Planning for storm season when your lead flow doubles overnight

Roofing is the least even of the trades we generate for. Enquiry volume is flat for weeks, then a named storm crosses the country and a week's worth of demand arrives in a day. What separates firms that profit from that week from firms that simply survive it is a set of decisions taken well before the forecast.

The problem is not the volume

Most roofers can handle more enquiries than they get in a normal week. The problem is that a spike arrives with a different mix: a lot of it is genuinely urgent, some of it is insurance work, and a proportion of it is people ringing everyone in a panic who will book the first firm that answers.

Handled badly, you spend the week quoting emergency repairs at the expense of the re-roofs that carry your margin, and the spike costs you money.

Decide your triage in advance

Write down, now, which jobs get priority when the phone will not stop. Most firms who do this well split three ways:

Set your cap before the storm, not during it

A weekly lead cap exists so your team is never sent more enquiries than it can call back. That logic does not stop applying in a busy week — it applies harder, because the cost of an unanswered urgent lead is a homeowner who books someone else and tells people about it.

Agree with your supplier in advance what your cap becomes during a spike, and how you raise or drop it. If changing your cap needs a phone call during office hours, it is not a control you actually have.

Be honest about insurance work

A significant share of storm enquiries turn out to be insurance claims. Whether that is good business depends entirely on your appetite for the paperwork and the payment terms.

• Do you want claim work at all?
• If so, do you handle the claim or leave it with the homeowner?
• What is your position on excesses and on quoting to a loss adjuster's figure?

Decide once. A team improvising that decision at eight o'clock on a Monday morning will decide differently every time.

The week after

Demand falls off a cliff. Do not read that as a lead-quality problem and start renegotiating; read it as the cycle doing what it does. The firms that get caught out are the ones that raise caps permanently during a spike and then blame the supplier when the quiet fortnight arrives.

• Triage categories written down and known by whoever answers the phone
• An on-call arrangement for make-safes
• A cap you can change quickly, in both directions
• A settled position on insurance work
• Planned re-roofs ring-fenced from the surge