The residential HVAC market saw a 20% decline in 2025.
In that same 12-month window, Topline Heating & Air grew by 82%.
Our founder, Lyle Horst, started out in this industry as a refrigeration tech. During his time in the field, he realized how critical bridging the gap between raw lead generation and actual, booked changeouts was to scaling residential trade companies. So, he started his own agency, Systemized Media, to fix the exact disconnects he witnessed firsthand.
He didn’t stop at the agency level to prove these systems worked, though. He then invested in a small HVAC startup, and he and his partner took that operation from two guys with one truck… to 300 employees generating over $60M a year in just five years, servicing over 35,000 homes. That company is Topline Heating & Air.
During his keynote at InstallerSHOW last week, Lyle broke down this exact infrastructure and walked through what’s actually required to bridge these gaps… which makes the difference between getting a lead and actually putting a truck in a driveway.
Here is the unedited operational framework.
The Cyclical Rut
Many home service operators are trapped in a recurring cycle: scrambling to find labor during peak demand, then struggling to keep those same techs fed during shoulder season. When you cannot guarantee hours, you often lose your best people.
Consistent lead flow is absolutely a core step in flattening out these seasonal revenue swings. But raw lead volume won’t change your bottom line if you don’t have the infrastructure in place to actually handle it. An influx of leads without a capable system to book and close them puts owners on a fast-track to burning through ad spend.
When you control your lead volume and pair it with a rigid backend system, you control your capacity, and you retain your crews.
We actually implemented these exact systems for an HVAC client who was in financial distress when they first partnered with us. It was make or break for them. Within two years, they scaled to $15M in revenue.
It all comes down to four main systems →
1. Reputation (The Foundation)
You cannot scale on word-of-mouth alone, but you cannot convert paid traffic without a flawless reputation. Five-star reviews are the lifeblood of your local market dominance.
The Infrastructure: Implement automated workflows to send review requests via text and email immediately after a truck roll is completed. Do not leave this up to chance. Incentivize your techs to actively ask for and gather these reviews on the job site.
2. The Offer (Speed & Financing)
Homeowners are not buying parts… They are buying comfort and speed. When you are selling a $15K system, you cannot force your prospects to figure out the math on their own.
The Infrastructure: Make the offer a binary, easy decision. Stop competing on price with shared leads from platforms that pit you against five other companies. Offer fast installs and easy, pre-packaged financing. A financing-ready buyer is fundamentally different from a tire-kicker looking for three quotes.
3. Exposure (Owning the Market)
You need to be where the homeowner’s attention actually is. Relying solely on standard local SEO is not enough to keep the dispatch board full.
The Infrastructure: Run targeted campaigns across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Focus your budget exclusively on targeting the local audiences within your exact service areas. We currently manage $36M in annual ad spend across these platforms, and the data consistently shows that owned, exclusive leads yield the lowest Cost Per Lead (CPL) and highest closing rates.
4. Conversion (Speed-to-Lead)
A lead doesn’t pay the payroll. Booked jobs do. If your internal team cannot handle the inbound flow, your ad spend is consequentially wasted.
The Infrastructure: You must have a system mapped directly to your capacity and booking workflows. The 5-Minute Rule: You need dedicated staff prioritizing web leads. If a web lead is not called within five minutes, there is a 90% drop-off in booking probability.
The Video Reality: Stop Producing Commercials
When it comes to the actual ads running on social media, folks often overcomplicate the creative component… What you need to know:
→ DON’T pay for overly produced, polished commercials. You do not need a videographer with a lighting crew.
→ DO use a smartphone to capture raw footage of daily operations, techs in the field, and real owner updates.
The data shows that authenticity and humanism convert significantly higher than studio-quality content.
In other words, people buy from people.
When you find a raw video ad that pulls in a low CPL and keeps the calendar full, let it run until the frequency exhausts or the cost increases significantly (and remains high over the course of a few days). At that point, turn it off, test a new angle, and cycle it back in later.
Keep this process on repeat and ensure you are monitoring your results on a consistent, frequent basis.
Built by Operators, for Operators
Systemized Media was built with specificity, intention, and first-hand insight to fix the precise disconnects that cost home service companies money and their share of the local market.
If your business has the internal capacity to take on more changeout volume this year, but you lack the consistent lead flow and thorough backend infrastructure to capture and convert it, let’s talk about building your system.
