Every seasonal campaign your shop will run this year — on one page. What runs when, the trigger dates, and the 2-hour quarterly review that keeps the whole thing honest.
Part of the Leveraged Owner 8-system framework
Contractor marketing fails the same way every year: January is quiet so you panic-discount, spring is busy so you stop marketing entirely, and December surprises you again like it does every December. The annual marketing calendar fixes this with one page — twelve months, every campaign slotted to its trigger date, reviewed quarterly in two hours. This is the flagship planning guide; the individual campaigns it references each have their own playbooks linked below.
Here's the standard contractor year. Adjust for your trade and climate, but start from this skeleton:
Print this and put it on the office wall. A calendar nobody sees is a calendar nobody follows.
Concrete takeaway: twelve months, one campaign per month minimum, each tied to a real seasonal trigger. Print it and wall-mount it.
Campaigns die when they depend on someone remembering. Every campaign on the calendar gets a trigger date — a specific day it fires, set in advance:
Concrete takeaway: no campaign without a trigger date and a named owner. "We'll send it in the fall" is how campaigns die.
Four times a year, two hours, same agenda. This is what keeps the calendar honest:
Concrete takeaway: quarterly, two hours, four agenda blocks: what fired, what booked, what's next, one improvement. Put all four dates on the calendar in January.
The physical artifact: a single landscape page, twelve columns (one per month), each column containing the campaign name, its trigger date, and its owner. That's it — no paragraphs, no strategy decks. If it doesn't fit on one page, it's too complicated to execute.
Build it in a spreadsheet, print it large, and review it at the quarterly meeting with a red pen. Campaigns that consistently miss their triggers get simplified until they fit the page — the calendar disciplines the marketing, not the other way around.
Concrete takeaway: if the plan doesn't fit on one landscape page, simplify the plan. Complexity is where follow-through goes to die.
A full annual calendar is the goal, but if you've never planned more than a week ahead, start with a 90-day sprint. Pick the three campaigns that fit the next quarter from the calendar above, write the texts, set the triggers, and run just those. Ninety days of executed campaigns beats a beautiful annual plan that never launches — and the sprint teaches you the muscle of planning, which is the real asset.
Choose the three by revenue proximity. The campaign tied to work you can do this month goes first; the brand-building play goes last. A shop heading into fall picks the heating tune-up push, the filter-subscription ask, and the review drive — not the spring AC campaign. Relevance beats completeness. You can add the rest of the year once the first quarter proves the system works.
Review the sprint the way the annual calendar gets reviewed: one hour, three questions. What booked? What got ignored? What do we repeat? Write the answers down — one page, filed where next quarter's planning starts. After two sprints you'll have a half-year calendar built from evidence instead of guesses, and the annual version stops feeling like a leap. It becomes transcription.
Concrete takeaway: block two hours this week and build just the next 90 days: three campaigns, written texts, set triggers. Start the muscle, then expand it.
This post is about the calendar itself, so the check-in is deliciously meta: at 30 days, did the campaigns you scheduled actually launch? The calendar fails the same way diets fail — not from bad planning but from no execution. Count launched versus planned; if it's under two-thirds, the problem is ownership, not the calendar. Name one owner per campaign.
At 60 days, hold the first quarterly review — even if the quarter isn't over. The habit matters more than the timing. Ask the three questions: what booked, what got ignored, what do we repeat? Write the answers on the one-page retrospective and file it where next quarter's planning starts. The second review will be easier because the first one exists.
At 90 days, you've completed one full cycle: plan, execute, review. The question isn't whether every campaign worked — it's whether the system worked. Did planning get easier? Did execution get more automatic? If yes, expand to the annual version. If no, shrink to the 90-day sprint until the muscle is built. The calendar serves the business, not the other way around.
The flagship framework: The 8 Systems That Run a Home-Service Business. For the weekly rhythm that executes the calendar, The Weekly Owner Dashboard.
The full setup SOP, all four copy-paste scripts (including the owner notification), the "Your Numbers" missed-call worksheet, and the step-by-step setup guide — free, no catch. Fix your missed calls this week.
Free. The full 8-system Starter Pack is $27 if you want everything else.
This post is part of the Leveraged Owner 8-system framework — the done-for-you version with the full setup guides, every script, the worksheets, and screen-by-screen setup instructions for all 8 systems.
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