The 2024 Business Planning Checklist for Contractors (with Templates!)

You know what they say…failing to plan is planning to fail. So as this year draws to a close and a new one comes sailing in, now is the time to take a look at your home service business health and do some planning.

What can you do to make this new year better than the last? In this 2024 business planning checklist, we’re sharing 10 things to examine in your home service business planning, based on key industry metrics and emerging trends, to make sure you’re set up to grow in the new year.

Table of contents

1. Existing customers
2. Customer journey
3. Target market
4. Differentiators
5. Services and pricing
6. Profitability and cash flow
7. Marketing strategies
8. Reputation
9. Communication strategy
10. Operational health

2024 business planning checklist

Here are 10 key components of your home service business to assess so you can ensure year-over-year growth—from processes and prices to customers and cash flow.

1. Your existing customers

First and foremost, get a health check on your existing customer base. This doesn’t mean going through post-project feedback surveys. That type of feedback is important, but for your strategic business planning, consider sending a broader survey out at the beginning of the year related to your other strategies. Use multiple choice or scoring format to ask questions like:

• How do you prefer to communicate?
• How helpful has our content been?
• How easy is our website to navigate
• What makes you continue to choose us?
• Is there anything we can change to better serve you?

Then leave an open ended question at the end for any other feedback they have. This type of information will help you know exactly what top-notch service looks like to your customers so you can continue to deliver as their preferences evolve.

Here’s a template you can use:

Happy New Year!

Our goal is to make each year better than the last for our customers, but we can’t do that without your input. Will you take this 3-minute feedback survey? Thank you in advance!

2. Your customer journey

In addition to collecting feedback directly from your customers, you may also want to step into their shoes and take a stroll through your own customer journey. Map out all of their encounters with your business as they progress from onlooker to lead, lead to prospect, prospect to customer, and customer to repeat customer. Things to consider:

• Touchpoints
• Pain points
• Goals
• Expectations
• Emotions

By going through the process yourself, you can identify areas of improvement as well as strengths to harness to ensure your customer experience sets you apart from competitors and meets consumer expectations.

The above is one of several customer journey map templates you can use for your business.

3. Your target market

Run a check up on your target market. Is it still a lucrative market for your business? Has anything changed about this market over the past year that could impact your profitability?

Make sure your customer personas are up to date based on current industry and consumer trends.

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Also, take note of some of your best customers from the year. Which ones have been the most enjoyable to work with? Which ones have yielded the highest profits? Have you found more success with some clients over others? If you find any patterns, you may want to adjust, expand, or refine your target market or audience segments.

4. Company differentiators/value propositions

The next component of your business to check in on for the new year is your differentiators. Standing out in the home services space—or any industry, for that matter—doesn’t mean you have to offer cutting edge, never-seen-before products and services. Your positioning, and the manner in which you deliver products and services, is what allows you to stand out.

So as you go into the new year, make sure you know what it is about your products and services, your customer experience, and your brand that makes you different from competitors.

Here are some questions to consider to help you in nailing down your value propositions and differentiators:

• What details matter to your customers that make them choose you over competitors?
• What are you known for?
• What do you have a reputation for?
• Are you the best, the only, the fastest, the cheapest, the first, the closest, in any category?

For example, you might:

• Partner with a leading supplier
• Supply sustainable equipment
• Use eco-friendly practices in your daily operations
• Offer an unmatched warranty
• Be an early adopter of new technologies

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5. Services & pricing

The next item of business in your 2024 planning checklist is your pricing. Are they high enough to cover your costs? Do they reflect your worth?

While affordability plays a big role in customer satisfaction, it’s not everything. If your prices are too low to make a profit, you won’t be able to invest in the tools, teams, and technology that improve other aspects of customer satisfaction. Remember that people don’t just pay for repairs and equipment; they pay for experiences.

If you have solid grounds on which to raise prices (cost of supplies, new industry fees, economic changes, for example), send out a message communicating the change to your customers. Be transparent and make sure you equip them with resources and contact information for any questions they have.

Jobber’s price increase tips and templates are a great resource.

6. Profitability & cash flow

What kind of planning guide would this be without a section on profitability? Here are two key things to consider when looking at financials for the year ahead:

Profit and loss (P&L) statement: This documents both your revenue and expenses to see if you’re making money (profit) or losing it (loss). This helps you to see whether you need to increase profit margins or lower your expenses to maintain profitability over the long term.

Use your P&L statement to first make sure that you’re making a profit. Then think about where you will be reinvesting that profit. You could invest more into more marketing, operational tools, team expansion, training, and more.

You can find an example HVAC P&L statement here as well as downloadable P&L templates here.

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Remember, though, that money flows in and out of your business at fluctuating rates due to customer payment plans, seasonality, billing schedules, and other factors. So you’ll also want to look at your cash flow statement, which tells you how much money you have in your account at any point in time.

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7. Marketing strategies

You can’t run a business without customers and you can’t attract customers without marketing. Some things to consider as you plan out your marketing for the new year:

• Messaging: First and foremost, do you have your company’s brand messaging nailed down? Does your content consistently reflect your value proposition and your brand personality? If not, check out this brand messaging guide and template from WordStream.
  
  
• Channels: Next up, are you using the right channels and strategies? Here are some of the most effective ones you should be using along with some platforms you might consider:
  • Paid search: Google Ads, Google Local Services Ads Microsoft ads
  • Organic search: website, SEO and blogging)
  • Paid social: Facebook ads
  • Organic social: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, X
  • Listings: Google Business Profile, Yelp, BBB, Angi,
  • Lead aggregators
  • Customer referrals

• Performance: Take a look at your best marketing channels to see where you may want to allocate more budget in the near year and where you might need to cut your losses.
  
  
• Budget:  A good rule of thumb is to allocate between 5-10% of your revenue to your marketing budget.
  
  
• Are you spending enough? You need to invest enough budget into your marketing to see returns. If you skimp on your website, it’s not going to attract or convert enough visitors to pay off your investment. If you set your budget too low in Google Ads, your ad won’t show very frequently, and it will not provide the volume of data Google needs in order to optimize your ad’s performance. These are just two examples of why it’s important to make sure you’re spending enough on your marketing to make it a worthwhile investment.

8. Your reputation

Your reputation falls under marketing, but with how much power reviews and referrals have today, it gets its own category here.

• Search engine appearance check: Type your business name and location into Google and see what comes up. Make sure the listings that show are in top condition. That means making sure your contact information, product/services offerings, business descriptions, and hours are accurate.

• Sentiment scan: Sift through the reviews on your top platforms (Google, Facebook, Angi, etc) and make sure that they all have responses—both the positive and negative ones. Look out for common praises or complaints that can help you with honing your messaging and improving your services.
  
  
• Review quantity and quality: The more reviews you can get, the better. And while you should always strive to get five star reviews, a mix of positive, neutral, and even negative reviews can actually garner more trust from a consumer as it shows you have nothing to hide. If you don’t have a solid volume of recent reviews, or if you see that your competitors have more than you, it’s time to get more proactive about asking for reviews in 2024.

9. Communication strategy

Revenue boils down to one thing: communication. You can’t conduct effective marketing, sales, or customer service without effective communication. And effective communication means saying the right things, at the right times, over the right channels. Take some time to evaluate your communication strategy

• Saying the right things: Do you have your core marketing messages nailed down? Are they consistent across all of your collateral? What about your sales scripts? Are you keeping your communications brief so that they encourage a response, or are you burdening contacts with blocks of text that they aren’t reading? Use our 55 Text & Email Templates as your guide here!

• At the right times: Are you reaching out to new leads within five minutes? Are you following up on quotes within two days? When a contact engages with you in real time, are you responding quickly enough?
• Over the right channels: Note the plural channels. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not using a multi-channel communication strategy of phone, text, and email. You’re doing yourself even more of a disservice if you’re not leading with text. 97% of consumers ignore calls from unknown numbers. 90% of texts are opened and read within 3 minutes. 69% would prefer for an unfamiliar company to contact them over text messaging, rather than over the phone.

10. Operational health

Operational efficiency is the Achilles Heel for many businesses. Too many executives get caught up in revenue at the expense of looking at the teams, tools, and processes behind it. The most successful businesses know that true and sustained growth isn’t about feeding the machine more fuel, but about equipping the machine to be able to produce more output with the same, or even less fuel. Here are some things to consider for operational efficiency in the new year:

• Tools: Take a look at your tech stack. The platforms you use for CRM, FSM, email marketing, accounting, inventory, dispatch, communication, and more. Are you paying for tools that you don’t need or use? Can anything be consolidated or migrated to the cloud? Are there any new tools that could improve productivity? Replacing legacy systems doesn’t come without its headaches—and yes, things will break, but in the long run, it’s a way of taking one step back to take several steps forward. Modern platforms are designed to integrate and scale with your business.

• Processes: Do you have rinse and repeat processes for key business activities? This means hiring, employee onboarding, lead outreach, evaluation and quoting, post-job completion, and the list goes on. With a solid framework in place, employees can still maintain the autonomy of executing the tasks in their own unique way while you can ensure efficiency and positive customer experience. Rinse and repeat processes allow you to put together team structures that maximize output as well as to hire, train, and scale up with ease.

• Automation/AI: The other benefit to having repeatable processes is that you can leverage automation and AI. You’ve no doubt heard of the many benefits of these technologies, and likely experienced them yourself. But automation and AI are quickly becoming embedded in business operations across all industries, rendering them not just nice-to-haves anymore, but absolute musts if you want to keep up with consumer expectations and compete in your market.
  
  
• Employee satisfaction: Employee retention is one of the biggest challenges among home service businesses and call centers today. What employee retention strategies do you have in place to ensure your team members feel they are being taken care of? Think about scheduling flexibility, extra benefits, certifications and trainings, awards and recognitions, and safety measures.

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Set yourself up for success in 2024

Revenue growth is made possible by several moving parts and pieces. It’s important to look at all of them and see not just how they ebb and flow individually, but also how they influence one another and how they ultimately come together to impact your business goals. As you strive to make this year better than the last, consider these ten aspects of your home service business and you’ll be on the right track.

1. Existing customers
2. Customer journey
3. Target market
4. Differentiators
5. Pricing
6. Profitability
7. Marketing
8. Reputation
9. Communication
10. Operational health