Inside a Bohaus Sprint: A Plumbing Company

The situation

The client is an owner-led residential plumbing company. Seven trucks, a service manager who still runs calls, one dispatcher, and an office manager who handles billing in QuickBooks. Jobs run through Housecall Pro. After five, calls roll to an answering service that takes a message and texts the on-call plumber.

The owner has also been buying AI. A website chatbot. A review-reply tool. A writing assistant the office manager uses for estimates. A call-recording app with AI summaries. Each one is billed monthly. None of them books a job.

Meanwhile the money leaks where it always has. A water heater fails on a Sunday. A slab leak shows up at dinner time. The answering service takes a message, the on-call plumber is under a sink, and by the time anyone calls back, the homeowner has booked the next company on the search page.

What the sprint finds

In Discover, we list every subscription and ask each person what they actually use. The pattern is common. The AI tools sit beside the business, not inside it. The chatbot collects names into an inbox nobody watches on weekends. The call summaries never reach Housecall Pro.

Then we map what happens to a call, from first ring to booked job, during the day and after hours. The handoffs are where it breaks. The answering service cannot see the schedule. The on-call plumber gets a text with half an address. The dispatcher starts Monday by rebuilding the weekend from voicemails.

Housecall Pro, meanwhile, already supports online booking, job notes and customer history. Most of it is switched off.

In Diagnose, after-hours and overflow intake ranks first. It is where emergency work is won or lost, and the tools to fix it are already paid for.

What it builds

In Build, we create one intake system inside the field service platform.

When the office is closed or the lines are full, calls and web requests are answered, and the caller is asked the right questions: active leak or not, water shut off or not, address, access, and whether they are an existing customer. Emergencies are booked into the on-call slot and the on-call plumber gets a complete job, not a fragment. Routine work, like a running toilet or a quote for a water heater, is booked into the next open daytime slot.

Every call becomes a job or a callback task with an owner. Nothing ends as a voicemail.

The chatbot and the call-summary app are switched off. The owner decides what else to cancel.

Hand over

In Hand over, the dispatcher and the office manager learn the system in depth, including how to adjust the questions and the on-call rules. Plumbers get a short walkthrough on what an after-hours job looks like on their phone. A short playbook covers edge cases, such as a caller who is not sure whether it is an emergency, and names the dispatcher as the owner.

The team gets a simple dashboard: calls answered, jobs booked, callbacks open. And a roadmap of what comes next, often replacement quote follow-up.

What changes

The weekend stops arriving as a stack of voicemails. Emergency callers get booked while they are still on the line. The on-call plumber rolls with an address, a description and access notes. The dispatcher starts Monday with a clean board.

The software bill goes down. The owner can point to one thing AI does for the business every night.

What this means for your business

Most trade businesses do not have an AI shortage. They have a pile of tools working alone while the phone goes unanswered.

For a plumber, the first job is usually the after-hours call. For an electrician it might be estimate follow-up. For a pest control company, renewals. The pattern is the same: list what you pay for, find what is used, turn on what you already own, and make one job run every time.

That is a Bohaus Sprint: six weeks, fixed scope, one live system inside the tools you already use, and a team trained to run it.