VIEW POINT: Which Services Do You Add On?

In January, I arrived home from work to find that my house was freezing cold (well, it was about 55 or 60 degrees, which felt like it was freezing). After trying to turn on the furnace to no avail, I called a heating and cooling company and they agreed to come to my house the next day at lunch.

When I woke up after spending the night under my electric blanket, the house was down to about 50 degrees. (Cleveland winters are very cold.) At that point, I would have paid almost any amount of money to have had the furnace back on. Fortunately, the heating and cooling service technician arrived a few hours later.

As he started to take apart the furnace, he told me that he thought I had a dead bird in the duct work. "The birds hang out by the chimneys to keep warm in the winter and sometimes the fumes knock them out and they fall down the chimney into the ducts," he said. And sure enough, right inside, next to the motor, was a dead bird.

A few minutes (and $80) later, my house was warming up and the technician was on his way out the door. I asked him how to prevent another dead bird from causing trouble again and he said that I needed a chimney cap. I asked him if he would install it for me and he said no, that I would need to call a chimney sweep or a roofer. If he had offered to install it, he would have had an easy sale. Why? Because he responded quickly to my call and showed up on time. In this day and age, I consider that to be the greatest asset a service company can offer. And even if he had been a little more expensive, it wouldn’t have mattered because he already had proven that he was honest and would get the job done in a timely fashion.

We’ve all heard about add-on services that PCOs can take advantage of: caring for lawns, cleaning decks, putting up holiday lights, making small home improvements. But what add-on services have really worked for you? E-mail me at jdorsch@pctonline.com or call me at 800/456-0707 and let me know. We’d like to do a story in the coming months on what has worked (and what hasn’t) for PCOs. Wouldn’t it be great to hear from real pest management professionals what has proven to be a true money-maker for them? Give me a call and let me know what you think and stay tuned for a future story about add-on services in PCT.

In the meantime, be thankful spring is almost here — and watch out for those birds hanging out on the top of your chimney.

The author is editor of PCT magazine. She can be reached at jdorsch@pctonline.com.