Local Visibility for Air Conditioning Engineers
Two customers, two seasons, one profile pulling both ways
The heatwave customer and the facilities manager are not the same business
- £10,200Office cassette system
- £4,840Multi-split installation
- £2,600Multi-room system
- £1,202Split system installation
- £255Service with a gas top-up
Most air conditioning businesses are two businesses sharing a phone number.
One is domestic and violently seasonal. It does not exist for nine months and then, during the first genuinely hot week, produces more enquiries in four days than the previous quarter — from people who want a unit in a bedroom by the weekend and will ring the first three names they see.
The other is commercial. It runs all year, it is bought on maintenance contracts and F-Gas competence, and the buyer is a facilities manager comparing suppliers rather than a homeowner comparing availability.
One profile has to serve both, and left alone it drifts towards whichever produced the most recent activity. Which is almost always the domestic spike — so by August the profile reads as a company that fits bedroom units, at exactly the point a commercial buyer is planning next year’s contracts.
What that looks like in practice
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Keep both service sets listed.
Installation, servicing, F-Gas leak checking, maintenance contracts, commercial fit-out, domestic split systems. A profile weighted entirely to one reads as unsuitable for the other.
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Prepare for the heatwave before it happens.
Demand arrives with two days’ notice and lasts a fortnight. Position in that window is set by the months beforehand, not by anything done during it.
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Say what your lead time is, honestly, in season.
During a hot spell the deciding factor is when you can come. Being straight about a three-week wait loses the impatient enquiry and keeps the review.
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Photograph commercial work too.
Cassettes in an office, external plant on a flat roof, a plant room. A gallery of bedroom wall units tells a facilities manager you are not for them.
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Use the quiet months for the commercial half.
Autumn and winter are when maintenance contracts get reviewed, and when your competitors have stopped marketing entirely.
The ratio
An office cassette system is £10,200 and a domestic split is £1,202. Our Booked package is £99 a month — £1,188 a year. One commercial installation covers more than eight years.
That gap is the whole argument for not letting the profile drift domestic. Eight domestic installations is a busy fortnight in July; one commercial fit-out is worth more and brings a maintenance contract behind it. The map position that produces the second is built in the months when nobody is thinking about air conditioning.
What we’d actually do
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Rebuild the profile to carry both offers
Without either drowning the other.
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Build the commercial layer in autumn
Content, photography, contract offer — while the domestic side is quiet.
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Set expectations for peak season
So the heatwave produces bookings rather than complaints.
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Separate the domestic route
With its own page, prices and realistic timescales.
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Track position for commercial and domestic searches separately
, because one number hides which half is working.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Both halves of the business are visible in the profile
- Commercial photography is present and current
- Peak-season enquiries arrive already knowing the lead time
- Maintenance contracts are pursued in the quiet months
- Position is tracked separately for each half
The mistakes we see most
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Letting the profile go domestic.
It happens by default because that is where the volume is, and it costs the work that actually pays.
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Marketing during the heatwave.
By then it is decided. The position was won in April.
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No lead time anywhere.
In a hot week the honest answer wins better customers than the vague one.
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Bedroom units only in the gallery.
It is the clearest possible signal to a commercial buyer that you are not the contractor they need.
The first ninety days
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Weeks 1–4
Profile rebuilt with both service sets properly listed, and commercial photography gathered from recent jobs.
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Weeks 5–8
The domestic route separated with realistic timescales, so peak season is managed rather than survived.
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Weeks 9–12
The commercial contract offer pushed while it is quiet, and position tracked separately for each half.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Systems are recorded against the site with their refrigerant charge and check interval, so commercial maintenance runs on dates rather than on enquiries.
Domestic and commercial jobs stay distinguishable in the reporting, which is what makes it possible to see that a busy July was not actually a good quarter.
And because contract renewals prompt in advance, the commercial half keeps moving through the months when the phone is otherwise silent.
Commercial customers do not leave reviews, and that is a problem
There is a mechanism that quietly pushes the profile domestic, and it is worth understanding because no amount of good intention overcomes it.
Homeowners leave reviews. A family who got a bedroom cool during a heatwave is delighted and will say so. Facilities managers do not — reviewing a contractor is not part of anybody’s job, it may need approval, and the person who dealt with you has no reason to.
So the reviews accumulate almost entirely on one side. Within two seasons a profile is thirty domestic reviews and nothing commercial, and it now actively argues that you are a domestic installer — to precisely the buyer worth the most.
There is no clever fix, but there are workable ones.
Ask anyway, and ask the right person. Site managers and building managers are far more likely to respond than procurement, and asking at handover when something has just gone well beats asking by email a month later.
Where a review genuinely is not possible, get something else: permission to name the building type, a photograph of the installed plant, a line you can quote. None of it is a review and all of it is proof, and it belongs on the website where you control the context.
And keep the commercial evidence visible on the profile through photographs and posts, which is the part you do control entirely. A profile with recent images of cassettes going into an office says commercial contractor regardless of what the reviews are about — which for this trade is the single most useful thing photography can do.
The same asymmetry runs through the enquiry data, and it is worth knowing before you read too much into a busy summer. Domestic enquiries arrive through the profile and are easy to count. Commercial work arrives through a phone call from somebody who was given your name, an email from a consultant, or a tender you were invited to — none of which shows up as a map interaction at all.
So the reporting will always flatter the domestic half, for the same structural reason the reviews do. Judge the commercial side on contracts won and systems under maintenance rather than on anything the profile can tell you, or you will keep concluding that the half of the business worth eight times as much per job is the half that is not working.
Questions air conditioning engineers ask
Should I have two profiles? No — one business, one profile. Two risks both and neither will be complete. The separation belongs on your website.
When should I prepare for summer? Spring at the latest. The heatwave gives you no notice and no time to improve anything.
Is domestic worth the disruption? It is real money and it is concentrated. It just should not be allowed to define what the business looks like.
How do I reach facilities managers? Not through the map alone. The profile supports it, but commercial work comes from content, contracts and being on lists.
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