Running a Trades Business in Palm Beach County: Price for the Soft Months

Most of the country runs on one calendar. January to December, with a slow patch around the holidays.

Palm Beach County runs on two.

The first is the seasonal clock. From fall into spring, the county fills up. Palm Beach County’s own planning profile estimates about 159,000 extra seasonal residents (a 2020 estimate) on top of a year round population of roughly 1.5 million (2024). Those are homes that sat closed for six months, and every one of them wakes up needing something.

The second is the heat and storm clock. Hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30. Air conditioners run hard for most of the year. Roofs, panels and generators get attention right before a storm and right after one.

Put the two clocks together and you get a business that is slammed for a few months and soft for a few others. The soft months are where Palm Beach County shops quietly lose the money they made in the busy ones.

This guide shows you how to see that loss in your own numbers, with one worked example you can redo tonight.

How the two clocks hit each trade

Every trade here feels the swing. It just lands in a different month.

HVAC. Summer is wall to wall no cool calls. For a lot of shops, the cooler months are the soft stretch, carried by maintenance and the odd changeout.

Plumbing. Seasonal homeowners come back and open houses that sat empty since spring. Water heaters, slow leaks, running toilets. Then summer arrives and the phone gets quieter.

Electrical. Generator installs, panel upgrades and surge protection come in waves around storm season. A quiet hurricane year can leave a gap nobody planned for.

Roofing. Estimate requests can spike after a named storm and go flat in a calm year. Summer rain also eats into tear off days.

Painting, flooring, remodel and handyman work tends to follow the seasonal homeowner. Pool routes run all year, but seasonal homes still come and go from them.

None of this is news to you. You have lived it. The question is whether your price was built for it.

Why one price cannot cover both clocks

Here is the trap.

Most owners set their hourly rate in a busy month. The trucks are full, the board is booked, and the rate feels fine.

But your costs do not know what month it is. Rent, insurance, the office person, the truck payments and your own pay stay the same in August as they were in February. Your techs still get paid for a full week.

What changes is how many of those paid hours you can bill.

When billable hours drop, every billable hour has to carry more of the fixed cost. A rate that covered you in February can lose money in August. That is how a shop ends up profitable on paper and broke in the bank account.

The worked example: one tech, two months

Let’s say it is a Tuesday in late July. The board has holes in it. Your tech still clocked 40 hours this week.

We will use the sample shop from our free Rate Calculator, the same one in our guide to what a $25 an hour tech really costs. One tech is paid 160 hours a month. His loaded cost is $32.96 an hour, so those 160 hours cost $5,273.60. His share of overhead is $48.71 per billable hour at a full 116 billable hours, which is $5,650.36 a month. That overhead does not shrink when the phone gets quiet.

The shop charges $95 an hour. For the example, say the slowest months drop to 90 billable hours, and four months a year look like that. Swap in your own.

Read the bottom line slowly.

In a full month, $95 barely clears the cost of $94.17. In the soft month, the same $95 is $26.38 short on every hour billed. The tech is losing $2,373.96 a month before a single part is counted.

Now stretch it out. Four soft months at that pace is $9,495.84 per tech. A three tech shop gives back $28,487.52 in those four months.

The eight full months do not save it. Three techs at $96.04 ahead for eight months is $2,304.96. That shop still ends the year $26,182.56 behind, and most of it is gone before anyone notices.

Redo the table with your own numbers. Use your real paid hours, your real billable hours in your slowest month, and your real overhead. The soft month column is the one that matters.

What the busy season is hiding

Here is the part that stings.

The busy months are supposed to pay for the soft ones. If you have read our guide on HVAC profit margin, you know how thin that cushion can be. In a lot of shops they do not, and the reason is not the price. It is the quotes.

When the trucks are full, quotes go out faster than anyone can keep track of them. Nobody calls back. The customer gets two other numbers, and one of those shops does call back.

In the follow up document we install, a sample stretch of 60 quotes looked like this: 21 won, 12 lost, and 27 that simply went quiet. At a $1,900 average, those 27 quiet quotes are $51,300 of quoted work that never got an answer either way.

In Palm Beach County, that leak is biggest in exactly the months you are counting on to carry the summer.

I spent seven years as a licensed HVAC technician and eight more running operations. The busiest season I worked was never the most profitable one. It was the one where the most money walked out the door without anyone saying no.

Where the rest of the method lives

The table above shows one tech in two months. A real price has to account for every job type, every truck, parts markup and the hours you lose to drive time and callbacks.

That is the Job Costing Template, one of the documents we install when we work together. You can see it on our What We Install page.

When an owner wants the floor rate set and the price book rebuilt on it, that is what The Recovery Reset is built for: two weeks, $1,950.

Polaris One is based in West Palm Beach. We work with trades owners remotely across the country and in person across Palm Beach County and the rest of driveable South Florida.