You do not need more random volume. You need a cleaner mix of work your crews can repeat, renew, and expand.
Key Takeaway: Real growth is usually hiding in the jobs and accounts you already have. Upgrade your A B C sold-work mix, protect renewal lanes, and expand multi-site relationships before you chase new volume.
Payroll just cleared. You are staring at the bank balance on your screen and the stack of work orders on your desk. Your crews ran hard all week. The schedule looked full. The board looked healthy.
Then your sales lead drops two tenant-improvement bids in your inbox and calls them “easy.”
You know what that word usually means. Low dollars. Short timelines. A general contractor who wants fast help now and slow payment later.
A text hits your phone from the same GC.
“Can you add one more thing?”
You should feel strong after a week like this.
Instead you feel punched. Because you are starting to suspect the problem is not volume. It is the mix of work you keep choosing to win.
Reality
Last Tuesday, you had three bids on your desk.
One was a planned replacement for a property manager you’ve worked with for years. Clean scope. Clear decision-maker. The kind of work your crews can run without drama. The other two were tenant buildouts for a GC who always has “one more thing” and always stretches payables.
You bid all three. That is the trap.
The trades are growing, skilled labor is staying tight, and the shops that win will be the ones who stop trying to grab everything in sight.
Two shops can both do $8M. One feels like a treadmill. The other feels like a machine.
The difference is selection.
Fix It
Pull your last 90 days of sold work. Print it. Spread it across the table.
Grab a black marker and a red marker.
If you have more red than black, your mix is running you.
Now write your repeatable lane in one sentence. A strong starting version might sound like:
Pro Move
Put your A-profile on the board for 60 days and treat it like a capacity rule, not a suggestion.
This is not about what comes in. It is about what you choose to chase once your week is already full.
If your sales lead cannot answer “Is this A-profile?” in ten seconds, the bid should slow down until you can.
Quick Win
Set one boundary next week.
Pick the one that will feel slightly uncomfortable but immediately clarifying.
Your sales lead will push back.
“We cannot just turn work away.”
That is when you know the boundary is working.
Is Growth Stalled By Me Or Our Sales System?
Reality
If you never separate your wins, everything blends into one loud year. You feel busy, not leveraged.
C-work hides in plain sight because it never shows up as a single headline disaster. It shows up as a pattern.
The “quick” retrofit that eats a week. The scope that turns into a fight. The senior labor you have to babysit on-site because nobody else can stomach the friction.
Fix It
Meet Renee.
Renee runs a $12M commercial HVAC shop. Capable operator. Strong demand. Chronic exhaustion.
Two months ago she took a tenant-improvement retrofit for a GC she likes. The price looked fine. The scope looked simple. The schedule looked manageable.
By day four, the job was eating senior labor. By day seven, change orders were turning into arguments. By day ten, her service manager was covering the site because nobody else could stomach the friction.
So Renee and Devon, her operations lead, pulled the last 30 closed jobs and sorted them:
A-jobs: Right size, right margin, right customer. Your team can repeat them without heroics.
B-jobs: Good work that fills smart gaps but does not change your trajectory on its own.
C-jobs: Bad-fit customers, awkward scope, shaky pricing, or constant rework.
Then they added rough gross margin dollars.
The room got quiet. Devon leaned back in his chair. Renee stared at the numbers and said
“I thought we were just tired. I did not realize we were choosing this.”
That line is the moment most owners never reach.
Pro Move
Once Renee saw her A-jobs clearly, she noticed something else.
Some A jobs were one-time wins. Great margin, great customers, but no obvious path to more work.
Others led somewhere. A service agreement. A second building. A multi-year relationship.
She started marking those A-Recurring. Those jobs raised margin now and made the next quarter easier to sell into.
That is the distinction most shops never make.
Quick Win
Run your own 30-minute A B C huddle next week. Pull the last 10 jobs you won.Label each A, B, or C.
For every C, write one sentence on why you chased it anyway. Then create one rule that blocks the pattern.
Example rules that work:
Am I Targeting The Wrong Job Types?
Reality
Most commercial HVAC sales meetings obsess over what is new. That habit creates a leak.
You hunt strangers while your best accounts make quiet decisions about who they will trust next year.
Renee learned this the hard way. One of her best accounts from 2022, a mid-size healthcare property group, renewed their maintenance agreement with another shop this spring. She found out casually at a supply house.
No blowup. No drama. Just a quiet loss of predictable margin and future replacement work.
When she replayed it later, the reason was simple. She assumed loyalty would carry the renewal. She never shaped the renewal conversation. She just assumed it would happen.
Fix It
Build a simple expansion list.
Start with your top 15 accounts by gross margin dollars. For each, answer:
If your data is messy, do it the field way. Ask your senior tech:
“Which unit is going to die this summer if we do nothing?”
Service agreements also create more predictable service lanes and replacement timing, helping reduce seasonality whiplash.
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has a solid, plain-English brief you can reference when you’re turning recurring comfort and energy complaints into a planned-upgrade conversation: Building energy management control systems for small and medium commercial buildings.
Pro Move
Run a renewal-first pipeline meeting for 60 days.
Agenda order:
You are training the team to stop hunting strangers first and protect the accounts that already trust you.
Quick Win
Call five A-list accounts next week. Use this one-line opener:
“What other buildings are giving you headaches this quarter?”
Offer a short site walk and a preventative plan tied to the next 90 days. If two of five conversations convert into scoped planned work, you just proved that your best growth channel might already be in your phone.
What Numbers Should I Be Watching?
Reality
An A-profile without a filter is just a good idea that gets bullied by the inbox.
The week gets busy. C-work sneaks back in.
Fix It
Create a three-question filter for every meaningful opportunity.
Score each 1 to 5 before you discuss it.
Total the points.
Classify:
Pro Move
Run one week of “A-jobs first.”
Then run a 30-day mix check:
If your A bucket is healthy but win rate is soft, your next stop is the pitch post.
Quick Win
Tag every job you sell next week as A, B, or C. At the end of Friday, ask one question:
“Did we spend our best hours on work we want more of?”
If the answer is no, tighten your filter on Monday.
Renee’s first clean win after running this was not a massive new client. It was a second-site service agreement from an existing property manager, signed in 48 hours because the trust was already there.
She forwarded the signed agreement to Devon with one sentence.
“Why did we ever make this harder than it had to be?”
That is the moment hidden growth stops being a concept and becomes your new operating rhythm.
If this post helped you see that your growth problem is a sold-work mix problem, not a hunger-for-leads problem, here is the right next lever:
Run the Bid Win Rate Scorecard now to see whether your next lift is A B C mix discipline, renewal bias, pitch structure, or price protection. Fast pulse. No spreadsheets. This is not the deeper diagnostic we build inside your Workplan.
This week:
When you want an A-profile, renewal cadence, and A-Recurring targeting system your team can run without your constant override, the Sales Growth Workplan is where we build it.
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