Maybe you’ve been stringing lights for Christmas ever since you were a kid, perched on your dad’s shoulders to place the star of Bethlehem atop your family’s Christmas Tree. Fast forward to 2021. Now you’re a successful roofing pro who spreads cheer by keeping people safe and dry inside their cozy homes (or offices) during the holiday season, and all year long!
Some roofing pros greet the holidays as an opportunity to make some scratch as exterior home decorators. In fact, they can make more than just a little money on their Santa side-hustle… Hanging lights has become big business, and demand comes at a perfect time of year, when contractors are winding down their regular roof repair and replacement jobs.
According to HomeAdvisor, getting a professional to string lights around a home runs between $220 and $650 a pop. But we know that in many affluent neighborhoods where residents need to “keep up with the Joneses,” decorating fees can run up into the thousands of dollars.
Equipped for Holiday Enlightenment
Thanks to your excellence in installing roofing systems, you already have the equipment and expertise needed to decorate a property with lights strung around roofs and dormers. You have a crew and you even have a happy customer base to reach out to. You and your team know how to deal with eaves, valleys, ridges, dormers, and windows better than any other tradesmen in town! Now all you need on your trip up the ladder is a bunch of gutter clips and colorful strings of Christmas lights. If Mrs. and Mr. Jones want Frosty the Snowman to glow atop their house, or Prancer prancing on their carport, no problem. It’s a lot safer if you take the reins on these kinds of reindeer games, instead of the homeowner.
Market Your Joyful Seasonal Service
A quick search on HomeAdvisor will tell you there is gold in them there holiday hills! Join the celebration by listing your roofing decor service there, or go it on your own with mailers to your clientele, wishing them a happy and bright holiday season. You can give existing clients a sweet little discount on hanging their lights. Nice, big candy canes make great door hanger ads, you know? And when you attach a flyer with a special offer to handle their home decorations, they won’t forget it!
Once you knock out your first fantastic job, ask the homeowner if you can stick a sign in their yard hailing your holiday lighting service. Make your sign fit in with the spirit of the season by taking a little liberty with your corporate colors, and go instead with a festive palette of reds, greens, and blues.
Lighting Accessories that Make the Job a Cinch
Plastic Gutter/Shingle Clips are your best friends when it comes to hanging Christmas lights along eaves. These clips are very inexpensive… about $6 for a package of 100.
Determine where you’ll “plug in.” Make sure the lights you put up are powered from a GFCI outlet (ground fault circuit interrupter). You don’t want to be accused of causing your client to suffer a blackout during the holiday season! Alternatively, go buy a portable outdoor unit in case the homeowner doesn’t have a convenient outlet(s) for the lights.
The iRoofing App Helps You Prepare
The iRoofing app for roofing contractors enables you to access satellite, aerial, and drone overhead images to calculate structural areas to be graced with Christmas lights. In order to formulate a quote you’ll need to know the size of the roof, its complexity, and parts. Easily turn measurements you’ve sketched in the iRoofing app into a holiday light decor estimate. The iRoofing app also makes it simple to resell your light decoration service yearly by saving the client’s job specifications in your customer database for access anytime. You’ll be able to perform the sale remotely, so the only thing left to do is to pick up the check and start the work! Merry Christmas!
Net Lighting is awesome. Some years back, a really smart person decided it was too much of a headache to wrap strings of lights around bushes or run single lines of lights up and down a roof. So, they invented net lighting. Yay! Now all you need to do is drape a blanket of lights over the surface to be decorated and, boom, instant merriment.
Route cords away from expected foot traffic. You certainly don’t want kids or adults tripping over your extension cords. Run them in inconspicuous areas, like behind shrubs and along landscape edging, whenever possible. If the weather calls for snow, mark where cords might be covered by using those little wire warning flags the power company uses to mark buried cables.
Use water-resistant lights. If your client doesn’t have hearty outdoor Christmas lights, recommend them. They’re more reliable and safer. These lights usually have a tag designating them as waterproof or water-resistant lights as defined by Underwriters Laboratory (UL). And, the cone-shaped C7 or C9 bulbs are the best to use, too (never couple the two types together, though). They come in strands of up to 100 bulbs.
Times Square has met its match. Homeowners who want to make a holiday statement often go with animated lights. Think of those exciting displays in Times Square or up and down the Vegas Strip. Animated lighting usually consists of lights affixed to frames shaped into figures like snowmen, Santa Claus, gingerbread people, reindeer, nativity scenes, etc. You can suggest your own ideas to supercharge your clients’ holiday decorations and build your reputation as the Kris Kringle of the roofing and home decor world!
Look, Up in the Sky! Trendy today are globe-shaped objects festooned with lights and hanging from trees. They’re called shimmer spheres and they call to mind giant snowballs. You can complete your client’s winter wonderland by hanging the spheres around the property… After all, you have the extension ladders and fearless roofers to get in the trees!
Keep your clients safe and warm
Again, you’re far more qualified to decorate the roof of a house than a homeowner who might have consumed too much eggnog. So, offer your lightening decor service during the holiday season and keep the revenue flowing! Read this article about other ideas to fill the offseason with income.
