The Offseason Book: Chapter 5: Adjacent Services (Cure 3)

Subcontract low-margin work to focus your resources and time on higher-margin services, increasing profitability per hour and improving the quality of your labor pool.

Implement adjacent services with opposite demand curves to combat seasonality; for example, if landscaping is your core business, offer snow removal to keep revenue stable in winter.

Utilize the 'ORA' framework (Onboard, Retain, Ascend) by prioritizing ascending customers through cross-selling higher-ticket, higher-margin services to maximize customer lifetime value.

Empower your team with product knowledge, sales training, and instant pricing tools to identify and act on cross-selling opportunities, turning customer service calls into sales opportunities.

Adopt retail cross-selling techniques like bundling, post-purchase recommendations, and abandoned cart follow-ups (for declined estimates) to increase customer spend and engagement.

Focus on personalized communication (e.g., iMessages, personal calls) for cross-selling, as it builds trust and is significantly more effective than generic mass messages, even if more time-intensive.

Strategically add new services only if they fill offseason gaps or have demand curves opposite to your primary service, avoiding the trap of adding services that inflate revenue during busy periods without solving seasonality.