A few weeks ago I was on the phone with a contractor who was having about as rough a year as you can have.
He hired 14 people this summer. Fourteen, in one summer, most of them techs. And a lot of them couldn't do what they said they could do when they sat across from him in the interview.
You can probably guess the rest. Summer winds down, the phones slow, and now he's swamped with warranty calls and callbacks. Jobs weren't done right the first time. A tech would show up, swap one part, and leave without checking out the rest of the system. Two weeks later the customer calls back, and somebody has to go out and fix it for free.
Every one of those callbacks is a truck, a tech, and a few hours you don't get paid for. Stack up enough of them and they eat the whole season. That's where he is right now. He's got big problems to fix and no money to fix them with.
I'm not sharing his story because he did something the rest of us never do. I'm sharing it because every one of us ends up in some version of that conversation.
Maybe it wasn't bad hires for you. Maybe it was a slow winter, a big job that went sideways, or a supplier price jump you didn't catch in time. Something went wrong, and now you're sitting there asking the same question he was asking me: what do I do now?
The way out isn't another hiring push. It isn't a new marketing campaign either. When the money's gone, you can't spend your way out of the hole.
You take the jobs you have right now and the people you have right now, and you get the most out of every one of those jobs. Every call, every day.
That sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Doing it takes a lot of work.
It starts with the diagnosis. The one-part swap is what got my contractor friend into this mess. A tech who checks out the whole system finds the problem that would have turned into a callback, and he finds the other things the homeowner needs to know about.
Then the homeowner needs to see the whole picture. Not one fix and one price, but the real choices: fix what's broken today, fix it plus what's about to fail, or replace it. That's why we built The New Flat Rate around a menu of five options. Every tech presents the full picture on every call, whether he's been with you ten years or ten days.
When your techs work that way, each job is worth more, and you aren't leaving the next callback behind when you pull out of the driveway.
You have to stand behind your work. If your company got it wrong, you go back and make it right. That's what makes you the company people trust and keep calling.
But being reliable doesn't mean letting people walk all over you. Once you've been back to a house a couple of times, some customers start to figure you'll come back for anything. Be clear about what your warranty covers and what it doesn't. If your tech finds a new problem that has nothing to do with the original repair, that's a new service call, and it's okay to say so. Be respectful about it, and hold the line.
This is the part a lot of us get backwards. We treat profit like whatever's left over after we take care of everybody else. It works the other way around.
When you put profit up front, that's what lets you take care of your customers. It's what lets you take care of your people: pay them right, train them, and keep the good ones. And it's what lets you hold people accountable, because you're not so desperate for a warm body that you can't tell a tech his work isn't good enough.
When there's no profit built into the jobs, every mistake costs more than you can afford. When there is, a bad summer is a setback instead of a crisis.
You can't undo the summer. But you can decide what the next hundred calls look like, and that's where the recovery starts.
Want to see what those callbacks are actually costing you? Run your numbers through our free Truck Roll Cost Calculator and find out what every return trip takes out of your profit.