GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Running a Garage Door Business

Getting Through the Busy Season in a Garage Door Business

Every garage door company has stretches when the phone does not stop. Maybe it is a run of weather, the weeks before the holidays, a builder finishing a phase, or just one of those months where every spring in town seems to give out at once. Busy weeks are good for the bank account and hard on everything else. The companies that come out of them in good shape are the ones that planned before the rush.

Know Your Busy Weeks

Accounts like the ones in Property Managers and HOAs: Landing Monthly Accounts for a Garage Door Company add steady work, and steady work has to fit around the rush too.

Look back at your own past year. Which weeks had the most calls? When did the schedule fall behind? Simple reports on jobs by date show it quickly, without guessing. Your busy season is your own. It depends on your area, your customers and your mix of repairs and installs. Once you know when it usually comes, you can prepare for it.

Protect the Repair Van

When calls pile up, the temptation is to stack every van full from 8am. Then the emergency spring call at 10am has nowhere to go. A better approach is to keep the repair van's day loose on purpose, leaving room for calls that come in after the day starts.

If you split the vans, with one on repairs and emergency spring calls and one on installs and tune-ups, the split matters most in busy weeks. The install van keeps its appointments while the repair van takes the urgent calls. The dispatch board shows each van's day, and crew GPS on the office map shows which van is closest when a new call comes in.

Answer Every Call

Busy season is when missed calls hurt most, because a homeowner with a broken door will call the next company on the list. Plan for the phone before the rush:

• Make sure someone is assigned to the phone at every hour you are open, even if that means the owner stays off the tools for a few days.
• Use two-way texting from the office to confirm and reschedule, which is faster than phone tag.
• Let the website request form take requests after hours. They flow into Form Responses for the office to book first thing.

Answering fast is covered in more depth in Answering Leads Fast: How a Garage Door Company Stops Losing Calls to Voicemail.

Move Planned Work Early

Tune-ups and non-urgent work can usually wait a week or two. If you know a rush is coming, pull due tune-ups forward into the quieter weeks before it. The Waiting List map shows every visit that has come due and what is coming due soon, so the office can book ahead.

When the rush hits, the office can push non-urgent tune-ups back a little with a short, honest text. Plan customers understand when it is explained. Overdue pins on the Waiting List make sure none of them get forgotten once things calm down.

Keep Customers Informed

Customers are more patient when they know what is happening. Automatic texts do a lot of this work in a busy week. The night-before reminder, the on-the-way text and the arrived text go out on their own based on each customer's alert preferences. The customer app shows a live map with their place in the day's route: “You're stop 6 of 9 — the tech is 2 stops away.” That one screen saves a lot of “where is the tech?” calls.

Get Paid While It Is Busy

Billing is the first thing to slip when everyone is working long days. Tie it to the job. When the tech taps Complete, the invoice is created from the job's lines, and a card on file can be charged right there. Customers without a card get the invoice and can pay online from the customer app. Past-due follow-up catches the rest after the rush.

The worst outcome of a great busy season is a stack of unbilled paper tickets in the van the week after.

Stock the Vans Before the Rush

A busy week is a bad week to discover the van is out of the parts for the most common repairs. Before the season starts, restock each van for the work it usually does, and set a routine for checking it at the end of each day. Ask techs to note on the job when they used the last of something, so the office knows to reorder. A tech who has to drive back to the shop mid-day loses calls the company could have run.

Look After the Crew

Long days wear people down, and tired techs make mistakes. Keep an eye on hours with the time clock on the tech app, rotate the late calls fairly, and give people a real day off when you can. A rushed tech on a ladder is not worth the extra call. When the rush ends, take a day to look at what broke in your process and fix it before next time. The quiet weeks that follow are covered next. For the full business toolset, see the GarageDoorBossPro garage door business software page.