The Problem
Metro Plumbing's owner had been running the same operation for 11 years. Three trucks, steady referral business, good reputation. But the growth ceiling was obvious: he was also the dispatcher, the estimator, and the follow-up department.
He called it "the leak he couldn't find" -- the business was producing work, but revenue wasn't growing the way the workload suggested it should. When we ran a discovery audit, four specific problems surfaced immediately.
After-Hours Calls Going to Voicemail
42% of all inbound calls came in after 5pm or on weekends. Every one of them went to a generic voicemail. Most didn't leave a message. They called someone else.
Non-Emergency Quotes Going Cold
About 35% of revenue came from non-emergency work: water heater replacements, bathroom rough-ins, fixture upgrades. These prospects shop around. Without a follow-up system, roughly half of those quotes aged out with no second contact.
Scheduling via Text Thread
Job scheduling ran through a 3-person text chain. Double-bookings happened twice a month. Crews showed up to jobs that hadn't been confirmed. Time was constantly lost to coordination overhead.
No Review Generation Process
The company had 4.1 stars on Google with 22 reviews after 11 years. Three competitors in the same service area had 4.7+ with 200+ reviews. He was losing search visibility and social proof to companies with worse field work.
None of these problems required hiring someone. They required building systems that run without a person in the loop.
"I knew calls were slipping through. I just didn't know it was almost half of them. When you see that number, you stop thinking about whether to fix it."
Metro Plumbing Co., OwnerThe Stack We Built
SYNTAX designed and deployed four automation workflows in 11 days. Each one targets a specific leak in the business. None require the owner to manage them once they're running.
After-Hours Lead Capture and Qualification
An AI voice agent now answers every call after 5pm and on weekends. It identifies the type of job, collects the caller's name and address, asks one qualifying question (emergency or scheduled), and books them into the calendar or creates a callback task for the next morning -- with full context already logged.
Callers who prefer not to talk to a voice agent get an automatic SMS fallback: "We just missed your call -- reply with your address and what's going on and we'll get you scheduled." 73% of after-hours contacts now result in a booked appointment or a qualified callback.
Estimate Follow-Up Sequence
When an estimate is sent, a 3-touch follow-up sequence triggers automatically: a personalized check-in email at 24 hours, an SMS at day 3 ("Just following up on the quote I sent -- any questions I can answer?"), and a final email at day 7 with a scheduling link. If the homeowner responds at any point, the sequence stops and the owner gets notified.
For the non-emergency quote segment specifically, close rate moved from 48% to 67% within 60 days -- the improvement driven entirely by the follow-up sequence catching prospects before they committed to a competitor. On an average non-emergency ticket of $1,400, that lift across 6 quotes per week compounds quickly.
Scheduling Confirmation and Crew Dispatch
New jobs booked through any channel -- phone, website, or referral -- now flow into a single Google Calendar automatically. The homeowner gets an SMS confirmation immediately and a reminder the morning of the job. The assigned tech gets a separate SMS with the address, job type, and any notes from the intake. Double-bookings dropped to zero.
Post-Job Review Request
When a job is marked complete and invoiced, the homeowner gets an SMS 2 hours later: "Thanks for having us out today -- if we did a good job, a quick Google review goes a long way for our small business." One tap. Direct link to the review page. In the first 90 days, Metro Plumbing received 28 new Google reviews, moving from 4.1 to 4.6 stars.
Timeline
Results at 90 Days
These are the numbers at the 90-day mark. The revenue projection is based on close rate improvement applied to trailing 12-month estimate volume.
"The first week it was live, I had three jobs booked that I never would have known about. One of them was a $3,800 water heater replacement. That paid for the whole thing."
Metro Plumbing Co., OwnerWhat This Cost
The SYNTAX engagement for Metro Plumbing was a one-time build at $4,800 plus a $650/month retainer covering hosting, monitoring, and workflow updates. The software stack runs $290/month at current volume.
Total first-year investment: approximately $13,000. Projected first-year revenue increase: $140,000. Every dollar of that is recoverable work that was already arriving at their phone -- they just had no system to catch it.