Buying a marketing service is a once-every-few-years decision for most HVAC owners, which means few of them have a reliable way to judge it. These three guides fill that gap. Each one covers a specific moment: before you hire, as you hand over, and through the first year. They are practical, written for owners rather than marketers, and they work whether or not you ever hire us.
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How to evaluate an HVAC marketing trial, ours or anyone's
A free trial is only useful if it tells you something specific about your company that you didn't know. This guide gives you a scorecard, the questions to ask during the week, and the red flags that should end the conversation.
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The 12-month calendar: what a done-for-you HVAC marketing service should deliver
A done-for-you HVAC marketing service should follow two clocks at once: the service clock (trial, onboarding, launch, monthly cycle) and the weather clock (heating season, shoulder seasons, cooling season). This guide lays out both, month by month.
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The onboarding checklist: what to gather before anyone runs your marketing
Before any agency, including ours, starts work, you should know who controls each of your marketing accounts and have a short set of business details ready. This checklist covers both, with what to look for in each.
The 12-month service calendar
Read the 12-month calendar guide.
This guide sets out what a done-for-you HVAC marketing service should deliver in each of its first twelve months, from the trial and onboarding through launch, the first clean month of data, the build phase and the year-end review. It then lays a Canadian weather calendar over the top, so you can see when heating and cooling content should be written and when ad budgets should move.
What you will learn:
- the deliverable to look for at each stage, so you can tell if a provider is on schedule
- why heating content belongs in July rather than November
- how your start month changes the plan, with three worked cases
- how the calendar shifts on the Prairies, the BC coast, in Quebec and in the North
- when to publish content about rebate programs, and when to wait
How to evaluate a marketing trial
Read the trial evaluation guide.
A free trial is a sample of how an agency thinks. This guide gives you a ten-line scorecard to fill in at the end of any trial, the questions worth asking during the week, and the red flags that should slow you down. It closes with a worked comparison of two audits for the same company, showing why a short specific one beats a long generic one.
What you will learn:
- the four things every useful trial should leave you with
- how to score an audit from 0 to 20
- what to ask about accounts, reporting and leaving
- how to run two trials at once without confusing your Business Profile
- why anti-spam consent should come up if anyone mentions messaging your customer list
The onboarding checklist
Read the onboarding checklist.
Most first-month problems come from not knowing who controls which account. This checklist walks through every account an HVAC company is likely to have (domain, hosting, Google Business Profile, Ads, Analytics, Search Console, Meta, call tracking and CRM) and explains what "good" ownership looks like for each. It also lists the business details any agency will need from you, and how to recover accounts held by a former provider.
What you will learn:
- which single account matters most, and why
- the difference between owner and manager access
- ten business details to prepare before onboarding
- what Canadian privacy and anti-spam rules mean for sharing customer lists
- a one-hour hand-off meeting agenda
How these guides fit together
The guides follow the order of the service itself. Start with the trial guide if you are comparing providers. Move to the checklist once you have chosen one, ideally during the trial week, because account recovery is slow. Keep the calendar guide for the months after launch, and compare each update against it.
They also match the parts of our own service. The free trial is the subject of the first guide, onboarding of the second, and the monthly cycle of local SEO, ads and reporting of the third.
A note on sources and accuracy
Where a guide mentions a government program, a regulator or a law, it links the official source and states the date it was checked. Programs open and close often, so treat any program detail as accurate as of October 2026 and confirm it with the administrator before acting on it. We are a marketing and business consulting service, not an HVAC contractor and not a law firm, so nothing in these guides is legal, technical or compliance advice.
If a guide raises a question about your own company, the contact page explains how to reach a senior strategist, and the FAQ answers the most common ones.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to read the guides before contacting you?
No. They are there for owners who like to prepare, or who want a second opinion on an agency they already use. You can call, text or email at any point.
Are the guides specific to your service?
They describe how we work, but every checklist and scorecard is written so you can use it with any provider. That is deliberate: a good process should be easy to check.
How often are the guides updated?
When something material changes, such as a federal or provincial program opening or closing. Each guide shows the date it was last updated and lists its official sources.