Turner & Barnett Consulting co-founder, Michael Turner, explains how office staff, not technicians, limit growth for HVACR businesses.
Most HVACR contractors I talk to don't have a crew problem. They've got good techs, full vans and more work on the board than they can quote.
The hold-up is back at the office. Look at what happens to a typical job after the call comes in. Someone takes the details and types them into the job system.
The estimator pulls supplier prices from a PDF or a portal and copies them into a quote, line by line. The tech finishes on site and the job sheet sits in the ute until Thursday.
The invoice can't go out until someone chases that sheet. Then on Friday, the owner or office manager rebuilds the weekly report by hand from three different places. None of that is hard work. There's just a lot of it, and it's the same work over and over.
Because it quietly holds up the cash, the usual answer is to hire another admin person. Sometimes that's the right call. Often it isn't.
A new hire doesn't fix a process that makes people type the same details four times. It just means more people typing. What I'd suggest instead is three steps, in this order.
First, map the job. Sit down with whoever does the office work and write out every step from first call to paid invoice. Every copy, every paste, every "I just check this spreadsheet first".
Most owners are surprised by how long the list is. We worked with one business whose sales process had 42 manual steps. Nobody designed it that way. It just grew.
Second, cut the steps that don't need to exist. This is the cheap bit, and it's usually the biggest win. If the job details are already in the system, nobody should be re-keying them into the quote.
If the tech can submit the job sheet from their phone before they leave site, nobody needs to chase it. That 42-step process came down to 8.
Third, automate the repeatable steps, and only those. Once the process is short and clean, software can take on the work that follows the same rules every time: pulling current supplier prices into a quote template, turning a finished job sheet into a draft invoice, building the Friday report from data that's already there.
In that business, 4 of the remaining 8 steps now run on their own. A person still checks the quote before it goes, still makes the call on the odd job, and still talks to the customer. The software just does the copying.
The order matters. Automate a messy process and you get a faster messy process. Buy software before you've mapped the work and you usually end up paying for features you don't need while the real problem stays put.
There's a people side to this too. Good office staff don't want to spend their day retyping. Take that off them and they can spend the time on things that actually need a person: following up quotes, sorting out a tricky customer, keeping the schedule tight when a tech calls in sick.
One business we worked with took on more crew without growing the back office. That's the outcome worth aiming for. More jobs out the door, invoices going out the same day the work is done, and an owner who isn't rebuilding a spreadsheet on Friday night.
If you want somewhere to start this week, pick one job that finished recently and trace it from the first phone call to the money landing in the account.
Count the times someone typed the same thing twice. That number tells you where the limit on your growth really sits.
Michael Turner is co-founder of Turner & Barnett Consulting, a Brisbane firm that helps owner-led construction and trades businesses take manual work off their office teams.