AI for plumbing and HVAC back office: Claude-built pricing calculators, payroll workbooks and automatic install jobs
Blanton & Sons (Adam Grubb, GM; Charleston, SC area)
What they did with AI
Blanton & Sons, a family-owned plumbing and HVAC company in the Charleston, South Carolina area, runs on ServiceTitan, and general manager Adam Grubb (a former plumber) automates every back-office process he can. He used Claude and ChatGPT to build his own tools: a mobile pricing calculator where a tech enters equipment cost, material cost, target margin and commission and gets a price plus a range of acceptable prices, a reverse version that shows management the margin and commission a quoted price implies, and payroll workbooks that handle South Carolina's overtime-on-commission math. With an outside AI shop he built a workflow that takes a job a tech marks "perform later," builds the install job in ServiceTitan and sends the purchase order, which replaced the install coordinator's paperwork; that employee now spot-checks the automation and spends her time with customers. Techs use ServiceTitan's Atlas assistant and ChatGPT for troubleshooting and manuals, and a vendor tool called Buck AI assigns calls on the dispatch board by tech skills, area and schedule. Grubb says dispatch "used to be an all-day job" and is now weekly capacity management. He outsources anything with legal exposure, such as payroll automation. No figures beyond his own descriptions.
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Related use cases
AI back office for remodelers: connect Claude to JobTread for proposals, vendor bills and job-close audits
Element Design Build
Element Design Build, an eight-person design-build remodeler in Hudson, Ohio, uses Anthropic's Claude as the link between its existing software: JobTread for project management and job costing, Fireflies for call transcripts, and Microsoft 365. Owner Vlatko Demrovski records prospect calls and consultations with Fireflies, then has Claude summarize them and help prepare JobTread proposals from templates and historical job costs; he says proposals that took 60 to 90 minutes now take 10 to 15, and a $150,000 kitchen estimate that took two days often takes about three hours. On the accounting side, an AI agent helps input vendor bills, match purchase orders and budget line items, and support reconciliation; job-close audits now happen on every job, and commission calculations that took a full day are done in under an hour with an audit trail. Claude also drafts schedules from the company's actual task durations. Element grew from $3.74 million (2024) to $3.92 million (2025) with the same headcount, which Demrovski largely credits to this setup. He reviews every output ("I read every single word") and tests spreadsheet instructions on one row first. Figures are owner-reported in Qualified Remodeler's 2026 Fred Case Award profile.
Automate a plumbing shop's back office with AI agents, but keep humans on big quotes
Jon O'Neill (@HouseHackerJon)
A plumbing company owner who also builds software for the trades listed the AI workflows running in his shop: email triage, job booking by text and email (he still doesn't trust voice agents), truck and warehouse restocking, fleet maintenance reminders, reviewing sold-job notes for missed opportunities, drafting quotes from tech notes and photos, job routing, review requests and missed-call texting. In replies he says job booking saves the most time, and that quotes over $5K, price negotiation and truck restock orders over $1K still go to a human.
AI for a plumbing and HVAC shop: Claude CSR onboarding plan, QuickBooks analysis and AI after-hours calls
BWS Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning
Kevin Strandberg, owner of BWS Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, describes on the Plumbing & HVAC Hustle Podcast how he uses Claude. He says he had it write a two-week, day-by-day onboarding plan for a new CSR with no HVAC or plumbing background, with supporting documents and daily tests, in about 30 minutes. He connected Claude to QuickBooks Online and asked for an in-depth analysis of first-quarter financials, getting an executive summary he could take into an accounting meeting, and had it draft a month-end close process for their ServiceTitan, ADP and QuickBooks setup. He also uses it for HTML email blasts and reports that BWS runs an AI phone agent from Avoca for after-hours calls, which he says works well on the second try after a vendor switch and fine-tuning, but that customers still want humans in business hours. His cautions: it still hallucinates, so he checks the output, works in batches of three to five tasks, and fixed a pricing error that Claude now remembers. No numbers beyond the 30-minute onboarding plan are given; this is the owner's own account on a podcast hosted by a marketing agency.