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How a Plumber Scaled to 200 Million by Fixing Scheduling
Description
In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how a mid-sized plumbing company in Phoenix hit $200 million in annual revenue by overhauling its scheduling system—something boring on paper that unlocked explosive growth. They walk through the specific operational bottleneck: technicians were spending 40% of their day driving between jobs because dispatchers manually clustered calls by zip code. The fix was a routing algorithm that minimized drive time, not distance, using traffic data and job-duration estimates. The result: each technician went from 4.5 to 7.2 billable hours per day. Lucas explains the financial math—revenue per truck jumped 60%, customer wait time dropped from 4 hours to 90 minutes, and repeat-customer rates doubled. Luna pushes back on implementation costs and cultural resistance. The episode closes with lessons for any service business where labor is the constraint.