, why renewal rate drives the result, what you can afford to spend to sign one, and how to market plans well.
Guide 1: How to calculate cost per booked job
Read the cost-per-booked-job guide.
This is the foundation. It explains the difference between cost per lead, cost per booked job and cost per sold job, and why the middle one is the everyday working number. Then it goes step by step through adding up spend properly, including the agency fees owners often forget, counting booked jobs from marketing, splitting the result by channel, and setting a ceiling for each job type from its gross profit.
You will learn:
- why a healthy company-wide figure can hide one channel costing twice as much as the others
- how to turn average invoice and margin into a maximum cost per booked job
- why repair campaigns often run above their ceiling, and what to do about it
- a six-step monthly routine that takes a couple of hours once it is set up
Guide 2: Maintenance agreements as recurring profit
Read the maintenance agreement guide.
A member is worth much more than the plan fee: the repairs, add-ons and replacements they bring, for as long as they renew. This guide shows how to put a conservative number on that, and why the renewal rate shapes lifetime value more than anything else.
You will learn:
- how to build a per-member value table from your own records
- how moving from 70% to 80% renewal can add more value than a sign-up campaign
- what you can afford to spend to win a new member, and why point-of-service sales cost so little
- how to design a plan that sells without quietly losing money on each visit
- a five-step renewal and win-back process that respects Canada's anti-spam rules
Guide 3: Job mix and the shoulder seasons
Read the job mix and shoulder seasons guide.
An annual budget split twelve ways overspends when you are full and underspends when you are empty. This guide builds a monthly plan from technician capacity and a gross profit target, then works backward to the media budget.
You will learn:
- how to calculate gross profit per technician hour for each job type
- how to choose the job mix that fills open hours and reaches a monthly target
- how provincial heating fuel mix changes your calendar
- five ways to fill April and October without discounting
How to use the guides together
The three guides form one loop. Cost per booked job tells you what work costs to win. Maintenance members lower that cost over time, because renewals need no new acquisition spend. Job mix and seasonality tell you where each month's money should go. Run the loop every quarter and your marketing budget stops being a guess.
If you work through them and want a second opinion on your numbers, our margin mapping service does the first step with you. You can also read how we work or see plans and pricing.
A note on the numbers
Every figure in these guides is illustrative. They are chosen to be realistic enough to show how the maths behaves, not to describe any real company or any industry average. Your job values, margins, close rates and renewal rates will differ, sometimes a lot, by province, by fuel type and by how your office runs.
We are not an HVAC contractor and not an accounting firm. For margins, tax and financial statements, talk to your accountant. For marketing decisions built on those numbers, the guides above are a sound place to start.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need special software to use these guides?
No. A spreadsheet, a job export from your field-service software and your call tracking log are enough. The guides explain which columns you need.
Are the numbers in the guides industry benchmarks?
No. Every figure in the worked examples is hypothetical and there to show the method. Use your own invoices and margins, ideally confirmed with your accountant.
Which guide should I read first?
Start with cost per booked job. The other two build on it: maintenance members change your long-term costs, and job mix decides where each month's budget should go.