Acme HVAC is a 6-truck residential heating and cooling shop in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The owner, Sam Reilly, took over from his dad in 2019. They were running on a stack of ServiceTitan + a couple of Google Sheets + a wall calendar. Profitable, growing, and absolutely drowning in admin.
Before TradeOS
Sam tracked it for one week in October 2025:
- 27 quotes drafted (avg 14 minutes each)
- 11 quotes sent same day, 16 sent next day or later
- 9 quotes accepted
- Sunday: 4 hours catching up on invoicing
I was working harder than my dad ever did and I had better software. That can't be right.
The biggest single cost was the gap between job-end and quote-sent. Their close rate on same-day quotes was 71%; on day-3 quotes, 38%. Every hour of lag was costing them jobs.
What they changed
Three things, in this order:
- Switched quoting to the truck. Sam and his two senior techs started drafting quotes in TradeOS during the last 10 minutes of every visit, using photo + voice. No more "I'll send it when I get back."
- Set a default deposit. 25% on jobs over $1,500. Customers either pay it or push back, but either way Sam knows where he stands within the week.
- Connected QuickBooks. Sunday paperwork went from "manually re-typing invoices" to "spot-checking a sync report and signing off." Took two weeks of small fixes to get the chart of accounts right.
The numbers, four months in
- Quote drafting time: 14 min → 3 min average (78% reduction)
- Same-day send rate: 41% → 89%
- Close rate: 53% → 67%
- Sunday admin time: 4 hrs → 25 min
- Average days-to-payment: 21 → 9
Revenue is up 18% YoY in a quarter where the broader market was flat. Sam attributes most of it to the close-rate lift, which is itself almost entirely about quote latency.
Lessons
- The lag is the bug, not the workflow. The difference between a same-day quote and a 3-day quote isn't a quality difference — it's an availability difference.
- Defaults beat policies. "We have a deposit policy" vs. "deposits are pre-checked when you draft" are different worlds. Defaults compound.
- QuickBooks is worth the two weeks. The connection setup was the fiddliest thing they did. Once it stabilized, the time savings dwarfed the setup cost.
I haven't worked a Sunday afternoon since November. My wife thinks I bought a different business.