This firm studies one gap in this trade.
A technician finds a replacement opportunity. Somebody, eventually, sells it. Almost everything this firm knows lives in the distance between those two events, and almost nothing in a contractor's software is watching it. These are the notes.
There is no field for it
What happens to a twelve thousand dollar opportunity between a technician’s phone call and somebody’s calendar.
- The record
Unsold is not a reason
A hundred quotes carry one word. They describe ten different situations, and every one of them calls for something different.
- Capacity
The barber’s line
An opportunity queue does not get long. Past a certain point it grows, permanently, and no amount of effort closes it.
- Incentives
Nobody is paid to work the pile
The advisor ignoring a three week old quote is behaving correctly. That is what makes it a structural problem instead of an attitude problem.
- Measurement
Close rate cannot see it
The number owners trust most is measured against the wrong denominator, and the better the sales team performs, the more it hides.
- The ledger
Explained and unexplained dollars
Knowing what did not sell is a status report. Knowing what it consists of is the difference between managing and guessing.
- The handoff
The objection is not the reason
What stopped the sale today and what finally killed the opportunity are different facts, learned at different times. Forcing one to stand in for the other creates fiction.
- Priority
Do not call all six hundred
Pull the old estimates is not a plan. A ranked queue of twenty eight beats a phone list of six hundred, and the ranking is the work.
- Definitions
A vocabulary for the part nobody names
Terms this firm uses precisely, because the loss it studies lives in the space between words this trade already has.
Three places. Conversations with owners, service managers and dispatchers at Arizona HVAC companies, which is most of it. Published work by people who train this trade for a living, named wherever this firm leans on them. And the estimate records companies open up for a count. Kopikat Research does not publish a client's data and does not publish a company's numbers. Where a figure appears anywhere on this site it is a sample built to show the shape of a finding, and it says so. When something here turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected on the page rather than quietly deleted. This is a working library, not a brochure.
The count is where the reading stops and your own numbers start.
These are research patterns, not conclusions about your company. Your records and your team determine what applies.
Or reach Cesar Carbajal directly at cesar@kopikat.io.