Operations Jul 14, 2026 7 min read
Quoting forty replacements a week in July
Shops on Quotient sent 41,300 replacement proposals last July. The ones that came out of it calm had a few habits in common, and most of them started in May.
Cal Brennecke
Co-founder and CEO
Every shop in Oklahoma knows the week. Sometime in late June the overnight lows stop dropping below 78, and every twenty-year-old condenser in the metro gives up at once. The phones do not stop. Neither do the techs.
Last July the shops on Quotient sent 41,300 replacement proposals, about a third more than in any other month. Talking to the shops that handled it well, a few habits came up again and again.
Write the three options before the season, not during it
The worst time to build a good, better and best for a 4-ton heat pump is at 6:15 PM in someone’s sweltering kitchen. The shops that had a calm July set up their most common systems in May: 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4 and 5 ton, split and packaged, with all three tiers priced and checked against the margin floor.
On the day, the tech picks the closest match and adjusts. The proposal takes about eleven minutes from the end of the walkthrough to the homeowner holding it, most of which is the homeowner reading.
Promise an install date you can keep
In a heat wave, the install date sells the job as much as the price does. A homeowner with a dead system and a family at home will pick the shop that can be there Thursday over the one that is $400 cheaper and booked until the 28th.
That only works if the tech can see the real calendar. At the shops that did this well, the last screen of every proposal showed the install windows actually open on the board that afternoon, and the homeowner picked one before signing.
We stopped saying “we’ll call you to schedule.” We say “pick a day.” It closes more jobs than anything I have ever said at a table.
Let the follow-ups run themselves
When every tech is running six calls a day, follow-ups are the first thing to go. The 48-hour text does not care how busy anyone is. Last July it went out 6,840 times across all shops on Quotient and preceded 1,210 signatures.
Watch the margin, not just the volume
Volume hides problems. A rush month is when parts run short, substitutions creep in, and a quick discount to beat another shop’s date becomes a habit. The owners who came out of July happiest checked the board every evening for one thing: any job that went out near the floor, and why.
- A substitution that changed the cost should change the price.
- A discount should be a decision the office made, not one a tired tech made.
- A Best option with a back-ordered unit should come off the proposal, not get sold and then swapped.
Feed the crews, literally
This one is not software. Every owner who had a good July mentioned some version of it: cold water and lunch in the trucks, techs sent home at a fixed hour no matter what was left on the board, and one day off a week that nobody touched. A tech running on four hours of sleep writes worse proposals, misses notes, and loses closes he would win in May. The schedule is part of the sales process.
Plan for August
The rush ends as suddenly as it starts. The shops that use the quiet weeks well go back through every open proposal from July, call the ones that went cold, and rebuild their price book with what the season taught them. Then they do it again in October, for furnaces.
