The fall cleanout window opens in three weeks. Here is the plan.
A 30 day plan for September: reactivating last fall's customers, locking in realtor and property manager work, and setting ad budgets before the October rush.
It is the first week of September. The phone has that late-summer lull, and in roughly three weeks the second busiest stretch of your year begins.
The fall run is real but short. It opens around the first of October and it is effectively finished by December 10. Homeowners reclaim the garage before the cold, sellers clear houses for the last listing window of the year, property managers turn units before the holidays, and everyone decides at once that the basement has to be dealt with before family visits.
The companies that fill October and November are not the ones advertising hardest in October. They are the ones who spend September doing four unglamorous things.
Week one: text last fall's customers
Your best list is one you already own and almost certainly are not using.
Pull every residential customer who booked between September and December last year, plus anyone from spring who has not been back. Send one text from your business number, in small batches so it does not read as a blast:
"Hi [name], this is [your name] at [company]. We cleared your garage last October. I am filling the fall schedule now and the weeks before Thanksgiving go first. Want me to hold a morning? Half load is $345, quarter is $265."
Two things make it work. It names the actual job, so it does not read as marketing. And it names a real deadline rather than an invented one.
On a list of 300 past customers, expect somewhere between 15 and 40 bookings before you have spent a dollar on advertising. Text non-responders once, ten days later, then stop.
Week two: lock in the B2B work
Fall is when property managers turn units ahead of the holidays and agents push their last listings of the year. Both plan two to four weeks out, which means the call to make is now, not in mid October when they have already used someone.
Call every property manager and agent you have worked with and ask one direct question: what is coming up in the next 60 days? Then offer a standing rate rather than a discount. A fixed price per one-bedroom clear, a fixed price per two-bedroom, same-week service, invoice emailed, net 15.
If you have no B2B accounts yet, this is the month to start. Three estate sale companies in your county and five listing agents is an afternoon of calls, and those relationships are the reason some hauling companies are busy in February. The longer argument is in the seasonality guide.
Week three: fix the profile before the traffic arrives
The rush is a bad time to find out that your Google listing is wrong.
Two specific things to check this week. First, hours. Across 5,171 hauling listings, 36.8% show no hours at all and only 44.5% list Saturday. October garage decisions get made on Saturday morning. If you work Saturdays and your profile does not say so, you are invisible for those searches.
Second, photos. Add ten fresh before-and-after pairs from summer jobs, shot from the same spot, captioned with the city and the load size. 97.8% of listings have photos, so this is not about having them, it is about having ones that show the transformation people are buying.
While you are in there, add a weekly post with a real offer and seed the Q and A with your prices. The full checklist is in the Google Business Profile guide.
Week four: set the ad budget on a schedule
Junk removal search volume climbs through October, peaks in the first half of November, and drops sharply after the first week of December.
Plan the increases now rather than reacting to them. Raise daily budgets October 1, hold through December 5, then cut back to a holding level rather than pausing. Pausing resets campaign learning and costs you two weeks recovering it in March.
Change the ad copy to name the deadline. "Garage cleared before the holidays, booking through November 21" outperforms a generic offer in every seasonal trade, and same-day availability outperforms both when you have the capacity to promise it. Structure and negatives are in the Google Ads guide.
Two things to fix before the phone rings
First, answer it. In an eight week window with a fixed number of calls, every missed one goes to whichever competitor picks up, because junk removal callers do not leave voicemails. If you are carrying a couch, you are not answering, which is what missed-call text-back is for. Put your own average haul and job count into the calculator and see what a few missed calls a week costs across a peak season.
Second, publish a price. The searcher in October is comparing three companies on her phone in a garage. The one that answers her question gets the call, and most of your competitors will not.
What September should produce
By October 1 you want a list of past customers who have already said yes to a date, two or three B2B accounts with agreed rates for the quarter, a Google profile with real hours and fresh proof, and an ad account ready to scale on a schedule you set in advance.
None of that is clever. It is just done in September rather than in the middle of the rush, which is the whole difference between a decent fall and a full one.
If you want the reactivation campaign, the profile work and the seasonal ad schedule handled, it is part of the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.