Jimenez Julien, the person who answers when you write in

Founder and product lead of SeasonTuneUp. He writes the copy on this site, designs the renewal screens, answers the support email, and has sat in enough dispatch offices in March to know what a full board sounds like.

Why a renewal tracker, and why for HVAC

The first version of SeasonTuneUp was a favor. A four truck shop outside Columbus asked me to look at why their maintenance plan revenue had gone flat two years running while their install numbers kept climbing. They were selling agreements fine. Sixty, seventy new plans a season, sold at the kitchen table by techs who believed in them. The problem was on the other end. Nobody owned the renewal.

I spent a week in that office. What I found was a workbook named after the woman who kept it, with a tab per year, colored rows that meant something to exactly one person, and no way to answer the question the owner kept asking: how many agreements are we going to lose between now and June? By Thursday I had counted 84 plans that had rolled past their anniversary in the previous eighteen months with no call, no notice, no charge attempted. At an average of $228 a year that is not a rounding error. That is a truck payment.

What surprised me more was the second number. Of the plans that did renew, close to a third never got their second seasonal visit. The customer paid for spring and fall and got spring. Those customers renewed at less than half the rate of the ones who got both visits, which meant the shop was paying for its own churn a year in advance. Nobody was tracking delivery against the promise, because the invoice closes when the tech leaves and nothing in the system remembers what was still owed.

So the product got built around two clocks instead of one. The first clock is the renewal date, counted from the day the customer actually signed rather than from a shared January date that buries an office in one month of calls. The second clock is the visit ledger: what you promised, what you delivered, what is still outstanding, and how close the season is to closing on you. Everything else in SeasonTuneUp, the campaigns, the booking board, the retries on dead cards, the equipment records, exists to serve those two clocks.

How I work with HVAC operators

I do not run a discovery call with a slide deck. I ask for a CSV export and I ask for forty minutes with whoever actually chases renewals, because that person knows things the owner does not. Then I run the lapse report against the real book and read the number out loud, whatever it says. Sometimes it says the shop is doing fine and does not need this. I have told people that and I will keep telling people that, because a shop that buys software it does not need cancels in ninety days and tells everyone at the supply house.

The rest of the time I stay close to the season. February and March I am on the phone almost daily with maintenance coordinators, watching how the spring campaigns land, which reminder wording gets replies and which gets ignored. September I do the same on the heating side. Feature work happens in the shoulder months, June and December, because nobody in this trade wants a changed screen during a heat wave.

Experience and expertise

  • Two full spring seasons of ride alongs and dispatch office observation across shops in Ohio, Arizona and the Carolinas, sitting with the person who owns the renewal list.
  • Twelve years building scheduling, recurring billing and field data systems for small operators, most of it in trades where the work is seasonal and the customer relationship lasts a decade.
  • Direct work on card and ACH recovery sequencing, including the retry timing that separates a recovered renewal from a lost one.
  • Ongoing review of agreement structures across 268 shops, which is where the benchmark numbers on the home page come from.
  • Publication director for MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes SeasonTuneUp and stands behind the terms on this site.

How this product is built and maintained

Everything published here is written by me, checked against real usage data, and dated. The benchmark figures on the home page are medians drawn from shops that imported a complete agreement book and ran both seasonal campaigns for at least one full year. When a number changes, I change it here rather than keeping the flattering version. If I cannot support a claim with data from the running product, it does not go on the site.

Product decisions follow the season, not a roadmap document. Anything that touches the renewal calendar, the payment retry sequence or the booking board is tested against a copy of a real book before it ships, and never ships in March or August. Customer data is never used to train anything and is never sold, rented or shared. Every shop can export its full book at any time, in a format that opens in a spreadsheet without special software.

Support is not tiered by plan. Whether you pay $45 or $229 a month, the reply comes from the same inbox and usually from me. I am accountable for what this site says, for what the product does with your customer list, and for telling you plainly when SeasonTuneUp is not the right fit for the way your shop runs.

Published articles

These are the nine reports I have written for Shoulder Season, the SeasonTuneUp magazine on maintenance agreements and tune up season, all published on September 3, 2026.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question, a correction, or an agreement export you want looked at. I read everything and answer in writing, normally within one business day and slower during the first two weeks of March. If you would rather start with a screen share, use the request form on the home page and say what time zone you are in.

Editorial note. This page was last reviewed on March 2, 2026. The publisher details, the registration numbers and the hosting information are listed on the legal notice, and the handling of anything you send through the form is described in the privacy policy.