What an SIS install looks like for a home services contractor.
A walk-through of the install we run for a typical $2-3M/year residential service contractor in the Gulf Coast region. Composite profile, forecasted math, fully transparent. No mystery dashboards, no invented testimonials.
This is a composite, not a client.
"Atlas Home Services" below is illustrative. It is not a single named client of ours. The profile is composed from the kind of operation we install for: a residential roofing or HVAC contractor doing somewhere between two and three million a year, mostly storm and replacement work, owner-operated, one dispatcher, two or three trucks rolling daily.
The numbers here reflect industry averages and our typical install pattern. They are presented as a forecast of what the install would do for a business like this. They are not a claim of past results. We are six months into Summit Intake Systems and we publish the math we run rather than invent client wins we have not earned yet.
Atlas Home Services: the profile.
Atlas runs roughly $2.4M in annual revenue, mostly residential. Their service mix is about 60% roofing (replacement and storm), 25% gutter and exterior, 15% emergency tarping and minor repairs. Average job ticket lands around $7,800, with a long tail of $25,000+ full-replacement jobs sitting next to a base of $400 minor-repair tickets. Close rate on estimated jobs hovers around 28%, which is in the normal range for this size of operation.
Lead sources are roughly split between Google Local Service ads, organic referral, and storm-chase canvassing. Inbound call volume averages 320 calls a month with sharp spikes after weather events. The owner answers his cell on personal time. The shop has one dispatcher who covers the main line during business hours and also tries to qualify leads, schedule techs, and field supplier calls.
Current intake is a phone, a notebook, and ServiceTitan for dispatch. No missed-call text-back. No after-hours coverage. No automated review request. Estimates get followed up manually when somebody remembers.
The owner is not a tech holdout. He just has never had time to install one, and the last sales call he took from a CRM rep ended in a six-month implementation slog that delivered a calendar nobody used. He is open to automation. He is closed to anything that promises miracles or requires his crew to learn new software.
For the long-form version of the install pattern by tool and role, see the home services intake playbook. The case study below is the same playbook expressed as one operator's projected numbers rather than a generic stack.
Where the dollars leak today.
The dispatcher misses an estimated 30-40% of inbound calls during business hours. Some of those go to voicemail, most do not. The caller hangs up and dials the next contractor on the search results. Industry data puts the home services missed-call rate in this range and we have not yet met an operation in this profile where the real number is lower than that.
After hours is worse. Atlas closes the office at 5pm. Leak calls do not stop coming in at 5pm. Roughly 25-35% of total weekly inbound lands in the after-hours window. Today, all of that volume goes to voicemail. Roughly one in ten of those callers leaves a message. Roughly one in three of those messages gets returned within 24 hours. The compounding loss is severe.
Follow-up on quoted estimates is the third leak. Atlas walks the roof, leaves a written quote, and hopes. Industry-typical estimate-to-close conversion sits around 25-30% on first contact, and rises by another 8-12 points with a structured follow-up sequence. Atlas has no sequence. The dispatcher calls back when she can remember to.
Reviews are the quiet leak. The crew finishes a job, the homeowner is happy, nobody asks for the review. Atlas has 42 Google reviews after seven years in business. Their main local competitor has 311. The reviews drive the ad click costs and the close rate of every other lead source.
30 days of work, four phases.
Every SIS install runs the same four-phase rhythm. Here is what each phase looks like for a contractor in the Atlas profile.
Discovery and audit.
Pull 90 days of call records from the existing phone system. Screen-share through ServiceTitan with the dispatcher. Find the dollar leak in writing. By day three the owner sees a one-page audit showing missed calls, after-hours volume, estimate follow-up gap, and the projected install ROI in his own numbers.
Build and integrate.
Configure missed-call text-back on the existing business number. Stand up the AI chat widget on the Atlas site and Google Business Profile. Wire the qualification flow: job type, urgency, address, insurance involvement, system age. Push booked appointments into ServiceTitan with the right job codes and travel buffers. A2P SMS registration runs in parallel.
Test and train.
Run 30+ simulated calls against the qualification flow. Soft launch with bookings reviewed by the dispatcher before pushing to a tech calendar. Train the dispatcher on the dashboard, the override paths, and the manual rebooking flow. Add the review request automation against completed jobs.
Handoff and monitor.
Flip on direct-to-tech booking once the qualification flow has earned trust. Hand off the dashboard. Weekly tuning calls for the first month. The 90-day ROI clock starts on day 30. If recovered revenue does not clear the install fee inside 90 days, we refund the difference.
What the install is projected to recover.
Based on industry averages and our typical install for a contractor in this profile, here is what the math looks like. Every number below is forecasted, not retroactive. Real installs land inside this range with normal variance.
How the recovered revenue number is built: at 320 inbound calls a month with a 65% pre-install capture rate, Atlas is touching roughly 208 leads. Lifting capture to ~95% across business and after-hours adds about 96 leads per month. We discount aggressively for lead quality and time-decay, assuming the post-install close rate on those recovered leads is closer to 12-15% rather than the live 28-36% rate.
That gives roughly 12-15 additional touched leads converted to jobs per month at an average ticket of $7,800. Discount further for the realistic mix of small repairs versus full replacements that dominate this recovered pool, and we land at a projected range of $22,000-$38,000 in net new recovered monthly revenue. The Money Machine install fee is well inside that range on month one.
The math is a forecast. It is built from numbers we have on the industry, from our install pattern, and from honest discounts for the recovered pool quality. Real installs vary. We publish the model and the assumptions so the operator can do the math themselves.
A note on what is excluded. The forecast above does not credit reputational compounding from review velocity, even though that is one of the highest-leverage outcomes of the install over a 12-month window. A jump from 42 reviews to 200+ over a year tends to drop cost-per-lead on the existing ad spend and lift organic close rate by another few points. We leave that out of the headline number because it is a 12-month effect, not a 90-day one. The 90-day ROI guarantee is built on the captured-leads math alone.
A note on what we will not promise. We do not project specific revenue numbers for a named operator until we have audited their call data. The Atlas math here is the kind of math we run after audit, not the kind we promise before one. On a discovery call we walk through the same model against your actual numbers and you see whether the install math holds up before any contract gets signed.
The system catches the lead. The operator still runs the business.
The honest part of this case study is the part automation does not do. We want to be specific.
The owner closes the sale.
The AI books the inspection. A human walks the roof, writes the quote, and earns the signature. Atlas's close rate stays where his close rate has always been. We do not move the close needle. We move the volume of qualified shots on goal.
The crew runs the job.
Nothing about the install changes how a roof gets installed, how a permit gets pulled, or how the supplier order gets placed. The system stops at the point where the work begins.
The dispatcher owns judgment calls.
Emergency calls (active leak, structural concern, anything that smells like injury) route to a human inside 60 seconds. The AI handles the standard estimate pipeline and gets out of the way the moment something looks abnormal. The dispatcher is the safety net the AI flows into.
The owner owns the relationship.
The first conversation about a $30,000 roof replacement is not a transaction. It is a relationship. Atlas's reputation, his crew's craftsmanship, his warranty, his willingness to come back next week and check the gutters: those are what win the recurring referral. We do not touch any of that.
What would change in your version of the math.
The Atlas profile is a midpoint. Your install math will move from there based on three variables.
First, your inbound volume. Higher call volume means a larger recovered pool and a faster payback. Below 120 inbound calls a month, the missed-call gap is small enough that the AI chat layer drives more of the lift than the voice layer. Above 500 calls a month, the dispatch automation becomes the single largest lever in the install.
Second, your average ticket. A contractor running $400 service-call tickets does not see the same math as one running $12,000 replacements. We do not install Money Machines below an average ticket of about $1,500; the payback gets soft. The home services profile that fits this install almost always has a five-figure replacement product as the anchor offer.
Third, your existing intake. If you already have a strong dispatcher, a working CRM, and a real follow-up sequence, the SIS lift is smaller than it would be for Atlas. We will tell you that on the discovery call. We have walked operations off this install when their internal team was running it well enough already; the right answer there is a Lane 2 or Lane 3 build, not a Lane 1 install.
Want this install run against your own numbers?
A 12-minute walkthrough. We pull your call data, your average ticket, your existing intake. You see the same audit Atlas would see, on your real business, before you decide anything.
No commitment. No pitch deck. Just the numbers.