A marketing referral your trades clients will thank you for

Why advisors to trades get asked about marketing

You are probably already being asked. The owner of a heating company sits down for a year-end meeting, looks at revenue, and asks, "Should I be spending more on Google?" The question lands on you because you're the professional in the room, not because it's your field.

There are three common ways advisors handle that question, and two of them carry risk:

• Give a quick opinion. Easy, but you end up owning advice you aren't paid or insured for.
• Name a nephew who does websites. Friendly, but if it goes badly, the client remembers who suggested it.
• Refer to a specialist with clear terms. You stay in your lane, the client gets real help, and nobody is surprised later.

We're built for the third option. We market and advise trades businesses. We don't pour concrete, wire panels or service furnaces, and we don't stray into your work either.

How a referral works, step by step

A good referral protects three relationships: yours with the client, the client's with us, and ours with you. This is the order we follow.

1. You spot a demand problem. Revenue is flat while costs rise, crews sit idle in shoulder months, or one large customer accounts for too much of the work.
2. You ask the client first. Nothing about the client comes to us without their permission. Often the simplest route is to pass on our number and let them call.
3. We talk to the owner. A senior strategist learns the trade, the service area, average job values and where work comes from today.
4. We report back only what the client approves. Some owners want their accountant copied on monthly numbers; others want complete privacy. Both are fine.
5. The arrangement is in writing. Before the first referral, you receive a short written description of how referrals work between us, including whether any fee is involved. Your client is told too.

The referral partnership playbook covers each step in more detail, including consent and what to do when a referral doesn't fit.

Three professions, three different signals

Each profession sees a different symptom of the same problem.

Each of those pages explains the handoff, what we will and won't do, and the questions your clients usually ask us first.

What the referred trades owner gets

The client you send us gets the same senior attention and the same plans as anyone else who calls. That means a look at how customers find them today, a plan built around their trade's buying pattern, and monthly reporting in plain language. See marketing for referred trades businesses for the full picture.

If the client agrees, those monthly numbers can be laid out so that you can read them too. Our advisor-ready reports show marketing spend, enquiries, booked jobs and cost per booked job in a single page that fits next to a set of financial statements.

Proof, and what it actually proves

Our published case studies are results from our HVAC work, and we present them as nothing more. They show a method: measure booked jobs, not clicks, and build the pages and listings that bring the right calls in.

• HVACDeal.ca produced 500+ leads at a 12:1 ROI.
• CanroHeat.ca achieved 250% lead growth.
• BCWide.ca tripled its leads in 90 days.

Those numbers belong to those companies. They are not a forecast for your client. The results page explains which parts of the method carry over to plumbers, electricians and roofers, and which don't.

Where we work in Ontario

We cover the whole province. Toronto's dense condo market behaves nothing like a subdivision in Brampton or a rural township outside Ottawa, so we've written separate pages for the regions where most trades advisors practise. Start with the areas hub or go straight to Toronto, Peel and Halton or Ottawa.

Ontario's trades also answer to their own regulators, such as the Technical Standards and Safety Authority for fuels work and the Electrical Safety Authority for electrical contractors. We link to them so owners can check requirements themselves; we don't advise on compliance.

Who is behind this

Ontario.Associates is part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group of companies. It is Canadian, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and led by Ali Sedighi, MBA in Technology Management, who has 17+ years of marketing experience and has built 150+ live HVAC websites. Our parent brand for trades work is Trades.Agency. Read more on the about page.

If you advise trades businesses anywhere in Ontario and want to know how a referral would work in practice, call, text or email. You'll get a straight answer and, if it fits, the terms in writing.