No games and no discovery call. The price is below, then the reason I think slow season is the right time to start rather than the wrong one.
Tapping either one does not charge you. It tells me which one you want and I ring you to set it up.
You asked about a percentage. I do not do that, and here is the honest reason.
A percentage sounds fair until it works. Then you are writing me your biggest cheque in the month you were busiest, and the two of us are arguing about whether the Hendersons found you through Google or through their neighbour. I do not want that argument and neither do you.
A flat fee you can cancel any time puts the risk where it belongs. If it is not working you stop paying me, and you do not need my permission.
You said money is tight with the slow season starting. That is the argument for starting now, not for waiting.
None of this works instantly. A new Google Business Profile has to be created and verified, and then it takes weeks before Google trusts it enough to show it to people. That is just how it goes and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
So the timing works out one of two ways.
Start now, in the quiet, and the profile is created, verified and gathering reviews while you have the time to send me photos and answer the phone. By the time it turns cold and everybody in Airdrie is searching at once, you are in the list.
Or start in November when the money is easier. You pay through your busiest months and the thing finally kicks in around March, when nobody needs a furnace.
The quiet months are the cheapest months to build something. They are just the hardest ones to spend in.
This morning I searched furnace repair Airdrie from an Airdrie phone.
Google gave back three companies in the map at the top and twenty underneath. Twenty three in total.
That is the part worth understanding properly, because it is not a ranking problem. It is more basic than that.
There are 48 heating and plumbing businesses listed with Google within twelve kilometres of Airdrie. Nine of those forty eight have no reviews at all and six do not even show an address, so Google is plainly not filtering out the new or the small. You are not ranked low. You are not in the index at all. I searched your business name, your trading name and your phone number, and Google returns nothing for any of them.
And the domain: you own tempbroshvac.ca. Type it in today and you get a CanSpace page telling you the domain is registered and asking if you would like hosting. The https version does not load at all. You already paid for the name. It is just pointing at nothing.
You are in the map when somebody in Airdrie searches for a furnace at seven in the morning. You have a handful of reviews from jobs you were doing anyway. Your own domain works, and the card you hand out points at something real.
A few of those customers tell a neighbour, because people talk when someone turns up when he said he would. Those referrals cost you nothing and they arrive on their own.
None of that is a big month. It is the absence of a dead week, which is the thing that actually keeps a two man shop up at night.
And on the money, plainly: $297 a month is less than one call-out. If it brings you one extra job a month you are well ahead of it. If it brings you none, you cancel, and you keep the Google profile and the domain either way.