Seasonality and a slow-season marketing plan for window and glass repair
When glass repair calls come, when they stop, and a month-by-month plan for keeping a window repair shop busy through the quiet stretch after the holidays.
Glass repair has a rhythm most owners feel but few plan around. Spring storms and hail bring broken panes. Summer brings baseballs, lawnmower rocks and slammed sliders. The first cold mornings of fall make every failed insulated unit visible, and the phone rings for foggy glass through November. Then the holidays come, people stop spending on the house, and January and February are quiet for residential work in most of the country.
The shop that treats the slow stretch as a surprise every year lays off a technician in January and scrambles to hire in April. The shop that plans for it fills January with work booked in November. This is the plan.
The year, month by month
January and February. Residential repair is slowest. Break-ins are up after the holidays, so board-up and the replacement glass that follows are steady if you answer nights. Commercial work continues; property managers have new-year budgets. Interior work, mirrors and shower glass, is not weather dependent.
March and April. Windows open for the first time, and every sash that will not stay up and every torn screen becomes a call. Spring storms start in the south and the plains. Hail season begins.
May through August. Peak for broken glass. Storms, kids, construction. Patio door glass and screens. Homeowners are outside looking at their windows. Commercial storefront work is steady.
September through November. Foggy-unit season. Condensation between panes shows on cold mornings and homeowners want it fixed before winter. This is the best stretch of the year for ticket size, because a house with one foggy unit usually has three.
December. Spending shifts to gifts and travel. Calls drop in the second week. Break-ins and board-ups rise.
Your region shifts this. Florida and Texas have a hurricane and storm window that dominates. The upper Midwest has a longer, harder winter dip. Look at your own invoices by month for the last two years before you plan anything.
Book January in November
The single most useful move is to sell the slow season while the phones are busy. In October and November, when foggy-unit calls are coming in, offer a scheduled install in January at the fall price, with the measure done now. Many customers prefer it; the glass is ordered, the deposit is paid, and the install happens after the holidays when the house is quiet.
Do the same with every multi-unit quote. "We can do the three fogged units on the back of the house in January and hold today's price." A quote with a January slot on it is a January job on the calendar before December starts.
Property managers budget in the fall for the following year. A November email with per-unit foggy glass pricing and a free survey offer lands when they are deciding what to spend. More on that in the email section below.
What to run in each quiet month
December. Switch ad budget from foggy units to board-up and break-in terms if you answer nights; only 5.7% of shops claim 24-hour service and even fewer answer. Post on the Google profile about holiday board-up response. Send a short text to past customers: "If anything happens to a window over the holidays, we answer. Save this number."
January. Run the Meta retargeting campaign to everyone who got a quote in the fall and did not book. Creative is the before-and-after; copy is "fall quote still good through February". Lower cost per booked job than any cold campaign. Keep Google Ads running on the emergency campaign only, at a reduced daily budget.
February. Commercial month. Call or email every property manager, school district facilities office and retail center manager within your radius with a one-page offer: free foggy-glass survey of the property, written per-unit pricing, work scheduled before spring. Send a certificate of insurance with it. Ten of those a day for the month fills March.
Early March. Switch Meta to the sash, balance and screen offer before windows open. "Window will not stay up? Usually $120 to $220, fixed in one visit." Post the spring storm board-up message on the profile.
Use the quiet for the work that pays all year
The slow months are when the shop should do the marketing work there is never time for in June:
- Reviews. Reply to every one from the last year. Text the fall customers who never got the ask. Target the 90th percentile of 233; see the reviews guide.
- Photos. Sort the phone library, pick the forty best job photos, upload them to the profile and the website with real file names.
- The website. Add the price ranges. Build the job-type pages that are missing. Check it on a phone.
- Listings. Fix every directory where the name, address or phone differs. An afternoon of tedium that pays for a year.
- The customer list. Export every customer from the last three years into one sheet with phone and email. That list is the cheapest marketing you own and most shops have never used it.
Email and text to past customers
A glass customer rarely needs you twice, but she knows people who do, and she has other windows. Four messages a year, short, from the owner's name:
- March: "Windows opening season. Sash that will not stay up, torn screens, we fix both in one visit."
- June: "Storm season. Save this number for board-ups. We answer."
- October: "Foggy glass shows up on cold mornings. If any of yours look cloudy, send a photo and we will quote it."
- December: "Thanks for having us out this year. Holiday break-in board-ups, we answer."
Each gets a 1% to 3% response from a list of past customers, which on a list of 800 is 8 to 24 jobs for about twenty minutes of work.
Frequently asked
Should I lay off a technician in January? Not if November was planned. A shop that books January in the fall and runs the commercial push in February usually keeps the crew. If it cannot, put the slow technician on listing cleanup and photos rather than sending him home.
Is it worth advertising at all in December? The emergency campaign, yes, at a lower budget. Foggy-unit ads in the second half of December, no. Nobody is replacing glass the week before the holidays.
How much should the slow months cost in marketing? About the same as the busy ones, spent differently: less on cold search, more on retargeting, commercial outreach and the owned list. Cutting marketing to zero in January is how February stays empty.
A slow-season plan, including the commercial outreach and the past-customer messages, is something any of the services in the free 14-day trial can be built around. Text or call (385) 380-5907.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, window repair companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor