$2.18M/yr
operational waste we've quantified across 8 audited businesses
100%
of every figure traced to the client's own words, on the record
2–4 wks
to map your operation and put a dollar figure on every leak
Why we built this for you
We've sat inside businesses that run exactly like yours.
A fleet-and-dispatch operation has a signature rhythm. The phone rings, a job gets booked, a tech in a van gets sent, work gets done, a sheet comes back, an invoice goes out — eventually. Every one of those handoffs is a place where time, money and momentum quietly leak. Not because anyone's doing a bad job. Because the business grew faster than the systems, and the gap got filled with people remembering things and the owner staying late.
You don't need us to tell you it's busy. What an audit does is something you can't easily do from inside it: put a number on the friction, rank it, and hand you a map. Below is how we'd approach yours — grounded in what we've actually found in comparable businesses, with every claim cited to a real client.
What we'd look for inside Local Plumbing Group
Six places the money usually hides in a fleet business.
These are hypotheses, not accusations — we'll only know which ones bite once we map it with you. For each, here's the question we'd ask and the benchmark we'd measure you against.
⚡Speed to lead
A burst pipe is an emergency to the customer. If a missed call isn't called back within minutes, they've already dialled the next plumber.
Benchmark: top field-service operators respond in <5 min. One business we audited sat at 1.5 days — losing ~1 customer a month at near-100% conversion.
🗓️Daily dispatch & scheduling
Who's on what job tomorrow, which van, which suburb, which skills. The question is simply: how many hours a day does that take, and whose head does it live in?
Benchmark: automated. One owner we audited spent 28 hrs/week — 3 to 5 hours every single day — building it by hand.
🧾Job-to-invoice & variations
How long after a job finishes does the invoice go out — and how much extra work done on site never makes it onto the bill at all?
Benchmark: same-day. We routinely find weeks of lag and thousands a month in unbilled variations the customer never gets charged for.
📐Quoting & quote follow-up
Renovations and bigger jobs need quotes. Once one's sent, who chases it?
Benchmark: automated sequence. One business had 230 quotes sitting unchased — ~$80k of recoverable work nobody asked for again.
📋Field data & job costing
If timesheets and job notes come back on paper or from memory, your costing is guesswork — you know what you invoiced, not what you earned.
Benchmark: captured in the field. Most owners can't say with a straight face which jobs last month actually made money.
💸The stack you already pay for
You've got "Book Online" and a fleet to coordinate. How much of the software you pay for is actually switched on and used?
Benchmark: full utilisation. We routinely find paid modules never turned on — and the occasional subscription nobody's used in years.
The proof — businesses shaped like yours
What the audit surfaced in three comparable operations.
Different industries, same shape: a field team on jobs, daily dispatch, leads by phone, and an owner who became the bottleneck. Names withheld — our audits go deep into client operations, so we protect that. Full references available on request.
Field-Service Provider · ~50 staff
Daily dispatch run by one person, seven days a week
~50 field staff across 4 entities
$120,000/yr
quantified waste + untracked overruns
What we found
- The owner personally built tomorrow's field schedule every day — "three to five hours a day" — 28 hrs/wk, worth $58,240/yr of his time
- 1.5-day lead response in a near-100%-conversion market — losing ~1 new customer a month
- $6,000/yr still being paid for scheduling software that had been abandoned
"It takes me between three and five hours a day to get it done."— Owner, on building the daily schedule
The turn: the recommended toolkit cost $3,028/yr to run — but cancelling the dead subscription made the new stack $1,892/yr cheaper than what they already paid, while returning 21 hours a week to the owner.
Trade & Construction · 38 staff
Quoting, invoicing, and systems that didn't talk
38 staff · project-based trade work
$67,600/yr
quantified waste — plus uncounted double-paid invoices
What we found
- Zero data movement between their three core systems — every job re-keyed by hand into all three ($31,200/yr)
- Double-paid invoices — the expense tool never cross-checked the vendor ledger
- Quote creation lagging directors' expectations — 5 hrs/wk across two people ($26,000/yr)
"We don't have any connectivity… We're not moving any data yet. That's our problem."— Systems lead
The turn: nothing got ripped out. We built around the existing stack — automating job creation across systems and adding AP checking to stop the double payments.
Owner-Operated Services · ~600 customers
When the owner is the operating system
5–6 staff · ~600 active customers · $500–600K/yr
$378,000/yr
waste — 60–75% of revenue eaten by founder admin
What we found
- Owner matched payments against the bank feed by hand — 15 hrs/wk = $156,000/yr
- 3-hour manual onboarding per new customer across four disconnected tools ($104,000/yr)
- 50–60 customers lost every term because renewals lived only in the owner's memory ($66,000/yr)
"Because I'm doing so much admin and it all is in my brain, I can't remember 600 cards."— Owner
The turn: $436,800/yr of projected value across 11 changes — first-year tooling under $12k, paying back in well under a month of returned owner time.
How we'd lay out your opportunities
The priority matrix.
This is the heart of every APG audit. We don't hand you a wish-list — we plot each opportunity by how much it returns against how hard it is to do, so the sequence is obvious. Below is an illustrative version for a business like yours; the real one is built entirely from your numbers once we've mapped you.
Impact / $ Return →
Quick Wins — do first
Strategic Bets
Fill-ins
Low priority
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Effort to implement →
1Instant lead-response & missed-call text-back — stop losing emergency jobs to the next plumber
2Automated quote follow-up — chase every sent quote without lifting a finger
3Same-day job-to-invoice + variation capture — bill everything, faster
4Smart dispatch & scheduling engine — get the roster out of one person's head
5Field data capture → live job costing — know which jobs actually make money
6Subscription & stack rationalisation — stop paying for what you don't use
7Custom unified platform — the long game, only if the numbers justify it
Illustrative only. Your actual matrix is built from your hours, your job volumes and your rates — and you decide what, if anything, gets actioned.
What the audit actually delivers
You keep everything we build — whether you work with us again or not.
The audit isn't a sales meeting with a slide deck. It's a set of working documents, built from recorded sessions with you and your team, that map and quantify your operation end to end.
01
Process Map
Every step of how work actually flows today — phone to dispatch to invoice — laid out visually.
02
Findings & Waste Analysis
Each leak named, with the hours and dollars attached, cited to what your team told us.
03
Solutions Overview
The opportunity behind each finding, with the tools and effort it would take to fix.
04
Priority Matrix
Every opportunity ranked by return vs effort — the sequence made obvious.
05
Strategic Approaches
Realistic paths — use-what-you-have, best-of-breed, or custom — with the trade-offs of each.
06
Transformation Roadmap
Phased, sequenced plan — what to do first, next, and later, with projected value.
🛡️
The risk sits with us, not you.
If the audit doesn't surface meaningful, identifiable savings in your business, you don't pay. We diagnose before we ever propose building anything — so by the time there's a decision to make, you've already seen the full picture in numbers, not promises. There's nothing to take on faith.
Let's find out what Local Plumbing Group's number is.
Every business on this page thought it was "just busy" until someone mapped it and put a figure on the friction. Twenty-five years in, the question isn't whether the work is there — it's how much of it is quietly leaking on the way to the bank. The only way to know is to look. That's what this conversation is about.
apgsoftware.com · adam@apgsoftware.com