Offboarding

What it means

Everything between giving notice and the relationship ending. Transferring account ownership, exporting historical data, handing over content and credentials, and deciding what happens to work already in progress.

Almost nobody contracts for it, which means the quality of your last month depends on goodwill. Most agencies behave well. The ones that do not are difficult to do anything about after the fact.

Why it matters in HVAC

Timing is the specific risk. Notice given in April means offboarding through May, which is when cooling season preparation should be running. A month of nobody doing the work lands exactly where it costs most.

The practical answer is to overlap. Appoint the next agency before the last one finishes, and accept paying twice for three or four weeks. Against a lost season it is inexpensive.

How to check it

Ask what offboarding includes before you sign, not when you leave. Specifically: account ownership transfers, historical data export, content and credentials handover, and whether in-progress work is completed or stopped.

A four-item handover checklist

Account ownership on everything: Business Profile, analytics, Search Console, registrar, host, call tracking. Primary ownership, not manager access.

Historical data in a standard format, covering the full engagement rather than the last quarter. If the reporting ran on a proprietary platform, this is the item that needs asking about first.

Content and credentials: the site files, any content produced but not yet published, and logins to anything created in your name. Plus a list of citations and directory listings built on your behalf, because the next agency will otherwise rebuild what already exists.

Finally, what happens to work in progress. An agency finishing the pages it started leaves you whole. One that stops on the notice date leaves half a location cluster, which is worse than not having started.