Strategic planning and management are a healthy part of any HVAC business. The HVAC trade has so many variables that affect a business’s ability to be profitable, grow, and build a good reputation in the community; it’s hard to manage that by just taking calls as you receive them and going with the flow.

Let’s say a customer asks you to replace their ductwork. Do you just discuss pricing, tear out the old ductwork, replace it with new ductwork, collect payment, and call it a day? Of course not; High-Performance HVAC™ contractors don’t take a “throw-things-at-a-wall-and-see-what-sticks” approach to serious comfort decisions for their customers.

Emily Gutowski

We can’t know how well an HVAC system delivers capacity if we don’t take the system’s vitals, like Total External Static Pressure (TESP) in the air handler and in the ductwork.

At Kalos Services, we don’t take action until we can create a plan that addresses those readings — and then we test in and test out at the end to make sure we deliver the results we want.

But what does that have to do with business strategic planning?

It actually has a lot to do with it! It’s still strategic planning, no matter how you slice it.

It’s difficult to tell how well an HVAC business is doing and what its team can do better if we don’t have a strategic plan to use numbers to define our goals and track our progress.

These numbers aren’t just financial, either; in many cases, businesses tend to bring in more money in the summer due to the increased demand for cooling, not due to any meaningful improvements in operation. Finances alone typically don’t provide key insights into your business’s performance.

Numbers are important when it comes to creating and managing a business strategy. To be effective, these strategies need to have measurable goals, and we need to be able to track them with relevant numbers.

Just as we take measurements and use them to develop a plan to upgrade a customer’s HVAC system, HVAC business owners should have a strategic planning goal to gather key data about their organization to make business plans, track progress, and take action to address potential obstacles.

Kalos Services has an internal leadership program, and the very first lesson the students receive is about OKRs and how to create them. The OKR framework allows a person to make plans based on two items: objectives (goals) and key results (the metrics they use to indicate progress toward those goals).

Objectives and the SMART Framework: When we think about business objectives or goals of any kind, we want them to be SMART:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R – Relevant
T – Time-Bound.