Operations improvement for home service companies
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, restoration: businesses that run on schedules, trucks, technicians, and paperwork. When the operation falls behind the work, the symptoms show up everywhere: dispatch scrambles, slow invoicing, missed leads, and an office that spends its day re-typing information between systems.
Talk through an operating problemCommon operating problems in field service businesses
Dispatch depends too heavily on individual memory.
One or two people carrying the schedule by phone, text, and recall.
Invoicing lags the work.
Jobs finish; billing waits on paperwork; cash arrives weeks later than it should.
Technicians do office work.
Time that should be billable goes to forms, photos, and status updates that the workflow should carry automatically.
Leads fall through.
Calls answered but not logged, quotes sent but not followed, no owner for the handoff between intake and sales.
The software is owned but not connected.
Field service management, accounting, and marketing tools each doing part of the job, with your office as the manual bridge.
An engagement here starts by following one job end to end: from the first call, through scheduling and dispatch, the work itself, the paperwork that follows it, and the invoice that closes it. At each handoff the questions are the same. Who owns this step, what does it wait on, where is the same information entered twice, and what does the delay cost. The fixes are measured the same way: time to invoice, first-visit completion, calls handled per coordinator, jobs closed without rework.
Fix the workflow before adding tools
The entry is a focused Operations Diagnostic on the workflow hurting most, often dispatch-to-invoice or lead-to-quote: one to two weeks, fixed fee, findings quantified, a 90-day plan you can run with or without us. Fix Sprints then implement the priorities one at a time, each measured against its baseline. Where automation or better integration between your existing systems will pay for itself, the Diagnostic identifies it; the workflow gets designed first. What a Diagnostic covers · how engagements run · how BMG works with owner-led businesses.
Operating background
From Brad Berlin's operating career. Not BMG client outcomes.
- Support resolution time cut from about 26 minutes to about 90 seconds at MyCarrier, by redesigning intake and routing workflows and connecting the systems the company already owned.
- Monthly operating expenses reduced 30 to 40% as COO of Freightclaims.com during a capital-constrained period.
What the work looks like across multiple locations
An illustration of BMG's method. Not a client engagement.
The pattern
A company runs three or four branches. Each has its own dispatcher, its own informal rules about who takes which job, and its own relationship with the same field service software. Utilization looks acceptable at the company level and poor inside any given week: one branch turns work away on Tuesday while another has technicians idle twenty minutes down the road. Nobody is doing anything wrong. There is no shared view of capacity and no rule for crossing a branch boundary.
What gets followed
The same job type, from first call to paid invoice, in each location. Running three versions of one workflow side by side is usually the fastest way to find which version is right: how the call is captured, how it is scheduled, what the technician receives before arriving, what they send back, how that paperwork becomes an invoice, and how long each handoff waits.
What usually changes first
Rarely the software. Usually the decision rules. One intake queue with an owner. A written rule for when a job crosses a branch line and who approves it. A standard job packet the technician has in hand before arriving. A close-out step the technician can finish in the truck instead of at the office. Then every branch is put on the same version of the same process.
How it is measured
In the operation's own numbers, baselined before anything changes: billable hours per technician per week, first-visit completion rate, days from job complete to invoice sent, and the share of jobs closed without a callback. Cross-branch dispatch is measured separately, on how often it happens and what capacity it recovered.
Multi-location is a process problem before it is a systems problem
Companies running several locations often conclude they need a bigger system. More often they need one process, described once, running the same way everywhere, with the system configured to support it. Adding software to three different processes tends to produce three different configurations of the same software. Own the workflow before you add another subscription.