The starting picture
Riley’s Heating, $6.2M revenue, 24 staff, single owner-operator. The complaint that triggered the engagement was straightforward: the ops lead was spending three full days a week stitching together reports nobody read, the AEs were forgetting to follow up on warm pipeline, and Tuesdays had become “catch-up day” by default.
We scoped four agents in week one. Here’s how week eight looks.
The four agents
- CRM hygiene loop, shipped week 2. Cleaned 1,400 stale records in the first run.
- Inbound triage, shipped week 4. Drafts the first reply, books a meeting, or sends the lead to the right AE with one click.
- Weekly leak report, shipped week 5. Replaces the Monday digest. Reads “what slipped” instead of “what happened.”
- Invoice nudge, shipped week 7. Sends reminders, escalates only the ones the agent gives up on.
What changed about Tuesdays
Tuesdays used to be the day everyone caught up on the backlog. They’re now the day everyone does the work that needed judgment in the first place. The ops lead reports back in for two hours on Tuesday mornings to review what the leak report flagged, and that’s it.
The numbers
- 18.6 hours per week reclaimed across three people.
- $54k annualized labor avoided at the blended hourly cost they shared with us.
- 9-day median payback across the four agents.
What we’d do differently
The invoice nudge should have shipped before the inbound triage. The cash velocity gain was bigger and the build was cheaper. We didn’t see it until week 6 because we were anchored on the original scope. Lesson: re-run the ranked-list assessment at the end of every month, not just at kickoff.
Read the case study for the full architecture, screenshots, and the policies behind each agent.