< Previoustion. Once you have their attention, you are in a better position to discuss solutions. Alternatively, you can seek venues where you have more time to discuss performance contract- ing or even demonstrate it. The objective is to communicate what you can do that differs from the way other contractors ap- proach HVAC. Unless you are speaking with an engineer, do not get trapped in technical discus- sions. Instead tell stories. THE POWER OF STORIES A story has a be- ginning with a pro- tagonist (e.g., a cus- tomer). It has an obstacle that must be overcome (e.g., a specific comfort problem), a journey to get past the ob- stacle and take the protagonist to a successful conclusion and a hap- py ending. Think of half a dozen stories with different ob- stacles that represent your capabilities. People remember stories. People have been using stories to communicate since the dawn of time. Before we had a written language, we would sit around the fire and listen to stories from our tribal elders. These were stories about dangers to avoid. They were stories about finding food. They were stories about healing illnesses and injuries. They were stories about survival. Storytelling is baked into our DNA. What are your stories? Stories are not the only way to communicate. A s a High-Performance HVAC contrac- tor, you do things differently than other contractors. That gives you an edge, but only if you can communicate those dif- ferences to prospective customers. It boils down to message, media, and motivation. THE MESSAGE You know what makes you different from other contractors. You know how to make all rooms in a home comfortable at the same time. You know how to improve air quality. You know how to balance tempera- ture and humidity. You know how to reduce energy us- age, which reduces out-of-pocket util- ity costs and carbon footprints. So, how do you communicate all of that? We live in a sound bite society. Unfortunately, much of high-performance contracting does not lend itself to a soundbite world. Consider reduc- ing your message to the identification of prob- lems you can solve: zHot spots or cold spots in your home? We can fix them. zProblem room? We can make it comfortable. z Clammy feeling? We can optimize your humidity. zHigh utility bills? We can lower them without replacing your expensive air conditioner. If you need to communicate in soundbites, questions are a good way to get people’s atten- High-Performance Branding for High- Performance HVAC Contractors By Matt Michel BRAND MARKETING Story-telling is baked into our DNA. It’s how we learned survival skills and retold history since the dawn of mankind. DECEMBER 2023 11HVACTODAY.COM12 DECEMBER 2023HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAY company? Who answers the door when you arrive at the prospect’s home? This is your target. BROADCAST MEDIA Broadcast media can work well in smaller markets but tends to over- reach in larger metro areas. It does you little good if you are speaking to a prospect 30 miles outside of your ser- vice area. Cable, on the other hand, allows more precise targeting down to the zip code level. It is also highly af- fordable. The same is true for Inter- net radio options, such as Pandora, I-Heart Radio, etc. If you decide to go cable or Inter- net radio, try to envision what stations your target customer watches or lis- tens to. You may be thrilled to see your ads on a sports channel, but you might be more effective on one of the home improvement or cooking channels. You might find better luck targeting Christian or soft rock radio than talk radio. It all depends on your target customer. DIGITAL MEDIA There is a lot of focus today on digi- tal, and rightly so. However, the same ROI focus should be applied to digital media that applies to other media. Fo- cus paid search on the key problems you can solve to keep costs low and re- sults focused. Search engine optimization for your website should also stress the things that differentiate your approach, but from the consumer’s perspective. Do not expect consumers to search for technical terms, but for problems and solutions. TRADITIONAL DIRECT MARKETING Ironically, the focus on digital and subsequent shift away from tradition- al forms of direct marketing has made direct more attractive. One of two options high-perfor- mance contractors should consider includes radius marketing. This is where you mail to some number of homes surrounding your custom- er with a note about the problem the customer experienced and how you solved it. Chances are good that others will share the problem. The other form of direct marketing that works for high-performance con- tractors is consumer newsletters. A newsletter gives you the space Different manufacturers have used water tables in the past to illustrate airflow. With a little creativity you can do the same. When appropriate, con- trolled demonstrations are a powerful means of communication. THE MEDIA Media encompasses more than broadcast television and radio. It in- cludes cable, Internet radio, your web- site, Internet advertising, search en- gine marketing, outdoor advertising (including your trucks), direct mail (including newsletters), public speak- ing opportunities, home-and-garden shows, and so on. With any media, the goal is to find a vehicle that reaches your target au- dience for the most affordable price. Start by defining your target. Most contractors focus on homeowners, age 35 and over. Some may select an old- er demographic believing that older homeowners are more likely to have disposable income and more willing to pay for higher end services. Many focus on women because the marketing research shows that wom- en influence seven out of eight HVAC replacements as well as most service calls. Ask yourself, who calls your DECEMBER 2023 13HVACTODAY.COM BRAND MARKETING from your profit but should be built into your pricing as part of your mar- keting budget. Some high-performance contractors tend to look sideways at marketing promotions as though they devalue their service. Nonsense. Promotions are nothing more than reasons to act now instead of waiting. People are subject to inertia. Absent an outside force, they will not act. Promotions are the outside force. TIMING When marketing fails, it is because it is either the wrong message, wrong media (or audience), wrong motiva- tion, wrong timing, or some combi- nation. You can control the message, media, and motivation. You can tweak them and adjust them. Timing is beyond your control. This is why marketing should be done all year long. True, you pick it up during predictable seasonal slowdowns, but you should never stop. Marketing your business is a lot like pushing a dead car in neutral gear. It takes effort to get it rolling, but less ef- fort to keep it rolling once it starts. If you let it roll to a stop, it will take more effort to get it rolling again, so do not stop marketing. Ever. SPEAKING OPPORTUNITIES Do not overlook the opportunity to speak on home performance in your community. Every service and civic club is looking for speakers, week in and week out. Many homeowners’ associa- tions feature speakers at their meet- ings. Corporations that have brought people back to the office hold “lunch and learns.” Almost all of these will involve put- ting together a tight 15-to-30-minute canned presentation on high-perfor- mance contracting. This is an ideal en- vironment to open by discussing what it is and how it is different. Use stories as illustrative examples. Close with information on how to find a High-Performance HVAC contractor. Remember, you are speaking to the process and solutions, not advertising for your company. The promotion is inherent. You should be a member of a local service club. Get on the program rota- tion. Rotary and many other clubs use speakers’ bureaus. Do some Internet sleuthing and find them online. THE MOTIVATION One problem you face with poten- tial customers is how much motiva- tion they need to decide and act. Many people live with problems because they are unaware that there is a solu- tion. Even then, when presented with a solution, they often have no urgency to act now. This is why you create ur- gency with sales, specials, buy one/get one, and so on. Track your promotions to run count- er season. When things slow down, your promotions and offers should pick up. These should not take away and word count necessary to better ex- plain what you do that makes you dif- ferent. By making the newsletter in- teresting with a little information on your high-performance services, read- ership will be better. You do that by including a recipe, a crossword puzzle or Sudoku, and items about your local community. Mail the newsletters quarterly and in- clude a special offer in each issue. OUTDOOR DIRECT MEDIA The best option for outdoor adver- tising are your vehicles. Pay to get them wrapped in any color but white. Be bold. Be clean. Use a profession- al graphics designer to help you with your truck wrap. This is mostly a focus on brand. Trucks get more than 30 thousand ex- posures a day. A good wrap will raise brand awareness and familiarity that makes you a safer and familiar choice when viewing your other marketing. HOME SHOWS Visit the next home and garden show as a consumer. What gets your attention? Chances are it is not a booth with Company XYZ’s name across the top. You will be interested in problems and solutions that speak to you. This will be especially important for high-performance contractors. You are not just another HVAC com- pany, but you will get viewed that way if you fail to differentiate yourself. Follow the same advice given above and ask about a problem. Once peo- ple enter your booth, be prepared to talk about stories and/or give demon- strations. In a home show, demon- strations are especially effective. Matt Michel is a member of the Contracting Business Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Air Conditioning Heating & Refrigeration NEWS’ Legends in HVACR award. For newsletter and other marketing ideas, consider supplementing your National Comfort Institute mem- bership with a membership in the Service Roundtable. Learn more at www.ServiceR- oundtable.com . Matt can be reached at mattmichel@mail.com or 214.995.8889 .14 DECEMBER 2023HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAYDECEMBER 2023 15HVACTODAY.COM Make Combustion Safety Part of Your Brand By Vic Updike MARKETING S afety is often NOT a key differentiator when it comes to standing out from the crowd. It’s not because HVAC contrac- tors don’t care about safety. The fact is, in most cases, the exact opposite is true. But most contractors don’t tout safety as part of their mar- ket brand. They are missing an essential feature of their overall business approach. Safety should be crit- ical to a company’s overall branding and reputa- tion approach. For my team at Masterworks Mechanical, Inc., in Craig, CO, we focus on training to test and diagnose safety issues. That is central to our brand. We have 14 technicians trained and certified in combustion analysis and carbon mon- oxide safety. We have several new technicians scheduled for training. Everyone who works in the field gets trained. SAFETY BRINGS CUSTOMER TRUST AND CONFIDENCE Having highly trained and even certified tech- nicians coming into a home enables customers to see them checking gas-fired equipment for signs of rising carbon monoxide (CO) levels, which gives them a good feeling. Several years ago, I read a book called Blue Ocean Strategy that discussed how companies can provide products and services with little or no competition. Doing this allows them to charge enough to be profitable, grow their businesses, and take good care of their employees. For me, combustion safety is how I get to my blue ocean. It is how our team helps customers trust and have confidence in what we do. Our service area covers 45 miles in all direc- tions from Craig. You would need to double that area before you find another contractor who knows anything about combustion or CO safety. Our approach to combustion safety completely separates us from our competition. We always perform a combustion analysis for every gas appliance we service or any new instal- lation we do. Customers who hire us get some- thing that they couldn’t buy anywhere else. That is the keystone of our company. WE EMPHASIZE TRAINING The training our team receives also protects them. We spend a lot of time with installers and service techs to look for visible signs of problems. For example, let’s say they’re working on a fur- nace. They know to follow that vent pipe out of the room to see what else, if anything, is attached to it. The idea is to NOT just look at the furnace but to consider all gas-fired appliances in the home. What is their impact on any potential danger from CO production. We want everything to operate safely. PROFESSIONALISM AND RELIABILITY Another part of our brand is how the team looks and acts. These two things impact your custom- er’s first impressions of your firm. We often hear from customers about how our field techs are the type of people they’d invite over for dinner. And that is by design. We want our technicians to look and act like professionals. We want customers to feel comfortable inviting them into their homes. We also have a drug-free program. If technicians want to work for us, they must pass those tests. It changes the group of people we work with. Our professional approach is also a part of our 16 DECEMBER 2023HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAY Our salespeople always include a low-level monitor with the bid, and we put one in every time we do anything with gas-fired equipment. In addition, at Masterworks, we al- ways buy a few low-level monitors ev- ery year to keep around as loaners. Let’s say a customer is buying a furnace, but it won’t come in for two weeks, and something sketchy is happening with the old one. We’ll leave one of our loan- er monitors to ensure CO isn’t being produced in rising numbers. EMPLOYEE MORALE AND PRODUCTIVITY Another thing I want to say is the importance of networking and hav- ing others in the industry available for advice. I was lucky to have peo- ple like Tom Johnson to help me in- corporate combustion testing into our daily routines. He and other advisors were great for making us do all the right things. But I was worried about whether it was “taking” properly. That worry was put to rest when I found our guys returning from service and installation jobs talking about CO numbers, or things they caught that other HVAC companies would miss. Their morale was sky-high. That’s when I knew it was working. Combus- tion success stories became part of our team’s daily conversations. Typically, when a company wants to make changes, the orders come from top management and are fed down to the workforce. When those chang- es are fed from the bottom to the top, that’s when you know you’ve got a program that’s up and running successfully. When that happens, our team’s productivity soars. COMMUNICATING YOUR BRAND Our biggest advertising and market- ing spend is on our vehicles. Everybody recognizes them because they’re the only maroon fleet on the road. That’s what keeps us going. We base much of our marketing on word of mouth. Peo- ple know Masterworks because they’ve seen our trucks and the quality of our work. I think it’s safe to say that we have safety baked into their culture. Our customers and the community we serve see our company different- ly — the more people in your commu- nity who know your brand, the better. I read somewhere that studies show businesses with a strong safety culture are generally better equipped to han- dle challenges and changes. Safety enhances customer trust and confidence, improves employee satis- faction, and creates overall business success. preventive main- tenance (PM) pro- gram. We include changing the bat- tery in the low-lev- el CO monitor as part of our PM checklist. If the customer doesn’t have a monitor, we explain why they should. Then we do a combustion test on ev- ery PM service. When we finish our work, we send them our complete preventive maintenance form so they have something in writing that ex- plains what we did and what we found. To better help them understand the results of our analysis, we use col- ored boxes to reflect their CO status. A green box means all is well. A yellow box means there isn’t an emergency, but they should consider taking some action. And a red box means we shut down the furnace because it poses an imminent danger. CO MONITORS VERSUS CO DETECTORS On every service call, our technicians will explain the importance of having a low-level CO monitor in their homes. Typically, the customer responds with, “Oh, we already have a detector.” Our guys know to tell them that de- tectors are government-regulated and can’t alarm until harm is already done. On the other hand, monitors mea- sure much lower CO ranges in the air, which alerts consumers before harm can be done. When it comes to equip- ment installations and replacements, we get past this argument by always installing a low-level CO monitor as part of our service. Vic Updike and his wife Amy own Masterworks Me- chanical LLC of Craig, CO. Vic has worked in the HVAC Industry as a technician, service manager, as well as other positions for more than 30 years. If you’d like to learn more about their CO culture, reach out to him at ncilink.com/ContactMe. DECEMBER 2023 17HVACTODAY.COM18 DECEMBER 2023HIGH-PERFORMANCE HVAC TODAY 1.Diverse Solutions: Offering these systems allow you to provide solutions that cater to var- ious customer preferences and concerns, mak- ing your services highly appealing for discern- ing homeowners who appreciate versatility. 2.Customer Satisfaction: Dual-fuel systems ensure customer comfort and peace of mind. The gas furnace acts as a reliable backup in sit- uations where the heat pump may fall short, such as during extreme cold weather or pow- er outages. During a power outage the furnace can be operated with a small generator or mod- est backup battery. 3.Pricing Flexibility: Dual-fuel systems en- able you to provide cost-effective solutions that can compete with traditional furnace and air conditioning setups, depending on existing equipment and local climate conditions. This adaptability can appeal to budget-con- scious customers. Leveraging the furnace for cold and very cold temperatures can also al- low for more aggressive downsizing of the heat pump, potentially avoiding costly electrical sys- tem upgrades. 4.Climate Resiliency: In an era of climate change, extreme weather events, including severe cold spells, are becoming more com- mon. Dual-fuel systems offer climate resilien- cy, ensuring that homeowners stay warm even during extreme cold snaps or power outages caused by natural disasters. GUIDING CUSTOMERS TO THE RIGHT DUAL-FUEL SYSTEM When helping customers choose a dual-fuel system, consider their specific needs: zUpgrading Existing Furnace:For relatively new furnaces (under 10 years old) with single- I n the ever-evolving world of comfort solu- tions, HVAC contractors face new challenges and opportunities. Customers are increasing- ly seeking energy-efficient and eco-friendly options to meet their heating and cooling needs while addressing concerns about rising utility costs, fluctuating energy prices, and potential power outages. Although heat pumps have gained popularity for their environmental benefits, many custom- ers remain skeptical about their performance in cold weather. This is where dual-fuel heat pumps come into play, offering HVAC contractors a ver- satile solution to cater to the evolving demands of customers. ADDRESSING CUSTOMER CONCERNS Homeowners often harbor reservations about heat pump systems due to their perceived ineffec- tiveness in cold weather. When heat pumps first gained popularity in the 1970s, they were unable to heat efficiently in below freezing temperatures. Many heat pumps available today have much better cold weather performance, but homeown- er misconceptions persist. Additional concerns include the potential for perceived lower comfort due to lower supply air temperatures, higher utility bills, uncertain fu- ture electricity costs, and worries about heating during power outages. As HVAC contractors, it’s crucial to acknowl- edge and address these concerns to provide effec- tive solutions for homeowners. THE BENEFITS OF DUAL-FUEL SYSTEMS FOR CONTRACTORS Dual-fuel heat pumps can be a game-changer for HVAC contractors, providing several advantages: Dual-Fuel Heat Pumps: Meeting HVAC Customer Demands By Ben Lipscomb, P.E. TECHNICALDECEMBER 2023 19HVACTODAY.COM dual-fuel system. These systems in- corporate variable-speed invert- er-driven compressors and high-effi- ciency variable-speed fans, resulting in outstanding SEER ratings. These systems often operate efficiently at very low temperatures, reducing re- liance on the gas furnace. EXPLORING DUAL-FUEL HEAT PUMPS IN DEPTH To grasp the advantages of dual-fu- el heat pumps, let’s delve deeper into their components and considerations. Components of Dual-Fuel Sys- tems:Dual-fuel systems consist of two main components: an electric heat pump and a gas furnace. The heat pump is responsible for primary heating tasks by extracting heat from the outdoor air and transferring it into the home efficiently. However, during extremely cold weather or power outages, the gas furnace takes over to ensure consis- tent warmth. The furnace fan is re- sponsible for moving air through the indoor heat pump coil and ducts into the home. Another key component is the con- trols that allow the furnace and heat pump to work together. These con- trols must tell the system whether to operate cooling, heat pump heating, or furnace heating. To determine whether to operate the heat pump or furnace, most con- trols will use outdoor air temperature. The controls also need to tell the fan what stage to run the cooling or heat- ing in and what speed to run the fan to match the compressor or furnace op- eration. This is where you need to be careful about matching heat pumps with a furnace. If a customer is going with a brand- new furnace and heat pump, it’s easy to find a matched set that will com- municate properly and just work. Whether the customer wants to go with a more traditional single- or two-stage system, or a fully modulat- ing inverter system depends on their objectives and budget. speed fans, consider recommending high EER single-stage heat pumps that match the fan’s capabilities. Avoid pairing older furnaces with multistage or variable capacity heat pumps, as this could significantly re- duce the SEER advantage of the sys- tem. An external controller with an outdoor changeover sensor may be necessary for older systems. zNew Multistage Communicat- ing System: If the customer’s ex- isting furnace is outdated or requires replacement, suggest a multistage communicating dual-fuel system. These systems are designed to work seamlessly, offering superior control over both the compressor and blow- er. It’s essential to match these sys- tems properly to benefit from man- ufacturer support and warranty coverage. zNew Inverter-Driven Com- municating System: Custom- ers seeking top-tier efficiency and advanced technology may prefer an inverter-driven communicating Next >