The trigger is a number in the ten day forecast
Every metro has a temperature where the phone changes. In Columbus it is three days above 95. Nobody in Phoenix calls at 95; there the trigger is the first stretch past 110, or the first night that stays above 85. Take your number off last year's call log by week, then read the forecast every Monday from the middle of May.
When it puts that stretch eight or ten days out, everything below starts. Each piece takes a day or two to take effect, which is why none of it can be done on the Tuesday the heat arrives.
Raise the budgets in the week before the heat
Local Services first, because the budget there is weekly and a cap set in May is gone by Tuesday of a heat week. Then the daily budget on the repair search campaign, the ad schedule extended into the evening and across Saturday, and the bids raised on repair terms you normally hold back.
Pause Meta for the duration. A homeowner with no cooling is searching, so the money goes to the two channels that catch the search.
Book the overflow answering before the week starts
Put the overflow answering service on the calendar in writing, ahead of the heat. In the first stretch a three-truck shop can take a week of calls in two days, and one CSR who is also dispatching cannot do both. Every call that rings out in that week is a lead you already paid for.
Turn on missed-call text-back if it is off. Then write the week's script: the same-day slots that are genuinely open, the diagnostic price, and the three things a homeowner can check while they wait, which are the breaker, the filter and the grass grown up around the outdoor unit. That last part also cuts the visits that turn out to be a tripped breaker, and every one of those frees a slot.
When the calendar fills, install leads come off
The calendar decides where the buying stops. Once the install backlog passes two weeks, install job types come off in Local Services and the replacement campaigns pause, while repair keeps running, which is the backlog rule we plan every metro around. A replacement lead you cannot install for five weeks buys a quote the homeowner carries to a contractor who can start sooner.
What the page says once you are booked out
The page and the phone give the same answer: the next open slot, by date. Add a waitlist that texts the homeowner when one opens, and make it a text a person actually sends.
Take "same-day service" off the site the day it stops being true, and put it back when it is true again. Update the Business Profile hours for the extended shift, because Local Services shows the listing only during the hours you set, and a listing that closes at 5 pm during a heat wave is invisible for the 6 pm calls you were paying for.
The week after
Two lists come out of a heat week. The customers whose systems you fixed in the middle of it, who will write a review from the driveway if the technician asks that day. And the replacements you quoted and did not book, which is the Meta audience in July, once the panic has passed and the financing conversation can happen.
A two-truck shop cannot buy its way through a heat wave, and no budget changes that. Past a point every extra dollar buys a call that rings, gets answered, gets offered a slot four days out, and books with somebody else. The budget stops where the trucks do, and what is left over goes to the shoulder months.