Brightwater Plumbing

Bleeding — money is actively leaving. Leaking — costing you, but survivable. Solid — leave it alone. Each section below links to what we’d change, except the one we say to leave alone.

Your Google Business Profile has 38 reviews at 4.7, the most recent three months ago — healthy. You told us roughly 75% of work is referrals and repeat homeowners, and that you’ve never run outbound. You also said commercial and property-management accounts are your best margin and you’d take more.

Demand you’ve never generated is hard to price, so we won’t invent a figure. What we can count: 412 property-management and HOA accounts in your county fit the commercial profile you described, and you reach them through no channel at all. At a conservative 2% annual conversion on a worked list and your stated $1,900 commercial ticket, that’s a range worth modeling — call it eight to ten jobs a year — not a promise, but not a rounding error.

The 412 becomes a list you work — sequenced and contacted without anyone in the office touching it. Reviews get requested automatically after every completed job, so the momentum doesn’t stall between busy stretches.

Calls ring to the front desk in business hours and to voicemail after 5pm and on weekends. You estimated about 10 calls a week get missed during busy stretches, and 5 after-hours calls a week that “get returned next day, if at all.” Quotes that don’t close get one follow-up, then nothing. We called your main line twice while preparing this; one rang out to voicemail.

Every call gets answered inside 60 seconds — 2pm on a Tuesday and 11pm on a Saturday — by something that can qualify the job, book it against your real schedule, and flag the emergencies. Nothing reaches voicemail. Quotes that don’t close get followed up on a schedule, not on whether someone remembered.

You schedule in a shared calendar with three plumbers, assigned by whoever’s at the desk. When that person is out, “it’s rough for a day.” Plumbers sometimes reach a job without the history and drive back to the shop for parts.

You said parts runs happen “a few times a week.” Call it 3 round trips a week at 40 minutes — 104 hours a year of paid time producing nothing. At a $42/hr loaded rate: $4,368. That excludes fuel and the revenue from the job that didn’t happen in those hours, which is the larger number and one we can’t estimate honestly from what we have.

Assignment happens against location, skills, and job history instead of memory. Plumbers see what they’re walking into before they leave. When the scheduler takes a week off, nothing changes.

You invoice from the field, same-day in most cases, and spend about 3 hours a week on billing and 2 on reporting. Payments mostly land same-day.

About $10,920 a year in loaded labor across billing and reporting — roughly what this should cost at your size. There’s a small argument for trimming the reporting hours; it’s a small one.

Nothing. This is working — same-day field invoicing is better than most shops your size. Don’t let anyone sell you a fix here, including us. Whatever budget you have belongs in Response.

Answer every call.

Your Response score is less than half your next-worst section, and it’s the only gap where the money leaves on a known schedule — every missed ring, every unreturned voicemail. Nothing else you could do this quarter recovers $49,920, and it doesn’t depend on anything else being fixed first. Realistically, live inside two weeks.

1. Work the 412. Once inbound is actually being caught, outbound is worth turning on; doing it in the other order just means more calls you miss.

2. Fix dispatch. The parts-run problem and the single-point-of-failure problem are the same problem, worth solving once call volume is higher.

We looked at your review velocity, your local ranking, your site’s speed, and your public complaints. Site performance is fine — 2.3s load, nothing to fix there. We couldn’t see your plumber retention or your supplier terms, and both could move the Operations picture in either direction. If either is a sore spot, tell us and we’ll revise.