TRACE STRATEGIES
Client Story · Commercial HVAC

Six weeks from chaos to calm.

MB
Marcus B.
Owner · Commercial HVAC · 3 branches · 40 techs
3
branches
40
field techs
6 wks
to felt change
The situation

Three branches, forty techs, and an owner still approving every quote himself. Jobs came in faster than the office could route them: dispatch lived on a whiteboard, parts orders lived in text threads, and every Friday ended with the same triage meeting that never cleared the board. Callbacks were creeping up, two senior techs were talking about leaving, and Marcus was working Saturdays just to keep invoicing from slipping. Nothing was on fire, which was the problem: everything smoldered quietly, all at once. What finally moved him was not a crisis. It was realizing he could not take a two-week vacation without the schedule collapsing. He booked the audit that same week.

What the audit found
T

Every job was priority one

With no real targets, the loudest customer set the schedule, and the profitable work waited.

A

The office ran on retyping

Quotes, purchase orders, and invoices were each entered by hand three separate times.

C

Crunch, crash, repeat

Weeks alternated between overtime pushes and idle mornings. Nobody could see the next 30 days.

What we installed
01

Set three targets for the quarter

Sales, callbacks, on-time completion. Every crew's week now points at one of them.

02

Put every job on one board

Intake to invoice in a single view the whole office works from, all three branches.

03

Handed the retyping to a helper

Quotes and purchase orders now flow through once, with a person approving before anything sends.

The results
38%
fewer callbacks within 90 days
11 hrs
of owner admin time back per week
0
invoices missed since week three
6 weeks
from audit to the change being felt
In their words
MB

They came in, found the bottlenecks we'd stopped noticing, and built the fix around how we actually work. Six weeks later the chaos was gone.

Marcus B. · Owner · Commercial HVAC

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