Why Busy Season Is the Worst Time to Stop Marketing
The phone is ringing. The board is full. Your techs are booked out and you’re already thinking about how to get through the week. The last thing on...
3 min read
Insights from Ryan Fenn, Founder of Chiirp, on the Beyond the Truck Roll podcast.
You know the feeling. You run the ad, the form fills come in, you call what you can, leave a voicemail or two, and move on. There are units to service, techs to manage, a parts order sitting unanswered in your inbox. The lead can wait.
The lead cannot wait.
Ryan Fenn has built a business on this exact gap. As the founder of Chiirp, a follow-up automation platform for home service companies, he has processed over 100 million follow-up messages and watched the same movie play out in market after market: contractors convinced their lead sources are broken, when what's broken is everything that happens after the lead arrives.
"Everybody says Angie leads suck. Ask the guys who love them why. They'll say: we have a system to convert them."
— Ryan Fenn, founder of Chiirp
You have 60 seconds
Salesforce studied millions of form submissions and found that leads contacted within one minute converted at nearly twice the rate of those reached in minute two. Fenn is quick to add that this research is dated — and that attention spans have only shortened since. The homeowner who fills out your form at 9 p.m. because their AC isn't cooling is not sitting quietly by the phone. They have four other tabs open. One of them is your competitor.
"With TikTok and Reels, our attention spans are wasted," Fenn said. "The minute is probably even shorter now."
The math here is not subtle. The contractor who responds in 45 seconds — automatically, via a text triggered the moment the form submits — is not smarter than you. They just stopped treating follow-up as a task someone gets to eventually.
The estimates you forgot about
Here is the part most contractors don't want to hear: the leak isn't just at the top of the funnel. It's in the quotes that went out, got no response, and were quietly filed as lost. Fenn routinely sees contractors join Chiirp with six months of dead estimates — and when they send a single reactivation campaign to that list, they close jobs. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth, from customers who simply never heard back.
"Had you not dropped that one little message," Fenn said, "they never would have come back to you. They would have looked up somebody else."
The average lead, Fenn estimates, needs 10 to 18 touchpoints before it converts. No contractor is doing that manually. No contractor should have to. That is the point.
Your existing customers are leaking too
The acquisition problem gets all the attention. The retention problem is quieter and often more expensive. Most contractors reach out to existing customers once: when it's time for a maintenance visit. From the customer's perspective, this reads as showing up only when you want something from them. Membership cancellations rarely announce themselves — they just happen, somewhere between the annual tune-up call and the moment a competitor's door hanger landed on the porch.
For SmartAC, whose platform is built around keeping contractors connected between service calls, the prescription is specific. The contractors with strong retention don't just show up at tune-up time — they send filter reminders, quick notes before a heat wave, "here's what to expect" messages when refrigerant regulations change. Nothing that sells. Everything that shows up. Quarterly at minimum. Bi-monthly if you can.
Where the money actually is
The fastest-growing contractors in any market are not, in most cases, outspending their competitors on ads. They are converting a higher percentage of what they already have. And because they convert more, they can afford to outbid competitors in Google auctions — which gets them more leads, which they also convert at a higher rate. It compounds quietly, in the background, while everyone else is arguing about which lead platform is worth the money.
"The money is usually where people are avoiding," Fenn said. "Where the hard work is — that's usually where the money is."
In 2026, the hard work is a text message. The only question is whether yours sends itself.
Ryan Fenn is the founder of Chiirp, a lead conversion and follow-up automation platform built for home service businesses. Hear the full conversation on the Beyond the Truck Roll podcast.
About Beyond the Truck Roll
Beyond the Truck Roll is a podcast by SmartAC bringing together HVAC contractors and industry leaders to break down what's actually working — from operations and data to the strategies driving real revenue. New episodes dropping regularly.
Watch Episode 7 with Ryan Fenn from Chiirp.
SmartAC empowers HVAC service providers with smart monitoring, real-time analytics, and a seamless homeowner engagement experience designed to fuel long-term business growth. Book a demo or explore the platform to see what it can do for your business.
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