Handyman Business Plan Template [Free]

A handyman business plan is a document that outlines a company’s goals and provides a detailed breakdown of the steps it will take to achieve them. It also contains the metrics for measuring success and the time frame in which certain milestones must be reached.

Business plans serve internal and external stakeholders, who use the information they contain to make critical decisions. For example, a business owner may use the document to create strategies to mitigate risks, while money lenders use it to assess a start-up’s revenue potential.

Because of its dual role, the document must capture essential information that both stakeholder classes need to make decisions. That’s where having a framework or template comes in handy.

A handyman business plan template is a document that logically arranges the key sections and details to include in a business plan.

Templates help entrepreneurs and people unfamiliar with business strategy to write business plans containing key elements that attract investors and guide operational decisions.

Read on to learn the vital components of a handyman business plan and what to include in each section.

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1. Industry Analysis

Before becoming operational, you need to understand the industry landscape you’re stepping into. This knowledge will prepare you to avoid the pitfalls others have succumbed to and identify the best way to meet customers’ needs.

Analyzing the industry’s outlook also proves to lenders that you’ve researched deeply and understand the business enough to generate revenue to pay them back.

For this section to be complete, you must answer these questions:

• Which industries will you be serving?

• What are the income projections?

• Does the industry experience seasonal fluctuations that affect income?

• What government regulations affect the industry?

• What are the potential risks associated with the industry? This could be government regulations, climate change, weather disasters, or technological advancements.

2. Executive Summary

As the name suggests, this is a concise overview of the entire document. It’s essentially a text-based sales pitch designed to capture attention, prove that your business concept is profitable, and convince readers that the other sections are worth reading.

The executive summary sometimes precedes the industry analysis. However, regardless of its position, it’s always advisable to write it last and limit it to one page so it provides a comprehensive overview of the entire document.

Typically, an executive summary starts with the company name and a brief description of its founder—their name, the reason for starting the business, and their experience. The summary of the target audience, services, core leadership, and funding request then follows it.

Pro tip: Support every strong opinion with relevant data points to earn readers’ trust. And if you’re not comfortable leaving a blank space, create a placeholder draft and rewrite it after you’ve written other sections.

3. Business Overview

Unlike the executive summary, the business overview is an expanded description of the company, the story behind its formation, and its services. This is your opportunity to use storytelling to impress the reader.

Your business overview should start with some basic information about the company—name, location, description of the ownership structure, and the business entity type. That should be followed by a one-paragraph elevator pitch describing your company that looks like this:

X is a handyman business based in Y. Homeowners often travel miles to find repairmen or wait hours for one to arrive. X will provide A, B, and C services so they don’t have to wait hours.

Two subsections will come after your elevator pitch. The first should capture your business’s history, recent achievements (if it’s an established business), and start-up costs. The second will reveal your philosophy, vision, mission, goals, and objectives (PVMGO).

Pro tip: Think deeply before writing your PVMGOs, as it will determine how your business is run and the type of employees you’ll attract.

4. Services

After the business overview comes an explanation of the services you’ll offer customers. Will you be helping property owners install drywalls? Are you going to tile floors? Or do you plan to repair and maintain homeowners’ kitchen and bathroom plumbing?

Generally, the services you pick must be backed up by the data you shared in the industry analysis section. They should also reflect customers’ pain points and your current skill set or expertise.

5. Market Analysis

If your company is to succeed, you must know your competitors, prospective customers, and the size of the demand for your services. Plus, lenders need proof that your company will be profitable. Market analysis aims to answer those questions and more.

Market analysis is gathering data that reveals details about other handyman companies, prospects’ needs, and variables that can change the market outlook. This process provides useful insights for creating effective marketing campaigns and overtaking competitors.

The first part of market research is competitor analysis.

Compile a list of the top ten competitors in your local service area, comprising handyman businesses and companies offering similar services. For instance, let’s say you offer plumbing services. Your competitors will include handyman businesses and plumbing companies.

This will reveal the caliber of the companies you’re up against, which will help you develop plans to overcome them.

For each competitor, identify their strategies to attract customers, set prices, and organize their service offerings. Instead of reinventing the wheel, you can copy their structure since they’ve proven it works.

Your market research process should end with identifying your strengths and weaknesses, the opportunities in the market, and the threats posed by competitors (SWOT analysis).

The information gathered during SWOT analysis should then be used to create a unique value proposition that highlights your differences from competitors and convinces customers to choose you over them.

Will you respond to customer calls quicker than competitors? Will you be a one-stop shop for all home repairs? Are you promising lower prices?

As Chris Hunter, ServiceTitan’s director of customer relations and cofounder of the Go Time Success Group Training Company, rightly points out, having a clear value proposition is vital to succeed.

“Why would somebody choose you? What makes you better than the other umpteen companies they can call very easily?” he says. 

“By identifying why you're better, whether that's your guarantees or warranties, whatever it may be, it not only helps you with your marketing message, but it also helps your team.”

Pro tip: Find out how to use your value proposition to create a business slogan or tagline

6. Customer Analysis

After market analysis, the next section is customer analysis. This involves understanding the population of prospects in your coverage area and their current pain points.

Customer analysis provides valuable insights for tailoring your service offerings to prospects’ needs. This will ensure you meet customers’ demands, survive revenue ebbs and flows, and achieve sustainable growth.

To perform customer analysis, gather as much data as possible about your ideal customers. Consult government databases and local news publications, knock on doors, and speak with owners of complementary businesses to understand prospects’ needs. This will also reveal the addressable market size.

After that, create separate persona documents for the prospect segments you’ve identified. They should contain prospects’ average income, buying behavior, demographics, psychographics, and common problems.

Using ServiceTitan's Customer Experience software, you can update your customer persona documents as you collect more data about their needs.

The software centralizes customer data, including personal information, service histories, and equipment installation records. Front office staff and field technicians can access it via browser, desktop, tablet, or mobile devices.

Such data consolidation makes it easier to spot customer trends, learn more about them, and tailor your services and marketing campaigns to their preferences. It also provides information employees can use to deliver a positive experience and quality service at every customer touchpoint.

ServiceTitan’s Customer Experience software also helps handyman companies provide customers with various comfortable ways to book appointments—texts, web chats, calls, and online booking widgets.

Providing customers with easily accessible appointment scheduling channels increases booking rates since it eliminates the inconvenience of driving to the office.

ServiceTitan’s Customer Experience feature also has an integrated SMS Texting feature that facilitates two-way communication between customers and employees.

Customers can use it to schedule, cancel, and reschedule appointments, submit complaints, ask questions, and track techs’ real-time location. It also lets employees send appointment reminders, post-job surveys, and complaint-resolution messages.

7. Marketing Plan

This section should contain a breakdown of the strategies, tactics, and channels for promoting your service offerings to customers. It should also cover the metrics for measuring success, the business goals each campaign will help achieve, and when you wish to accomplish them.

For starters, list the various channels you’ll be using to reach customers, tailoring your choices to the characteristics of your customers as captured in the persona document you created earlier. TikTok ads will work if your customer base is mainly young homeowners, while direct mail is ideal for older generations.

Here’s a breakdown of the various traditional and digital marketing mediums handyman businesses can explore to connect with customers:

• Direct mail

• Creating a website

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Social media marketing

• Paid ads

• Print publications (newspapers and industry magazines)

• Email marketing

• Newsletters

• Radio

• Television

• Direct marketing (cold calls, door knocking, and flier distribution)

Additionally, explain how you’ll execute your marketing strategy on each channel. The execution plan should include tactics, financial and human resources, and a success timeline. You should also list the marketing tools needed to measure performance on the various channels. For example, Mailchimp can be used for emails, while PostGrid works perfectly for direct mail.

You can also invest in a comprehensive marketing tool like ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing tool, which has tools appropriate for various marketing channels.

For example, the platform’s Local Services Ads integration lets handyman businesses run ads that appear for local-intent searches and empower customers to book appointments outside working hours.

We also have digital solutions for email marketing, direct mail, paid advertising, and reputation management. They help create campaigns and have dashboards displaying each channel’s revenue performance.

Marketing Pro – Ads is another robust marketing platform we created for handymen that integrates with Google Analytics and Google Ads. With Dynamic Name Insertion technology (DNI), the platform can tie each job booking to the source campaign.

Businesses use such precise performance data to allocate their budgets correctly and refine their audience targeting to reduce customer acquisition costs and generate revenue.

8. Operations Plan

After the marketing plan, go on to reveal how you intend to run and manage daily operations to achieve set business goals, as well as the people responsible for each task.

The operations plan is also an opportunity to carefully list everything that must be done for the business to start generating profits and remain a going concern in the long run.

For example, say you aim to generate 100 leads per week. The operations plan will assign the task of cold-calling 500 prospects daily to customer support team members.

Another goal could be to reduce production costs by 10 percent. In this case, the operations plan will detail your strategy to negotiate fair prices with suppliers and invest in technology to reduce money spent on wages.

The first subsection of your operations plan should reveal everything you’ve done so far to be able to deliver your services. What certifications have you gotten? Have you signed contracts with suppliers? 

The second subsection should outline the steps you’ll be taking to ensure quality service delivery. You should list the number of employees you’ll recruit, future milestones to hit, quality control measures, and plans for getting inventory on time.

Above all, ensure your operations plan includes strategies for optimizing job schedules and ensuring technicians arrive early at job sites, especially since customers hate late arrivals.

ServiceTitan’s Service Scheduling software lets business owners optimize schedules, minimize downtime, and ensure technicians always reach job sites early.

The software gives access to scheduling metrics such as lead source, appointments by trade, and customers’ booking flow. This lets you identify kinks in the scheduling process and know when to refine the job booking process.

ServiceTitan’s Service Scheduling also lets users bulk-book recurring jobs according to details in service contracts instead of manually creating separate appointments. Employees can also select from preset arrival windows when booking appointments or create custom ones to accommodate customers’ unique requirements.

With this software, handyman businesses optimize their scheduling process for faster arrival times, increasing their job completion rate and customer satisfaction.

9. Business Management Summary

This section will reveal the persons responsible for ensuring the company runs daily. It will also demonstrate plans to structure authority flows, assign responsibilities, and make key business decisions.

If you’re seeking funding, use a significant portion of this section to highlight your team’s management competence. Reveal their track record, certifications, and industry expertise to prove they can run the business in a manner that generates sufficient profits to cover interest payments and overhead costs.

Next, create an organizational chart containing the heads and members of key functional units—operations, finance, leadership, sales, marketing, accounting, and people management. If you’re a solopreneur who hopes to grow, create a fictional chart so new employees know who to report to and what their responsibilities are from the day they’re hired.

Then, list the amount paid to employees and other service providers. Again, if you’re a solopreneur, list the amount you’ll pay yourself, consultants, and people helping with administrative tasks or offering advisory services. Your wage bill should be between 15 to 30 percent of revenue.

Lastly, state strategies and tools for boosting and monitoring business performance, such as using a platform like ServiceTitan’s Field Reporting software.

This software can track performance metrics related to different aspects of your business using custom and preset reports. You can also schedule such reports to be delivered directly to your email address at quarterly, monthly, or yearly frequencies.

These reports provide real-time insights that support data-backed decision-making and help to identify bottlenecks. 

10. Financial Plan

This is the last section of a business plan. However, that doesn’t mean it’s less important than other sections, considering finance's critical role in every business entity's creation, growth, and enduring existence.

A well-written financial plan section must list all production costs. This includes inventory and equipment purchases, overheads, running costs, and handyman business start-up expenses (if the company is new).

Established businesses should provide various financial statements, such as balance sheets and income and cash flow statements. These documents will determine how resources should be allocated and help forecast future revenue.

Conversely, new businesses should lay out their financial projections for the next five years, supporting them with data such as expected deal-win rates, leads, cost of production, etc. Investors and lenders need this data to decide if the business idea is worth funding.

Lastly, established and new businesses should select the tool they’ll use (or are already using) to manage outgoing and incoming payments. Excel spreadsheets or premium accounting tools like QuickBooks and Sage Intacct could serve this purpose.

However, to escape the horrors of data redundancy, human error, manual data entry, and unfair pay structures, invest in ServiceTitan’s Contractor Payroll and Customer Payment platforms.

The Payroll platform allows business owners to create custom wage structures that account for performance-related payments like overtime, benefits, and commission. It also automatically adds drive time, vendor runs, and wrench time to employees’ timesheets.

This ensures everyone is paid fairly, boosting morale and productivity.

ServiceTitan’s Customer Payments platform allows you to collect cash, credit, and check payments from customers. Every payment is immediately reflected on the centralized dashboard so front-office employees can see each customer’s real-time credit balances.

The platform also streamlines financial accounting by automatically reconciling cash with electronic payments and depositing them into your business account in 24 hours. This removes the need to queue in banks or wait days for payments to clear.

Handyman business owners can use both platforms to maintain a healthy cash flow and manage their finances effectively.

What Are The Benefits of a Business Plan for a Handyman Business?

Recently, a study involving business owners and managers showed that companies without a business plan were more likely to fail, as the document helps small businesses spot market trends and create plans to overcome obstacles to success.

Other benefits of having a business plan include proving idea viability, team alignment, and goal setting.

• Proves idea viability: Creating a business plan produces data proving that your idea is viable enough to justify investment. It also provides solid proof points you can use to woo investors.

• Risk mitigation: Market and industry analysis reveals potential risks, which helps you create strategies to contain or overcome them.

• Team alignment: Business plans create a definite objective every employee can work toward. Such company-wide alignment improves the odds of success.

• Goal setting: You can use data insights and information gathered when writing business plans to set realistic targets and goals. 

Over to You

Creating a business plan places you in the perfect position to start a successful handyman business. 

If you have already started your business without a plan, it’s not too late. You can still use the tips above to create one so the company operates efficiently and remains profitable.

Chris Hunter rightly states, “The best companies out there, the ones that are highly performing, they're all doing this [creating a business plan].” 

“If someone's not doing this, it's never too late to start. Don't be intimidated by it. You don't have to be perfect the first year; you just need to get started. Every year you do it, this thing can get even better.”

Finally, remember you can always use handyman ServiceTitan software to track business performance, streamline operations, and boost revenue generation.

ServiceTitan is an all-in-one software solution that handyman businesses use to automate essential business operations like customer data management, marketing, invoicing, and financial reporting. Over 100,000 contractors nationwide use the platform to grow their profits.