When the Storm Hits

The play

1. Build the storm advertising before the season, not after it. Ads for hail, wind and leaks, written and sitting there year round. They cost nothing while nobody is searching, because you pay when somebody searches. When an event hits you turn the spend up on the campaigns that match and put a post on your business profile. A shop scrambling to write ad copy the morning after the hail is already a week behind the market (Play 1, "Count Where Last Year's Jobs Actually Came From").
2. Write your triage order down now, while it is calm. One shop's order: an active leak at a new customer and a warranty leak at an existing customer both come before a paid maintenance visit on a roof that is not leaking. Yours may differ. What matters is that it exists on paper, because in the middle of the week nobody will invent a fair one.
3. Cap the stops per man per day, and hold the cap. Ten booked and seven done is not a good day with three leftovers — it is three people who took time off, expected you, and got no phone call. You will probably keep their repair, because everyone is busy. You will not get their re-roof, and you will get the review.
4. Over-communicate, especially the bad news. Everybody hears where they are on the list, including the customers you just bumped off Thursday. Silence is the thing that actually costs money in a storm week. It is construction, outside, weather permitting — say that out loud, early, to everyone, rather than letting a moved customer work out on their own that you are not coming (Module 14, Play 3, "Make the Rain Call the Night Before").
5. Know your real ceiling: men and material, not leads. More spend buys more calls, and more calls you cannot answer just means you paid for the click, the phone time and maybe a truck roll to find the job already done by somebody else. Turn the ads up to what your crews and your supplier can actually carry, and no further.
6. Do not stand up a door-knocking operation in a week. One shop tried it after storms and calls its own attempt half-built — no pitch, no training, nothing to show for it — and went back to being found where people go when the ceiling stains. That is not proof knocking never works. It is proof that improvising a sales channel during your busiest week does not.
7. Let the neighbors come on their own clock. Working a street does produce calls, but often months later, and there is nothing to do to force it. Treat it as change you find in the couch, never as the plan.