Call it a maintenance plan, a service contract, a membership, a care plan. Same deal under four names. The customer pays you on a schedule, monthly or once a year, and in return you keep their equipment running. For an HVAC shop that’s usually two tune-ups a year plus a break on repairs. A plumber might sell an annual inspection and a water-heater flush. Pest control runs on quarterly visits. The thread tying them together is simple: you trade a one-time transaction for a customer who pays you again and again.
Why they're worth selling
Cash you can count on. When a set number of customers pays you every month, you can plan ahead and breathe a little easier in the slow season. Most trades live and die by the weather, and an agreement flattens that curve. It also feeds the rest of the work. A tech doing a tune-up catches the failing part before it quits on a holiday weekend, which is a repair you’d have missed, sold to someone who already trusts you.
There’s a longer game too. The day you sell the business, recurring revenue is the number a buyer actually cares about. A list of agreement customers is an asset. A stack of old invoices isn’t.
“A regular customer is worth more than a one-off call. An agreement is how you put that in writing.
How to price one
Here’s where most shops trip. They pick a number that sounds nice, say $14.99 a month or $199 a year, and hope it works out. Then they lose a little on every visit and never notice until the year’s over. Work it backward instead. Start with what the plan costs you to actually deliver.
- The labor hours per visit, at your real loaded labor rate
- Any filters, parts, or materials you include in the plan
- Drive time and the cost of putting a truck on the road
- A slice of overhead, because the office doesn't run for free
Say two visits a year run you about $180 all in, labor and parts. That’s your floor. Price under it and you’re paying customers to stick around. Now add your margin. Want to clear 40 percent? You’re at roughly $300 a year, or $25 a month. Round it to a clean number the customer can say yes to without reaching for a calculator.
One more thing people give away by accident: the repair discount. Build it into the price, don’t just hand it over. A 15 percent member discount on repairs sounds generous, but you already marked those repairs up, so the discount costs you less than the loyalty it buys.
Put it in writing
A handshake plan is the fastest road to an argument twelve months out. Write it down, and keep it short. Spell out what they get, how often, what it costs, how they pay, and how either side can cancel. List what’s not covered so nobody expects a free compressor in year two. Auto-renew helps here, as long as you tell them it renews and give them an easy way out.
Keeping track without losing your mind
Selling the agreement is the easy part. The hard part lands six months later, when you’ve got forty plans on forty different schedules and no clear idea who’s due. This is exactly what a spreadsheet quietly drops. Miss a scheduled visit and you’ve sold a plan you didn’t deliver, which is worse than never selling it at all.
You need every agreement customer flagged, their visit dates on the calendar before the busy season hits, and the billing running on its own. ToolbagCRM keeps your agreement customers, their equipment history, and their visit schedule together, so the recurring work shows up on the calendar instead of in your head. If you’re still tracking plans on paper, that’s the first thing worth moving. You can get started free with no card, and Founders is free the first month, then a flat base rate with unlimited users. An HVAC CRM that tracks maintenance agreements beats a wall calendar every time. See plan terms, plug-in slots, and payment fees.