You’ve reached an exciting crossroads–you have a growing HVAC business. By now, your sales have skyrocketed and your schedule is packed. As a result, you’re ready to start scaling! But, before taking the leap and putting ideas into action, you should know the most common pitfalls of scaling your business. By walking through these missteps, you can avoid losing customers, overspending, and missing out on revenue.
1. Neglecting Your Numbers
For independently-ran HVAC businesses in the $600K to $1M annual revenue range, knowing your numbers may be an afterthought. Business owners at this stage have enough of a grip on their day-to-day operations. But they may be blind to oversights in their marketing efforts and financial statements.
Unfortunately, small miscalculations have a tendency to snowball throughout the scaling process. In turn, the couple-hundred dollars you wasted can grow to thousands of dollars in lost profits for your growing HVAC business.
By taking the time to learn your P&L statements, balance sheets, and sales analytics today, you can avoid losing money down the road.
2. Misaligning Roles and Responsibilities
Until now, you’ve been a solo performer. There’s a high probability that you’ve been the primary technician, sales lead, and installation manager. With a growing HVAC business, however, you’ll need to start delegating responsibilities. This unfamiliar territory is where countless HVAC business owners make critical mistakes.
Assigning a bad-fitting role to one or more members of your team can only lead to bad outcomes. These include internal conflict, inefficient personnel hours, and a clunky customer experience. To avoid these challenges, our Credit for Comfort team recommends that you:
- Determine which high-level tasks you must maintain yourself
- Delegate tasks and responsibilities based on how important and time-consuming they are
- Clearly articulate the expectations of each new hire in writing
- Provide periodic performance reports to make course corrections
- Expand gradually as opposed to hiring an entirely new team at once
You can check out this blog to get some tips on how to choose the right sales manager.
3. Implementing the Wrong Business Systems
In the digital age we live in, new technologies seem to be rising up everywhere. Although you may be tempted to integrate time-saving systems wherever possible, proceed with caution. Not all systems will add value to your HVAC business. As a result, you may be forcing your team to learn complicated tools & technologies that take away from your efficiency. Instead, a better strategy may be assessing which manual tasks are taking the most time. And adding systems around your workflow; not the other way around. In turn, you can keep your progress in motion while avoiding unnecessary spending and learning curves.
Now you’re ready to scale!
For growing HVAC businesses, the scaling process is an exciting time. At the same time, moving too quickly can result in serious oversights that run the risk of derailing your operations. Instead of learning the hard way, our team hopes these key takeaways help you to navigate the scaling process better.
Whether or not you’re ready to grow your HVAC business, you may consider adding Credit for Comfort. Our easy-to-use platform can help you attract prospective customers interested in financing their HVAC jobs.
Thank you for reading, and we wish you the best of luck as you grow your HVAC business!
