Contractor AI Office / Day 30
When a platform acquires a contracting company it keeps the local name, the trucks and usually the owner. What it changes is the office — and it changes it on a schedule.
Twelve systems get installed in the first thirty days. None of them require a change of control. Check the ones you already run.
| What gets installed | Why they bother | Who runs it here | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | After-hours phone coverage | The single fastest revenue change available. A homeowner with a leak calls three companies and the one that answers gets the job — rarely the cheapest one. | Annie |
| 2 | One customer record | Every estimate, proposal, photo and invoice against one job, so nobody has to ask anybody what happened. | Albert |
| 3 | Estimate follow-up as a rule, not a habit | The industry average is about 1.4 touches on an unsold estimate, and contractors above $10M report follow-up producing 11–15% of income — both from a software vendor’s own survey of residential contractors, so weigh them accordingly. Directionally, follow-up is not a rounding error. | Albert |
| 4 | A standardized pricebook with three options | 54% of thriving contractors present Good / Better / Best on at least half their jobs against under 10% of struggling ones — again a vendor’s survey, and again worth knowing rather than quoting as law. | Albert |
| 5 | Weekly reporting to somebody above the owner | In a platform it goes to a regional VP. The point isn't the VP — it's that the numbers get read on a schedule by someone who acts on them. | Albert |
| 6 | Job costing while the job is open | Material and labor variance caught on day four is a decision. At month end it's a postmortem with a number attached. | Victor |
| 7 | Production scheduled against real capacity | Crews, materials and dates coordinated without the owner brokering it by phone every morning. | Albert |
| 8 | Change orders approved by rule | A written threshold and an audit trail, so a $4,000 change order doesn't wait for someone to get off a roof. | Albert |
| 9 | An onboarding curriculum | New hire productive in week one instead of month three. In a platform this is a program. In most independents it's a guy following the owner around. | Riley |
| 10 | A recruiting funnel that runs when you're not hiring | Labor is the binding constraint in every trade. Platforms treat hiring as always-on infrastructure, not as an emergency. | Riley |
| 11 | AR and collections as a workflow | Chasing money stops being a personality trait somebody has to have and becomes a sequence that runs. | Albert |
| 12 | Purchasing discipline | The one we're honest about: we can standardize what you buy and when, and surface what you're overpaying for. We cannot get you multi-state purchasing power. That gap is real and software doesn't close it. | — |
It took a platform thirty days and a change of control. Seven of the twelve run on the core the week you go live; rows 6, 9 and 10 run on the Victor and Riley add-ons (Victor is in pilot, not for sale yet), and row 1 on Annie, who is still in pilot and not for sale yet. The twelfth we told you the truth about.
Five minutes, your real numbers, no email required to see the result.