Run your heating company on numbers you can check

What public data can tell a heating owner

Public data can't tell you what to charge, but it can tell you what kind of homes surround you and how that is shifting. That is the context most growth plans skip.

Statistics Canada's primary heating systems table (38-10-0286-01) asks households every two years what heats their home. For reference year 2023, it reports that 46% of Canadian households relied on a forced-air furnace as their main system, 7% on a boiler with radiators and 8% on a heat pump. A decade earlier, in 2013, the same table showed 53%, 9% and 3%.

Read that carefully before you act on it. The 2023 survey added new categories, such as centralized systems in apartments and mini-splits, so part of the furnace decline is a change in how answers were sorted. The heat pump climb is real in several provinces, though, and it is not spread evenly: our provincial pages show where it is happening fastest.

Two more public tables round out the picture:

• Competitors. Statistics Canada's Canadian Business Counts, June 2026 edition, lists 16,754 employer locations under plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors (NAICS 238220). That category includes plumbers, so treat it as a ceiling on heating competitors, not a count.
• Seasonality. The monthly natural gas distribution table (25-10-0059-01) shows that, by our calculation, 72.1% of residential gas deliveries in Canada in 2025 happened between November and March. That is roughly the share of the year's heating load your phones and crews have to absorb in five months.

The owner's scorecard

A useful scorecard fits on one page and splits every number by equipment line. A single company-wide close rate hides the fact that your furnace replacements may be thriving while your heat pump quotes stall.

We usually start with these, all taken from your own records:

1. Installs per month, by furnace, boiler and heat pump
2. Average invoiced ticket for each line
3. Calls answered within business hours, and calls missed after hours
4. Quotes issued and quotes won, per line
5. Maintenance agreements active at the end of each quarter
6. Marketing spend per booked install, per line

The Owner KPI scorecard page explains how each one is defined so it means the same thing next quarter. We don't compare you to an industry average, because we haven't found a trustworthy public one.

Growth across furnaces, boilers and heat pumps

The right growth plan depends on the homes around you, and those differ sharply by province. Alberta and Saskatchewan remain furnace country; the Maritimes have moved quickly toward heat pumps; Quebec is mostly electric.

A worked example shows why the split matters. Suppose you installed 120 furnaces at an average ticket of $7,000 and 40 heat pumps at $12,000 last year. Furnaces brought in $840,000 and heat pumps $480,000. If the plan is to move 20 jobs from furnaces to heat pumps, revenue rises by $100,000 at the same job count, but only if you have trained installers and a way to generate heat pump enquiries. That last part is where marketing comes in, and where the Furnace, boiler and heat pump growth plan starts.

Your own ticket values replace ours, of course. The method is the point: price each line, then decide.

Capacity and the heating calendar

The busiest weeks of a heating company are predictable in shape, even if not in date. The trouble is that most owners staff for the average month and then lose calls in the first real cold snap.

Our Season and capacity planning work uses the gas delivery curve for your province as a stand-in for heating demand, then lines it up against your installer hours and phone coverage. The gas season guide walks through the arithmetic so you can do it yourself.

The quarterly owner review

Numbers only help if someone looks at them on a schedule. The Quarterly owner review is a ninety-minute session that ends with three decisions in writing: what to grow, what to fix and what to stop.

Who we are

HeatingBusiness.ca is part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group of companies. We are Canadian, headquartered in Vancouver, BC, and led by Ali Sedighi, MBA, who has built more than 150 live HVAC websites over a career that began in 2007. We are a marketing and consulting service only. We are not a contractor, and the installs, repairs and service calls stay with you.

Our marketing plans run through our parent brand, HVAC.Agency. For proof of the method, see our results from our HVAC work: HVACDeal.ca generated 500+ leads at a 12:1 ROI, and CanroHeat.ca saw 250% lead growth.

Start with a short message

The simplest start is a text to (604) 632-4959 with your company name and province. A rough idea of last year's installs by equipment type helps, but it isn't required. You can also call or email, and we meet by video call or in person. Plan costs sit on our pricing page; the FAQ covers contracts, ownership and reporting.