Be the Batteries: The Case for Recurring Revenue
Draft — pending Dean's review before publishing.
I equate almost everything in business to batteries. Stay with me. People always have to buy batteries. When they run out, you go buy new ones — again and again and again. If you're in the battery business, your customers never really stop being your customers. They keep coming back because the thing they bought gets used up.
That's the whole game: find a way to be a consumable. Be the batteries.
One-time sales are a treadmill
A business that lives on one-time transactions is always starting over. Every month you wake up at zero and have to go win it all again. That's exhausting, and it's fragile — one slow quarter and the whole thing wobbles.
Think about how you actually spend money. You don't have to go to a particular restaurant. But you're going to your local grocery store for milk, bread, whatever you eat — over and over, forever. That's consumable demand. It doesn't depend on a great mood or a hot economy. It just repeats.
In the trades, consumables are service contracts
So what's the battery in a home-services business? Service contracts. Maintenance agreements. The recurring relationship where a customer pays you on a schedule instead of only when something breaks. That's your consumable. It's the thing that carries you through the slow months and fluffs up your profit margin the rest of the year.
It's also why smart money is circling these businesses. Private equity chased HVAC because it's essential and it recurs — heat and cooling aren't optional, and the maintenance never stops. Honestly, I'm surprised they haven't gone harder after grocery, because that's about as consistent as demand gets. The lesson stands either way: recurring beats one-and-done.
Build your battery on purpose
Here's the question to sit with for your own business: what can you create that produces recurring revenue? Not as an afterthought — by design. A membership. A maintenance plan. A monitoring service. A refill. Something a customer signs up for once and keeps paying for because it keeps delivering.
Get that engine running and everything changes. Your baseline stops resetting to zero. You can forecast. You can invest ahead of demand instead of scrambling behind it. And you stop living deal to deal — the trap that keeps most owners stressed and stuck.
Be the batteries. Build the thing people have to keep buying, and let it carry you.