A 14-truck HVAC company losing calls at 5pm
They called us to review a $40,000 platform. We told them not to buy it, and fixed the thing that was actually costing them money.
A quote for a platform nobody had asked for
A field service platform had been pitched to them twice. Forty thousand dollars up front, then a monthly fee per truck, and a promise that it would fix scheduling, invoicing and customer follow up all at once.
The owner was not against spending the money. He just had no way to tell whether it would work, and the person telling him it would was the person selling it.
The money was leaving at five o’clock, not in the scheduling
We pulled three months of phone records. Roughly a fifth of inbound calls came in after the office closed, and almost none of them left a voicemail. Those callers were not waiting until morning, they were calling the next company on the list.
Scheduling, the thing the platform led with, was working. It was on a whiteboard, but the dispatcher could see the whole week and nothing was being dropped. Replacing it would have cost money and made a working process worse for six months.
Three months of call records
Every inbound call, when it came in, and whether anyone picked up or called back.
Two days riding along
We sat with the dispatcher and rode with two crews to see where the day really goes.
The number, in writing
What after-hours calls were worth at their average job value, with the assumptions shown.
Build only that
One booking flow, wired into the board they already used. Nothing else was touched.
A booking flow that answers when nobody is in the office
Calls that come in after hours now reach a booking flow that takes the address, the problem and a time slot, then puts the job straight on the dispatcher’s board for the morning. The customer gets a confirmation before they hang up.
It cost about a tenth of the platform quote, and the whiteboard stayed exactly where it was. The accounts are in the company’s name and they could hand the whole thing to another firm tomorrow.
“They told me not to buy the thing I called them about. Saved me forty grand and about a year of hassle.”