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🧩 1. Stop Chasing Volume—Start Segmenting It

Most commercial HVAC shops treat all revenue like it’s equal. But there’s a huge difference between $1M that’s predictable and profitable and $1M that burns out your crews.

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Start here:

• Split your jobs by service line (e.g., install, PM, controls) — This guide from BlueBridge Financial shows how commercial contractors scale profitably by diversifying services, entering new markets, and financing growth without burning out teams or cash flow.
• Tag each by building type (e.g., school, warehouse, office park)
• Flag the margin, crew fatigue, and callback rate on each one

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Crew Insight: "We realized our PM work was eating time and paying peanuts. It looked like steady revenue—until we pulled the numbers."

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🏷️ 2. Break Out Your Offers by Close Rate + Ticket Size

Not all services are equally sellable.

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Map each offer on this 2x2:

• High Close Rate / High Ticket (GOLD)
• High Close Rate / Low Ticket (Keep but optimize)
• Low Close Rate / High Ticket (Reposition or cut bait)
• Low Close Rate / Low Ticket (Why is this even here?)

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Want to reframe your pricing so the right offers win? How Do We Charge More and Win? walks you through that process.

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🔁 3. Identify Which Jobs Create Repeatable Value

Some jobs leave you with nothing but a check. The right ones lead to more work.

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Flag jobs that lead to:

• Annual or seasonal recurring work
• New building contacts
• Property manager referrals

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Growth doesn’t come from more quotes. It comes from building a pipeline of second and third projects off every job you finish.

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Example: One client landed 3 follow-up jobs from a single school district retrofit by embedding their service plan in the install.

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Read: How Do We Break Into Bigger Jobs?

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🎤 4. Interview Your Own Pipeline

Before you scale up—scale in. Talk to:

• Lost leads: Why didn’t we win?
• Repeat clients: What made you stick?
• New inbound: What got you to call?

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This isn’t just marketing. It’s goldmine research.

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Use it to:

• Reprioritize your most valuable lead sources
• Improve how you pitch high-ticket work
• Cut offers that confuse or stall deals

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Want help fixing that pitch? Read Why Isn’t Our Pitch Closing More Jobs? next.

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💼 5. Build Your Sales Workplan Like an Investor

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Investors don’t grow by guessing. They:

• Back the best-performing products
• Trim what’s underperforming
• Double down on what scales with margin

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You can do the same. Run a service line P&L every quarter. Ask:

• Which jobs build profit vs. steal time?
• Which service lines scale with the crew you’ve got?
• Where do referrals or repeat cycles stack up?

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For help diagnosing what’s working and what’s not, grab our Free HVAC Scorecard.

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Where Do You Double Down Next?

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At TradeSworn, we help commercial HVAC owners:

• Audit their service lines and offers
• Build a smart-growth roadmap
• Align crew time with profit—not just production

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Download the HVAC Scorecard →

Benchmark your margins, close rate, and scale-readiness in 5 minutes.

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