A Michigan windstorm or ice event will hand your shop a week of revenue in 72 hours — if your phone holds up. Most shops lose half of it to busy signals and full voicemail boxes while the crew is already buried. This garage door storm prep playbook is a fill-in checklist you run before the front rolls in, so the surge books itself instead of drowning your office.
Print it. Assign owners. Do it the day the forecast turns.
Work this list top to bottom once you see a lake-effect band, a high-wind advisory, or an ice warning on the map. Check each box and initial who owns it.
If you can only do one thing, do the first: make sure a real answer picks up. Everything else is wasted if the call dies.
Michigan storms break the same things. Wind slams doors off track; ice and cold snap springs; snow load bends struts. Stock deep on these before the run, because you won't have time to source mid-storm.
Put a storm kit on every truck, not the shop shelf. A tech stuck without a spring at 9 PM is a callback and a bad review.
During a storm your phone volume can triple. The trap is trying to solve every call live — you can't. Your job on the phone is to triage and book, fast, in the same words every time. A short shared script keeps quality from cratering when calls stack up.
Frame every storm call in three quick moves:
For the decision tree that sorts a true emergency from a next-morning repair, lean on your emergency call triage flowchart so nobody dispatches a truck at midnight for a door that can wait for coffee. And when the calls come faster than one person can answer, the honest math on lost storm calls is in what after-hours call revenue actually adds up to.
Decide the money rules before the storm, in writing, so nobody argues at midnight. A crew that knows the deal shows up; a crew guessing at pay gets resentful and slow.
Put four things on paper:
Say a windstorm generates 60 calls over three days. Your normal setup catches maybe 30 of them — the rest hit voicemail and call the next shop. Now say a live answer catches all 60, triage books 24 jobs at a $400 average storm ticket (repair plus after-hours premium).
That's $9,600 captured in one storm week. The 30 calls you used to lose were roughly $4,800 walking out the door every event. Run that math on your own numbers before you decide the phone can wait.
The storm doesn't end when the wind stops — the backlog does the damage. The morning after, sort overnight summaries by urgency, call the true emergencies first, and clear the whole queue before noon. Same-day callbacks are what turn a storm into reviews instead of complaints.
If you want a repeatable morning routine for digging out, pair this with your morning missed-call recovery playbook and your standing plan for handling after-hours and emergency garage door calls.
A Michigan storm is free demand — the shop that answers wins it. Run this garage door storm prep list before the front, stock the trucks deep, keep the surge script tight, and settle the overtime rules in writing first. The phones are the one thing you can lock down before the wind even arrives.
Call the live demo and have Ava call you now — hear exactly what your customers will hear when they call your shop.