Pre-Season Inspection Scheduling and Reminder Standard

Purpose

A chimney only gets swept when someone books it, and demand for that booking is not spread evenly across the year. It clusters in the weeks before the first hard cold snap, when every customer who put it off all summer wants an appointment before they light a fire. Left alone, that clustering pushes the back half of the list into November and December after some customers have already burned a season's worth of fires through a flue nobody has looked at, and it forces a choice between turning work away or pushing crews through a rushed day that skips the safety and containment steps protecting the house and the tech's own footing. NFPA 211's annual-inspection expectation is why this list has to exist at all; this standard keeps the shop meeting it on a schedule it controls instead of one the calendar imposes. Without it, the shop learns about its backlog the same week the customer does, in a call that opens with "we've been trying to reach someone."

Scope

Covers the outbound campaign that fills the pre-season inspection and sweep calendar from the active customer base: building the season's contact list, running outreach on a fixed cadence, and booking against real crew capacity. It does not cover the single end-of-visit "set your next appointment" touchpoint at the close of a service call, owned by the Customer Walkthrough and Reporting SOP, the field judgment of whether a borderline creosote reading can hold for next season or needs sweeping now, owned by the Creosote Borderline decision tree, or net-new customer acquisition, which runs through marketing rather than this list. A caller whose intake sounds like an active hazard rather than a routine reminder still enters through this standard (step 5), but exits it the moment a slot is booked and hands off to the field SOP that governs the visit itself.

Roles and responsibilities

The procedure

1. Build the season's tiered list from three inputs, not one. Pull the active customer base and cross it against last service date, any "monitor, revisit before next season" flag a tech logged during a prior visit, and any mid-season off-cycle service completed outside the normal annual rhythm. Sort into Priority (any monitor-flag, or last service more than 14 months back), Standard (within the normal 10 to 14 month window), and Low (serviced off-cycle in the last 6 months, not due yet). Acceptance: every active customer carries a tier, and the list is finalized by the shop's own season-open date, set early enough in summer that calling has not already started before the list is done. Wrong looks like pulling last year's raw contact list and treating "on it" as the same thing as "tiered": a monitor-flagged customer who lands in Standard by default gets called with everyone else in October instead of August. Stop rule: the list does not move to step 2 until every monitor-flag from the prior season is confirmed present in the Priority tier; where the flag log and the list disagree, reconcile before any calls go out. Hazard: none yet, an office-only step.

2. Start each tier's outreach on a fixed lead time ahead of first-fire date. Begin Priority-tier contact 10 to 12 weeks ahead of the region's typical first-fire date, the point in the year local burning reliably starts; begin Standard-tier contact 6 to 8 weeks ahead of the same date. Track first-fire date locally, not off a national average; it swings by months across climates, from late summer in northern New England to well into fall further south. Acceptance: first Priority contact logged at or before the 10-to-12-week mark, first Standard contact logged at or before the 6-to-8-week mark. Wrong looks like one outreach push at a single date for the whole list, which starts Priority customers too late or buries Standard-tier calls under a Priority-sized backlog. Stop rule: if the season-open date from step 1 lands inside the Priority window instead of ahead of it, the list-build ran late and Priority customers lose lead time this season cannot get back; flag it to the owner rather than quietly compressing the cadence in step 3. Hazard: none yet.

3. Run a fixed contact cadence and log every touch. First contact by phone or text. No response within 7 days: a second touch by the other channel. No response within another 14 days, day 21 from first contact: a final touch, logged as the season's last attempt. Acceptance: every touch logged with date, channel, and outcome, booked, declined, or no response. Wrong looks like one voicemail logged as "attempted" and the customer dropped from outreach until next year's list-build happens to rediscover them. Stop rule: a customer who reaches three logged, dated touches with no response moves to "unresponsive, carryover" status, not off the list; the carryover is what keeps a hard-to-reach customer from falling off the list for good, and it re-enters at the top of next season's Priority tier automatically at step 1, not as a fresh judgment call each year. Hazard: none yet.

4. Book against rated crew capacity, not against demand. Cap each crew's daily bookings at what a two-person crew can actually run without compressing drive time or on-site pace: for a residential Level 1 sweep and inspection averaging about 1.5 hours on site, that is 4 bookings per crew per 8-hour day once drive time between stops is counted in. Acceptance: no day's booked count for a crew exceeds its rated cap; a same-day cancellation can be refilled, but a slot is never added on top of it. Wrong looks like adding a fifth job to an already-full day because it looks quick, a gas-insert Level 1 instead of a full masonry sweep, on the reasoning that "it's a short one." Stop rule: any booking that would push a day over cap moves to the next open day instead, and the customer is confirmed on the new time before the day closes rather than left to discover the change when the truck does not show. The hazard this step controls is schedule pressure: an over-capacity day is the day a crew is most likely to skip a roof-access tie-off check or cut a containment verification short to hold the pace, and if the moved booking is not re-confirmed with the customer before the day closes, then the office has traded an overbooked day for a customer waiting on a truck that was never coming.

5. Fast-track any intake that sounds like an active hazard, regardless of tier. Any inbound call reporting a symptom consistent with an active hazard, a "chimney fire" sound during the prior heating season with no inspection since, a strong burning smell in the house, or visible sparks, routes to same-week scheduling ahead of the normal queue order. Acceptance: the call is logged with the reported symptom and the date of the offered slot; same-week means within the current 7-day booking window, not "next available Priority slot." Wrong looks like logging the symptom accurately and then leaving the customer in the normal tiered queue because "they're already on the Priority list." Stop rule: if no same-week slot exists anywhere on the schedule, the coordinator gives explicit stop-use guidance over the phone, do not burn until this is inspected, and logs that the guidance was given; and if the following week is also fully booked, then the coordinator names the earliest actual slot rather than leaving an open-ended callback promise. Hazard: an unswept flue with fire-history evidence is a live fire risk sitting inside a calendar entry, not a paperwork problem, which is why this step overrides tier order instead of deferring to it.

6. Reconcile the season close-out before the list closes. Before the region's first-fire date, tally each tier: contacted, booked, and unresponsive-carryover. Acceptance: the three counts for every tier reconcile to that tier's original total from step 1. Wrong looks like closing the season with a booked count and no unresponsive count, leaving next year's list-build with no carryover data to fold in. Stop rule: a tier that does not reconcile does not close; find the missing contact log entries before starting next season's list. Hazard: none.

The record this produces

The tiered list with its per-tier counts, the per-customer contact log (date, channel, outcome for every touch), the daily booked-versus-capacity count for each crew, the hazard fast-track log (symptom, slot offered, any stop-use guidance given), and the season-close reconciliation tally. Next year's coordinator reads the unresponsive-carryover and monitor-flag entries to build step 1 without starting from a blank list. The owner reads the daily capacity counts to see whether a crew is being run over its rated cap before it shows up as a callback. Where a customer disputes ever being contacted, the dated contact log is what settles it, not memory.

Worked pass: a season that overbooks mid-surge

A shop in the mid-Atlantic, first-fire date typically early November, builds its season list in July: 340 active customers. Cross-checking last-service dates and flags produces 47 in Priority (45 over 14 months, 2 carrying a monitor-revisit flag from spring), 260 in Standard, 33 in Low. The tiers total 340; the list is confirmed against the prior season's flag log and matches.

Priority outreach opens August 16, eleven weeks ahead of November 1. One of the two monitor-flagged customers answers the first call and books within the week. The other does not answer the first call or a text a week later; a third touch on day 21 also goes unanswered, and that customer moves to unresponsive-carryover for next season.

In the last week of September, the coordinator books Tuesday at five jobs against the crew's rated cap of four, adding a gas-insert Level 1 because it looked quick. Step 4's acceptance condition fails: Tuesday is over cap. At the weekly capacity review, the fifth booking is moved to Thursday, which had three booked and room for a fourth; the customer is called and confirmed on the new time before the review closes. Tuesday now reads four, at cap; Thursday now reads four, at cap. The resume is not a note that the day "got handled," it is Thursday's count re-checked against the same rated cap that caught the original overbook.

In mid-September a Priority-tier customer not yet contacted calls in reporting a loud roaring sound from the chimney the previous January and no use since. The call routes past the normal Priority queue order under step 5; a same-week Friday opening exists and is booked directly, symptom and offer date logged.

At close-out before November 1, Priority tallies 44 booked and 3 unresponsive-carryover against the original 47, which reconciles. Standard and Low reconcile the same way at their own pace before the list closes.

References

• See related: Customer Walkthrough and Reporting SOP, for the single end-of-visit booking touch this standard's season-wide campaign is built on top of
• See related: Creosote Borderline: Sweep Now vs One More Burn Season Threshold Decision Tree, for the field call that produces the monitor-revisit flag this list has to catch
• See related: Annual Chimney Inspection SOP, for the inspection this list exists to book
• NFPA 211 - Standard for Chimneys, Fireplaces, Vents, and Solid Fuel-Burning Appliances, annual inspection expectation
• CSIA (Chimney Safety Institute of America) guidance on seasonal service scheduling and creosote-related fire risk