The three weeks in September that decide your whole fall
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Leaf season revenue is mostly set before the first leaf falls. Here is what to run in the next three weeks, in order, and what to leave alone until November.
It is the first week of September. In most of the country the trees have not dropped anything yet and the phone is quiet. In about five weeks it will not be quiet, and by then almost every decision that determines what you make this season will already have been made.
Fall revenue in this trade is set in September, not October. Here is the order to do it in.
Week one: sell to the list you already own
The cheapest jobs you will book all year are the customers you cleaned for last fall. They need it again, they already trust you, and nobody has to pay Google anything for them.
Text every past cleaning customer this week. Not an email newsletter. A text:
"Hi Dana, Marcus at Ridgeline Gutter. We cleaned your gutters last October. We are setting the fall schedule now and the last two weeks of the month usually fill first. Want me to hold a week for you?"
A list of 600 past customers typically returns 90 to 180 bookings from a single text. That is three or four weeks of crew time booked in an afternoon, at zero acquisition cost. If your list is a mess or lives in three places, spend the week fixing it. That is not administrative work, it is the highest paid work you will do this month.
While you are in there, pull the customers with heavy oak or pine cover and offer them two visits, one in mid-October and one after Thanksgiving. About a third will take it.
Week two: get the profile and the phone right
Traffic is about to triple and everything below is worth more once it does.
Open your Google Business Profile and fix, in this order: real hours including Saturday if you work it, twelve new photos from last season, the fall booking post, and the services list with cleaning, repair, seamless installation and guards written out separately. Only 27.6% of gutter companies list Saturday hours at all, and October Saturdays are when homeowners look.
Then turn on missed-call text-back if it is not already running. During peak weeks a two-crew company misses somewhere between a quarter and 45% of inbound calls, and the automatic text recovers a meaningful share of them. The calculator will tell you roughly what those calls are worth with your own ticket size. Setup takes an afternoon.
Last, decide now who answers the phone in October. Crew leads answering between jobs works in March and fails completely in leaf season. A part-time office person for twenty hours a week during the season pays for itself if they save three cleanings.
Week three: turn on paid, with the budget split correctly
Now spend money, and split it by buyer rather than lumping it together.
Cleaning searches will eat any shared budget by lunchtime and your seamless replacement traffic will never see an impression. Run separate campaigns with separate budgets for cleaning, for repair and replacement, and a narrow defensive one for the guard products you install. Expect $25 to $70 per cleaning lead and $70 to $180 per replacement lead in most metros. The Google Ads guide has the negative keyword list, which matters more in September than any bid setting, because gutter searches drift into roofing and pressure washing constantly.
On Meta, run one thing: the before-and-after cleaning video with a dated offer. "Booked before October 1, $30 off. The last week of October usually fills by mid-month." Twenty dollars a day. Urgency works in September because the urgency is real.
What to leave alone until November
Do not rebuild the website in September. Do not start a blog. Do not switch CRMs. Do not run a guard campaign yet, because the guard customer buys after they have paid for a cleaning, not before.
Save all of that for January, when the crews are idle and you have time to do it properly. The slow season plan lays out what belongs in each month.
Hold capacity for the storms
The single most profitable decision in October is to keep two slots per crew per day unbooked. A same-day call after a Thursday storm is worth more than a routine cleaning scheduled three weeks out, and the homeowner who found out you can actually come today is the one who buys guards from you in December.
Companies who book out four weeks solid in early October feel successful and finish the season having turned away the best work of the year.
The review window
The eight weeks in front of you determine your review count for the entire next year. With the trade median sitting at 6 reviews and 59.6% of gutter companies holding fewer than ten, a disciplined fall moves you past most of the field in one season.
The mechanic that works is the photo text: shoot the packed trough before, the clean one after, send both with the review link before the truck leaves the street. It solves the problem that nobody was home to watch you work. Full method in the reviews guide.
Three weeks. List, profile and phone, then paid. In that order, because each one makes the next one worth more.
If you would rather have somebody else run any part of it while you are on a ladder, it is available as a free 14-day trial, which happens to be exactly the length of the window that is left. Text or call (385) 832-6175.