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TRADES
Advisory services for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical service contractors.
We've spent 30 years inside HVAC, plumbing and electrical service companies - in the truck, in the shop, and in the back office. Now we open your books like a job site; find what's leaking, tell you what to do about it, and stay until it's fixed.
Beyond Bookkeeping: Financial Strategy
Built for the Field.
If you run an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical company, this list will hurt.
I had my best year ever and I still couldn't make payroll in February.
Work-in-progress, retention, seasonal swings, and a payroll that doesn't care about your A/R aging. Profit and cash are different problems - and most owners don't see the difference until it's too late.
My flat-rate book hasn't moved in 18 months and I have no idea if it should.
Your competitor down the road raised theirs 12% last spring and didn't lose a customer. You'd raise yours too - if you had the data to know where and by how much.
A buyer offered me 4x EBITDA. Should I take it?
Probably not. Service-trade roll-ups are paying 6x-9x for clean, defensible financials. Most owners we meet are sitting on $1M-$3M of enterprise value they can't see.
We've lived inside the trades - and we have a pricing engine your competition doesn't have.
Operator first, accountant second.
We've sat in the truck and in the back office. We know what a callback costs, why your maintenance membership program is either your biggest asset or your biggest leak, and why your install margin should behave differently than your service margin.
HVAC, plumbing, and electrical are where we've spent 30 years — dispatched techs, mixed service and install, flat-rate pricing, materials volatility. I know all three cold, and every fractional CFO engagement starts with that same operator lens, whatever the industry.
AI-driven pricing analysis.
We run your historical job data through models built for service-trade economics - and surface the price increases you can take without losing the close.
What we run for you
Run finance like an operator. Every month, every cash call, every close.
+5-9 pts
of gross margin recovered through AI pricing analysis and job costing fixes
What changes in the first 90 days.
13 wks
of forward cash
visibility - no more February surprises
1
owner who finally knows what every job, every tech, and every service line is actually worth
The RDH DIFFERENTIATOR
Find the price increases your competitors haven't figured out yet.
Most contractors don't have a pricing problem in the abstract - they have a pricing problem they can't see. Their HVAC service call rate is too low for half their neighborhoods and just right for the other half. Their plumbing flat-rate book is competitive in one customer segment and leaving money on the table in another. Their electrical panel-upgrade pricing hasn't been rebuilt against current copper prices. They don't know which is which.
RDH's AI Pricing Analysis pulls 12–24 months of your historical job data (ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, or whatever you run) and analyzes it across the dimensions that actually drive close rate and margin: job type, service line, customer segment, geography, technician, time of year, lead source, and price point. Then it tells you, specifically and quantitatively, where to move price — and by how much.
WHAT YOU GET
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Full historical pricing study (12-24 months of job data)
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Service-line pricing recommendations across all your divisions
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Customer segment elasticity analysis
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Win/loss by price point
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Regional benchmark comparison
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Implementation roadmap (which prices to move first, second, third - and how to message it to your CSRs and techs)
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60-day follow up to measure realized margin impact
Engagement model:
Available as a fixed-fee standalone project (typically 6-8 weeks) or bundled into the Fractional CFO retainer at a reduced rate.
Know which jobs, which trucks, and which techs are actually making you money.
Your field service software has the answers. Most owners never pull them. RDH rebuilds your job costing from the burden up — fully loaded labor rate, true overhead allocation, parts margin, callback cost — and puts a Monday-morning dashboard in front of you that shows margin by tech, by service line, by trade division.
What you get:
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True burdened labor rate per tech (across all trades)
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Gross margin by service line (HVAC service, install, maintenance; plumbing service, repipe, drain; electrical service, panel, EV, generator, etc.)
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Callback and warranty cost analysis
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Cross-division margin comparison (which trade is subsidizing which?)
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Weekly operations dashboard
