Hello. My name is Eric Forty and I am the owner of hvacformsonline.com. I started this company with the intent on helping HVAC managers and owners manage their businesses better.

At this time, I should give you my background and then talk about the progression of the Home Survey. I have been in the HVAC business on and off for about thirty years. At the age of 8 I started delivering fliers for my father's HVAC business. In junior high (early 1980's) we installed our first computer system (UNIX), and I did various data entry tasks like job costing. In high school (1986-1987) I started telemarketing our customers for clean and checks and was responsible for service dispatching. After high school i went to Arizona State for a few semesters and came back to the company and became an installer of HVAC equipment. In the early 1990's I ran our duct cleaning operation and started database mining our HVAC customer database. The first mailings we did were to our customers that had equipment over a certain age.

In the mid 1990’s I finally made it back to college and got a Bachelors of Science degree in Business (Operations Management with an emphasis in Information Systems). After college I worked with a multi-billion dollar a year company designing desktop software.

In late 2000 I came back to the family business and did various duties such as marketing manager, IT manager, finance manager, accounting manager, and general manager. In 2001 I wrote a hundred page business plan and a thirty page budget which helped us win the Carrier Distinguished Dealer Award (at the time only about 50 winners in the U.S. out of 8000 Carrier contractors). Between 2001 and 2005 our business increased from $2,000,000 to $3,000,000 and our profits increased by 500%.

In 2000 every time a prospect called the company looking for an estimate on equipment we would record the information about the prospect on a pre-printed survey form. Answers to questions like "how did you hear about us?", and answers about a prospect's home like "do you have any rooms that are hard to heat or cool?" were written down by various call takers.

In 2001 we increased our direct mailing to our customer database and began blanket mailing to areas (subdivisions, towns, etc. ) of interest. Our business volume increased, but the responses to the survey questions did not change. I suspected the reason for this was because our employees were not recording the responses to the questions correctly. So, one day, I did further analysis on the people that we mailed and the sales that came in over a month or so. After doing some programming In Access it was determined that we did about $200,000 in business off a $1000 mailing. This meant that certain employees were NOT filling in the responses to the questions correctly. I later learned that these employees had a bias against direct mail marketing and were actually filling in the surveys incorrectly on purpose!

After hiring new employees the responses to these questions were indeed more accurate, but not completely perfect. So, I did further analysis and began scheduling these prospects myself to see why we were not getting accurate answers. I soon discovered that many prospects simply did not have the time to answer all the home comfort and advertising questions on the phone. I calculated that the "How did you hear about us?" data was only 50% accurate.

Having only 50% accuracy on the answer to the question of where my leads came from meant that I really didn't know what advertising worked and what didn't work (costing me thousands and thousands in miss spent advertising dollars). Plus, I really didn't know who my prospects were (size of home, age of home, etc.) and what their needs were (did they have allergies? hard to heat or cool rooms? etc.).

I thought there had to be a better way of gathering and recording this data, other than asking questions on the phone and writing them down on a piece of paper. So, I built the Home Survey Form which allows prospects to answer these questions on the Internet, at their leisure.

Now, we have between 85%-95% data accuracy, saving me thousands of dollars in misspent advertising. Plus, now I know exactly who my prospects are and what their needs are which is allowing my company to better serve our customers and has increased our total sale amount per job. And, instead of blanket mailings we are now doing more accurate and pinpoint direct marketing based upon the report/query results.