Operations Consultant for Home Services Companies

A home services company needs three things before AI can help: one owner for every decision, numbers by region and by salesperson, and clean customer data. I ran operations at a home-services company for eight years, from marketing assistant to COO over about 300 people. This is the order I'd use again.

Home services changes every day

HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, emergency repair: it's B2C, and B2C changes every day. The weather, the stock market, people's mood. People call when something breaks. That's stressful, and it's why an owner ends up in every decision.

My main job as COO was to be the translation layer between the owner and the team. A bridge that turns the owner's ideas into plans, and makes sure people understand them and execute.

The order of moves:

1. The right people in the right places.
2. Goals that match the company's goals.
3. Measure everything.

Every person knows where they work

The biggest problem after rebuilding each department was no single goal. There were several legal entities. The call center was its own company. The owner saw a holding. The staff said "I work at the main company."

So the first move was an org chart: which department sits in which legal entity, and what it owns. Every person got a job description and responsibilities. We standardized every role title.

Every person needs four answers:

• Where am I?
• What do I do?
• Why do I do it?
• Where are we going?

That's the day-to-day work of leadership. When decisions still wait on the owner, start with who approves refunds, discounts and overtime.

Where home services companies leak money

Not in the average. The average temperature of the hospital tells you nothing.

We measured Google Ads per region and per salesperson, the full funnel. Facebook Ads failed almost everywhere. Google worked in a few regions, where there was a strong salesperson and low competition. We didn't kill paid ads. We put a responsible person on marketing and on operations in each region, scaled where it worked, and closed where it didn't.

Everyone believed organic was the cheapest lead. So I calculated the real cost of organic leads: the repeat rate, the average ticket. In some locations, mistakes and bad reviews meant organic cost almost more than paid. More in the true cost of organic leads.

Every month we compared paid, organic and retention against each other and decided which channel to push.

Retention is the first thing to automate

People call when something breaks, then they don't come back. We built a membership program and automated retention emails and SMS with offers.

Returning customers paid more than new ones.

The retention department was the first one we automated with AI, in 2023. AI lead scoring found the best-fit customer clusters, and those became the most profitable. The key was clean, verified data first. The full story is in AI for customer retention.

How we work

Efficiency Sprint makes companies operationally ready for AI.

• The Diagnostic. I interview the owner and the team, map where decisions wait, and score each department with SCOPE™ by Efficiency Sprint, on process and on data. You get a roadmap.
• The Sprint. We build what the roadmap says: one owner per decision, numbers by region, clean data, written processes. Then the first agents, each with a person who owns the outcome.

From Luba Inz's engagements with 10+ owner-led companies: first results show in about 4 weeks (an operating rhythm, reporting, tracking, KPIs).

Book a call

If your company still runs through you, let's talk.

Not ready for a call? Take the AI readiness quiz.