A year ago, Stephanie Allen stepped back from the daily grind at AirWorks Solutions and trusted her leadership team to run the floor. But after a while, the HVAC and plumbing company, which she runs with her husband in Ventura County, California, had developed loose processes, loose systems, and a net profit deep in the negative.
"I was negative couple 100% on my net profit, around this time," Allen said.
This year, despite business being slow, AirWorks is operating at a 15% net profit with a team of roughly 40 people, and on track to achieve $14 million in revenue.
Allen credits the turnaround to five specific disciplines she built, and now, she’s sharing this playbook with you.
Accountability: one throat to choke
AirWorks runs on five departments: lead generation, lead processing, sales, production, and back office — each has exactly one person responsible for it. "You need to have one throat to choke for each of those," Allen said, borrowing the phrase from a consultant who helped her build the structure.
The rule she holds everyone to, herself included, is one person per seat, never two people sharing the same responsibility.
The right platform, used all the way through
AirWorks simplified its business units and job types inside ServiceTitan so inefficiencies are identified using data, instead of hiding in a messy chart.
Every call, every in-home conversation, every internal meeting gets recorded, and Allen runs those recordings through an LLM to flag what needs attention.
Dispatch Pro helps them set their board, then gives control over to a human whomakes the final call on edits.
Once dispatched, Field Pro tracks techs to ensure they’re covering what’s supposed to be covered on every visit.
Memberships built around real need, not a six-month check-in
AirWorks rebuilt its membership plan around smart sensors that monitor equipment inside the home.
Instead of showing up every six months, unaware if a customer requires services, technicians now get pulled toward calls where something is happening in the system.
Diagnostics are waived for members, and every visit on the schedule justified by data, instead of a simple guess.
Repair before replace, and options instead of ultimatums
Every technician provides homeowners with both a repair option and a replacement option, with the net cost of each laid out plainly.
"If you are not giving homeowners options, I tell my technicians you're giving them ultimatums, and nobody wants an ultimatum in their home," Allen said.
The approach trades a fast sale for a long relationship.
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Recording everything, because peak season data is rich
Most shops treat their busiest months as too chaotic to document. Allen treats it the opposite way.
Peak season is when techs will experience the highest volume of customer interactions, making it the richest window for figuring out what works and what doesn't. Allen takes advantage of this by recording top performers on the job and using this information to build a company-wide process instead of leaving it in any one person's head.
None of the five disciplines above depend on the others. What connects them is the same habit: check the numbers, on a schedule, regardless of the season.
"If you aren't disciplined in what you're doing in your business, it's very easy to die by a million paper cuts," Allen said.
A year ago, she'd stopped checking. This year, she's looking at the numbers every week, and the results are being reflected in the returns.
Ready to hear the full playbook, including how Allen's team is using AI without losing the human touch? >> Watch the full webinar on demand
