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Maintenance Plans: How to Set One Up for a Service Business
A maintenance plan is a standing agreement to come back on a schedule, and setting one up takes six decisions written on a single page.
To create a maintenance plan, decide which recurring service customers need, how often they need it and what the plan includes, then price it from your full-price visits, bill it monthly or yearly with clear renewal and cancellation terms and book the next visit before each one ends. An owner can draft the whole plan on one page using the template below.
Six decisions fit on a one-page plan
| Decision | What to write down | Example (HVAC, illustrative) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The recurring job | The service customers need on a schedule | Heating and cooling checkups |
| 2. The schedule | How many visits a year, and when | Two visits: cooling in spring, heating in fall, as ENERGY STAR advises |
| 3. What's included | The checklist for each visit, written out | Thermostat, electrical connections, coils, condensate drain, filter |
| 4. Member perks | Benefits that cost you little | Priority booking in peak weeks; no trip fee on repair calls |
| 5. The price | Full-price visits ÷ 12 for a monthly price | 2 × $150 = $300 a year, or $25 a month |
| 6. Billing and terms | Card on file, renewal date, how to cancel | Annual renewal reminder 30 days ahead; cancel by phone, email or online |
The same page works for other trades. A cleaning company's plan might be a deep clean every quarter, a salon's a set number of blowouts a month, a lawn company's a season of visits on a fixed rotation and an auto shop's oil changes at the interval in the vehicle maker's schedule.
Five habits that keep a plan working
- Price at full value. Build the price from full-price visits and add perks that cost you little, such as priority booking, so members don't learn to see the plan as a discount.
- Book the next visit at the current one. Put the next date on the calendar before the technician or provider leaves, and send a reminder a week ahead.
- Write the checklist down. A printed or emailed checklist after each visit shows the member what the plan bought.
- Track renewals monthly. Keep a simple list of members, renewal dates and visits completed, and call anyone whose visits were missed before the renewal comes up.
- Make cancelling easy. Federal law on recurring charges for goods and services sold online requires clear disclosure of all material terms before billing, the customer's express informed consent and a simple way to stop the charges, and several states have their own automatic-renewal laws.
General information, not legal/tax/financial advice; talk to a licensed professional about your situation.
Why it works
A maintenance plan turns a customer who calls when something breaks into one who is already on the calendar, and research on retention suggests that is where much of a business's profit comes from. A summary of retention research in Harvard Business Review reports that winning a new customer costs five to 25 times as much as keeping an existing one, and it cites research from Bain & Company finding that a 5% increase in customer retention raised profits by 25% to 95%.
Plans also give the slow season a schedule. ENERGY STAR tells homeowners to book cooling checkups in spring and heating checkups in fall because contractors get busy once summer and winter arrive, so an HVAC plan places its members' visits in the shoulder months, when the calendar has room.
Sources
- Gallo, A. The Value of Keeping the Right Customers. Harvard Business Review, 2014.
- ENERGY STAR. Maintenance Checklist.
- Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, 15 U.S.C. § 8403. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School.
Related reading: How Service Businesses Turn One-Time Visits Into Monthly Memberships · What HVAC and Landscaping Companies Sell in Their Off Season · How to Stay Booked in the Slow Season Without Discounting
Email hello@osnovaops.com about setting up a maintenance plan
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