What to run in the shop before the first cold morning
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September is quiet and October is not. The four campaigns to have live before the first cold snap fills your bays with no-starts and heater complaints.
- 1. Free battery and charging system test, starting the first week of October
- 2. The winter prep package, sold as one item
- 3. The declined-work sweep, done in September while it is quiet
- 4. Fleet calls, now, while budgets are still open
- Two profile details to fix this month
- What not to do
- The four-week checklist
Early September is one of the two soft stretches in the repair calendar. Summer road trips are over, school costs just landed, and the phone slows down for three or four weeks. Then one morning in October the temperature drops into the thirties overnight, a few hundred marginal batteries in your town die at once, and the shops that prepared take the calls.
You have about four weeks. Here is what to have running before then.
1. Free battery and charging system test, starting the first week of October
Batteries do not fail in the cold. They fail in the heat of July and then reveal it on the first cold morning, because a weak battery loses a large share of its cranking power once the temperature drops. Every summer in your market just cooked a batch of them.
Put a free battery and charging system test on the Google profile as a service, on the website, and behind a small Meta ad at $10 a day inside a ten mile radius. Test everything that comes in for anything else at the same time and note the result on the ticket.
Two effects. You sell batteries in October instead of jump-starting people in November. And you generate a list of vehicles with marginal batteries that you can text when the first cold night is forecast.
2. The winter prep package, sold as one item
Do not list six separate services. List one:
Winter Ready Check, $89. Battery and charging test, coolant strength and condition, heater and defroster operation, wiper blades and washer fluid, tire tread and pressure, brakes and belts. Written report with photos.
One decision instead of six. Give it a fixed price and a fixed time, and put it on its own page on the website so it can carry ads, as covered in the website guide.
In snow states, start advertising it mid-October. In warm states, rename it a pre-holiday travel inspection and run it the first week of November.
3. The declined-work sweep, done in September while it is quiet
This is the best use of a slow week and almost nobody does it. Pull every declined line from the last six months out of your shop management system. Filter to anything related to cold weather: batteries, coolant, heater cores, wipers, tires, belts and hoses.
Then text each customer individually, referencing their vehicle and attaching the photo from the original inspection:
"Hi Marcus, Dave at Miller Automotive. When your Silverado was in for brakes in June, your battery tested weak and your coolant was borderline. Both are the kind of thing that shows up on the first cold morning. Want me to hold a spot before it gets cold?"
That is not a sales pitch. It is a reminder of something they already saw with their own eyes and agreed was a problem. Recovery rates on a list like this typically land between one in six and one in four, at full ticket, with no acquisition cost at all. The full sequence is in the follow-up guide.
4. Fleet calls, now, while budgets are still open
Local businesses finalize next year's spending in the fourth quarter. A landscaper with eight trucks, a plumbing company with six vans, a church with two buses, a delivery outfit running twelve vehicles. Every one of them is heading into winter with vehicles that have to start every morning.
Twenty calls a day for one week in September is enough to land one or two accounts. The pitch is short: scheduled service that keeps their trucks working, priority scheduling when something breaks, monthly billing on account. Do not lead with a discount. Fleet buyers care about uptime, and one steady account outlasts any consumer campaign.
Two profile details to fix this month
Check your hours. If you are running any extra Saturday through the winter, get it on the Google profile now, because only 42.4% of shops in our dataset of 90,000 listings show Saturday hours at all. That is a wide-open lane on the one day the dealer service lane is closed and the customer is finally free.
Set holiday hours a week ahead of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Google prompts you and the prompt gets ignored every year, and a profile showing "hours might differ" gets fewer clicks.
What not to do
Do not cut prices in September. Volume is soft because fewer people are buying, not because your prices are wrong, and a discount only lowers the ticket on work you were going to get anyway.
Do not add cold ad spend in a soft month either. Acquisition costs the same and the buyers are not there. Spend the quiet weeks on the database, the declined list and the fleet phone, then put the ad money behind the winter package when the temperature actually turns.
The four-week checklist
- Week 1: Pull the declined list and start texting. Fix hours on the Google profile.
- Week 2: Build the Winter Ready Check page and price it. Twenty fleet calls a day.
- Week 3: Launch the free battery test on the profile, the site and a small Meta budget.
- Week 4: Turn on the winter package ads. Brief the writers on the one-line ask so the reviews come in with the volume.
The shops that do this in September are booked in November. The shops that wait are jump-starting cars in the parking lot for free.
Seasonal campaign builds are part of the ads services in the free 14-day trial, and the benchmark report shows where your listing stands before the season starts. Text or call (385) 832-6175.