September
Trades Board

The only trade body here that meets monthly rather than quarterly or annually, so there is always a program hole. Demand is non-seasonal and commercial shops are pushing to close projects before year-end budgets die, which puts capacity and admin drag on their minds right now. The room is small, roughly a dozen active owners, and that is the feature: everyone in it signs checks. The real multiplier is the supporting members, since each distributor rep talks to dozens of owners a week.

Formerly the Allentown Master Plumbers Association, founded 1897, rebranded 2021. September is their most active month of the year because apprenticeship classes start and enrollment runs into the second week, so the board is meeting and sponsoring owners are engaged. Pitch the association leadership and the owners who sponsor apprentices, never the apprentices. Plumbing demand is flat year-round, which makes them the most available trade this month.

There is no separate HVAC body in the Lehigh Valley, which is why plumbing and HVAC collapse into one outreach motion here. Timing is the sneaky-good part: AC season is winding down and heating season does not hit until mid-October, so this is one of the only stretches all year an HVAC owner will sit for an hour. It is also when they staff up for winter and run fall tune-up campaigns, which is exactly when scheduling pain is loudest. The better door than any association is a distributor counter day, since a distributor will let a non-competing vendor present on two weeks of notice and no association will.

LVBA runs roughly 150 members across builders, remodelers, subs and suppliers in Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, Emmaus, Whitehall and Nazareth, and their 35th Annual Awards registration is open, so that banquet is a room worth buying a seat at. ABC’s Lehigh Valley Council quarterly is not on their public calendar, which makes it a phone call. Fall backlog season means busy but reachable. Longer cycle than the service trades because remodelers carry less phone-based revenue leak.

PLNA’s September calendar has nothing in the Lehigh Valley. Native plant tours in Hockessin Delaware, a Penn State Extension webinar on the 9th, GreenTech North America in Philadelphia on the 23rd and 24th. A Lehigh Valley landscape owner in September is mid-peak and heading into leaf season through November. He is cash-rich and time-poor and will not sit in a lunch-and-learn. Landscapers buy systems in December through February, when the trucks are parked. Kwame’s first client is a landscaper, so this trade is his credibility, not his target.

September through November is their absolute peak, storm season plus everyone racing to get a roof on before winter. A roofing owner will not take a meeting now and should not. Put them on a list and hit the second week of January, when the phone stops and they are staring at a slow quarter. That is when roofers buy.

Found through Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore commercial reps and through LVBA. Interior season starts in October. Shops here tend to be small and thinly capitalized, so this trade fails the average-ticket test that makes the other six work.