You fixed their water heater in March. Charged $740. Did good work. Then nothing — until the thing fails again in 2031 and they call whoever shows up first in the search results.
That customer was worth $740 to you. The same customer on a $29/month agreement is worth $348 a year in plan fees plus the repair work you now get first shot at, every year, without paying for the lead again. Over five years that’s the difference between one $740 job and roughly $4,000–$6,000 of revenue from the same house.
This is the single most undervalued growth lever for a small shop. Here’s how to build one from scratch.
What a maintenance agreement actually is
Strip away the marketing language. A service plan is three things the customer buys:
- Scheduled visits — one or two a year where you inspect, clean, test, and document.
- Priority — they go to the front of the line when something breaks.
- A discount and no trip charge on any repair work that comes out of it.
And it’s three things you buy:
- Predictable revenue that shows up whether or not the phone rings.
- A reason to be in their house every six months — which is where repair work gets found.
- Work you can schedule into your slow weeks, because nobody cares what date their annual inspection happens.
That third one is worth more than most contractors realize. A maintenance visit is the only work in your business whose timing you fully control.
What goes in the plan, by trade
Keep the deliverable tight and repeatable. If the visit takes a different amount of time at every house, you can’t price it.
| Trade | 1–2 hour visit includes | Natural visit frequency |
|---|---|---|
| HVAC | Filter change, coil clean, refrigerant check, condensate flush, electrical connections | 2× (spring/fall) |
| Plumbing | Water heater flush, anode check, shutoff valve test, supply line inspection, leak scan | 1× |
| Electrical | Panel torque and thermal check, GFCI/AFCI test, smoke/CO test, surge device check | 1× |
| Roofing | Flashing and boot inspection, gutter clear, sealant touch-up, photo report | 1× (fall) |
| Landscaping | Already seasonal — bundle fertilization, aeration, cleanups into one contract | 4–8× |
| Handyman / remodel | “Home checkup” — caulk, grout, door/window adjust, 1 hour of minor fixes | 1–2× |
Whatever the trade, every visit ends with a written photo report and a list of anything you found. That report is the sales document. No report, no pull-through work, and the customer forgets what they’re paying for by month four.
Pricing it: start from your labor hours, not from a competitor’s flyer
Price the plan the same way you price anything else — from your real cost per hour. If you haven’t run that number, do it first; the overhead math behind your hourly rate is the input to everything below.
Say your fully-loaded labor cost is $41/hr and your overhead is $23/hr, so $64/hr break-even. Here’s what it costs you to deliver a two-visit plan:
| Cost to deliver, per member per year | Hours | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Visit 1: on-site | 1.5 | $96 |
| Visit 2: on-site | 1.5 | $96 |
| Drive time, both visits | 0.8 | $51 |
| Scheduling, reminders, report writing | 0.5 | $32 |
| Materials (filters, sealant, consumables) | — | $30 |
| Card processing (~3% of $348) | — | $10 |
| Total cost | 4.3 hrs | $315 |
At $29/month you collect $348. Gross margin on the plan itself: $33, or 9%.
That number surprises people. Read it carefully, because it’s the thing most “sell memberships!” advice hides: the plan fee alone is close to break-even, and that’s fine. You are not selling maintenance for the maintenance margin. You are buying a standing appointment in a house, twice a year, and the customer is paying you to keep it.
Where the money actually is
Out of 100 members, assume a third of them buy additional work each year off the back of an inspection — a failing capacitor, a corroded shutoff, a panel that needs attention. Say that work averages $850 per job at a 50% gross margin.
| Line | Per 100 members |
|---|---|
| Plan fees, 100 × $348 | $34,800 |
| Cost to deliver, 100 × $315 | ($31,500) |
| Plan gross profit | $3,300 |
| Pull-through repair work, 33 jobs × $850 | $28,050 |
| Gross margin on that work at 50% | $14,025 |
| Total gross profit from 100 members | $17,325 |
Those pull-through numbers are illustrative — your attach rate depends on your trade, your housing stock, and frankly on how good your written reports are. Track it from job one. But the shape is right: the agreement is the delivery mechanism, the repair work is the product.
Build three tiers, not one
A single price gives the customer a yes/no decision. Three options turns it into a which-one decision, the same way good-better-best quoting raises your average ticket.
| Basic | Standard | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $19/mo | $29/mo | $49/mo |
| Visits per year | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Repair discount | 10% | 15% | 20% |
| Trip charge | Waived | Waived | Waived |
| Response time | Next available | Within 48 hrs | Same or next day |
| Minor repairs included | — | — | Up to 1 hr per year |
| Transferable if they sell the house | No | Yes | Yes |
Price the middle tier where you want most people to land. The $19 option exists to make $29 look reasonable; the $49 exists to catch the customers who would have paid more and never told you.
Make the plans transferable to the new homeowner. It costs you nothing and it’s the clause that keeps members when houses turn over.
Bill monthly, on a card, not annually
| Annual, $348 up front | Monthly, $29 on autopay | |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-up resistance | High — it’s a $348 decision | Low — it’s a dinner decision |
| Cash timing | Lumpy, all in one month | Smooth, every month |
| Renewal | Active re-sell every year | Continues until cancelled |
| Cancellation rate | Spikes at renewal | Slow drip |
Monthly wins on almost every axis. Offer annual at a 10% discount for the customers who ask, and take it — but default to monthly with a card on file.
One real caution: auto-renewing subscriptions are regulated, and the rules vary by state. Several states have specific requirements around how you disclose automatic renewal, how you confirm it in writing, and how easy you have to make cancellation. Check your state’s consumer protection or automatic renewal statute before you write the agreement, and have a local attorney read the one-page contract. This is cheap insurance.
What 100 agreements do to your slow season
Here’s the part that changes how your year feels. Take a shop doing $220,000 a year with a brutal January and February.
| Month | Before: revenue | Plan fees | After: revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | $7,000 | $2,900 | $9,900 |
| February | $8,500 | $2,900 | $11,400 |
| March | $16,000 | $2,900 | $18,900 |
| June | $26,000 | $2,900 | $28,900 |
The $2,900 isn’t the whole story. The bigger effect is that you now have 200 maintenance visits a year that you get to schedule, and you put them in January and February. That’s roughly 860 hours of work you can shove into the months where you used to sit still — plus the repair work those visits uncover, which lands in your worst weeks instead of your best.
Run those plan fees through a 13-week cash flow sheet and watch what a guaranteed floor does to the weeks where you were previously deciding between a truck payment and payroll.
Capacity warning: 200 visits a year at roughly 4.3 hours each, including travel and admin, is about 860 hours — close to three-quarters of a solo contractor’s billable year. One hundred agreements is a two-person-shop number, not a one-man-band number. Build toward it. Cap enrollment if you have to.
What it does to the value of the business
If you ever sell, here’s the uncomfortable truth about a one-to-five person contracting shop: a buyer isn’t paying much for your backlog, your truck, or your reputation, because most of that walks out the door with you.
A book of transferable maintenance agreements is different. It’s documented, recurring, contractually assignable revenue that keeps producing after you hand over the keys. It’s the one asset in a small trades business that behaves like an asset.
I’m not going to quote you a multiple — valuation depends on your market, your trade, your books, and who’s buying, and anyone who gives you a number without seeing your P&L is guessing. Talk to a business broker who sells trades companies in your area. But directionally: a shop with 100 documented, transferable agreements and clean renewal data sells on different terms than one with zero. Keep the records from day one — enrollment dates, renewal rates, cancellation reasons. That data is part of what you’re selling.
How to sell them (without feeling like a salesman)
Don’t run a campaign. Attach the offer to work you’re already doing.
- Ask at the end of every job, standing next to the thing you just fixed. “I’m here anyway twice a year for plan members — it’s $29 a month, it covers the inspections, and you get 15% off anything I do. Want me to set it up?”
- Put it on every invoice as a line item the customer can check.
- Put it in the estimate as a Premium-tier inclusion: first year of the plan included with this job.
- Call your last two years of customers. You already have the list. That’s the cheapest 50 agreements you’ll ever get.
Expect something like a 1-in-5 attach rate on completed jobs once your pitch is tight. At 80 jobs a year, that’s 16 agreements annually from zero extra marketing — and it compounds, because plan members don’t churn out the way one-off customers do.
Your next step
Write the one-page agreement this week. Three tiers, exactly what’s included in a visit, length of term, how they cancel, and the transfer clause. Price the middle tier off your own cost-per-hour math, not off what the big HVAC franchise down the road charges.
Then offer it to the next customer whose job you finish. Not a launch, not a mailer — one conversation, on one porch, this week.