HVACBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Retail Stores and Small Offices: Building a Light Commercial HVAC Route

Retail stores and small offices are the bread and butter of light commercial HVAC. They are everywhere: strip centers, downtown storefronts, medical buildings, small office parks. They run equipment your techs already know, and they want someone reliable to keep it running. Built into a route, they give your shop steady work that does not depend on the weather.

The Everyday Commercial Customer

Churches, covered in HVAC Service for Churches: Working Around Services and Building Committees, are a special case. Retail stores and small offices are the opposite: ordinary, plentiful and similar to each other. That sameness is what makes them good for a route.

A strip center might have six tenants, each with a rooftop unit. A medical office building might have a dozen suites on split systems. A downtown block might have a row of shops with their own equipment. Once you know one, you know how to handle the next.

Finding the Accounts

The first retail and office accounts often come from homeowners. The dentist whose house you service, the shop owner who called about their own furnace. Ask. Many small business owners never thought to put their building's HVAC on a schedule.

Strip center owners and commercial property managers are the other way in. One owner may control the HVAC for a whole center, or may pass responsibility to each tenant. Find out which before you pitch. If the owner handles it, set them up as one client with each suite as an address. If each tenant handles it, each tenant is its own client.

Set Up Each Suite

In HVACBossPro, each suite or storefront gets its own address with its own equipment record: system type (often a Package Unit or split system), brand, model, serial, year installed, tonnage, filter size and location. Add access notes for anything the tech needs: “Check in at front desk,” “Roof ladder at back of building,” “Before 9am only.”

Tag every retail and office account Commercial so you can pull them up together.

Pick the Visit Interval

Most small offices and retail stores do well on one of two schedules:

• Quarterly (90 days) for busy stores, buildings with a lot of foot traffic, or systems that run long hours.
• Spring and fall (180 days) for quieter offices that run normal business hours.

Set the interval on each address, and the visits come due on the Waiting List on their own. Pins are colored not due yet, due now, and overdue past a 7-day grace, so you can see at a glance which parts of town have commercial stops waiting. Quarterly visits are covered in Quarterly PM Visits for Commercial HVAC Customers.

Group Stops by Area

The route only pays if the stops are close together. Use the Waiting List map to see which commercial addresses are due in each area. A strip center with five due units is a full morning on one van. Add the two offices across the street and you have a tight route with almost no drive time.

On the dispatch board, assign the group to a van and a day, auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, then adjust by hand for any stop that needs an early slot. Retail stops usually go first, before the doors open.

Early Starts Without Burnout

Retail and office work often means early mornings. Group the early stops on the same days so one tech starts early instead of several. Rotate who takes those days. The tech app's time clock records hours as they happen, so early starts are on the record.

Keep the Contact in the Loop

Store managers and office managers want to know when you are coming and when you are done. Automatic alerts can go out the night before, when the tech is next and when the tech arrives. Two-way texting from the office handles the rest: “Suite 4 is done, filters changed, belt replaced.” Before and after photos on each job back it up.

Billing a Route of Businesses

Single-location businesses can be billed per visit, with the invoice created when the tech completes the job and the card on file charged right then. Strip center owners or companies with several locations can be set to Monthly, so they get one statement each month covering every suite, with each line labeled with its address. Past-due follow-up handles the slow payers.

For how a retail and office route fits with the rest of commercial work, see the HVACBossPro commercial HVAC software page.