How we decide what’s worth fixing
Northgate Septic — a two-person operation. One owner-operator in the field, doing the pumping, inspections, and repairs. His spouse handles the books and answers the phone when she can. Busy season, they turn work away; slow season, they chase invoices. He’s the reason customers call — twenty years in, people trust his read on a failing system.
Illustrative owner perspective“I’m under a tank and the phone’s ringing and I can’t get it. By the time I call back, half of them already found someone else. Then I’m doing estimates at ten at night. I don’t mind the work — I mind that the good work is the last thing I get to.”
What we found — and what we’d do about it
Scored by how much of his time it eats, how often, whether it’s worth fixing — and, just as important, where his judgment actually matters.
Fix the missed calls — without taking him off the calls that matter
A front-desk layer answers the routine “do you pump tanks, how soon, what’s it cost” calls, captures the lead, and books the standard jobs against his rules.Anything that sounds unusual, urgent, or like a big job routes straight to him — because that’s exactly where his read is worth money. He approves what he wants to approve; he sees everything in a weekly summary.
Why this one first: it’s the biggest daily leak, it’s the easiest to measure, and itprotects his expert time instead of competing for it.
| Today | After (illustrative) | |
|---|---|---|
| Calls missed while on a job | ~6–8 / week | Near zero — routine answered, rare ones escalated |
| Jobs lost to voicemail | A handful / week | Recovered as booked work |
| Estimates written after 9pm | Most nights | Prepped and waiting; he prices, doesn’t chase |
Illustrative. A real map would put his actual numbers here, measured before and after.
- Supply ordering and review follow-up — real friction, but small. Not worth a project yet; a fifteen-minute habit change beats software here.
- His diagnostic calls and pricing on hard sites — that’s not friction, that’s the business. Automating it would make him less valuable, not more.
If the missed-call math didn’t clear the cost, we’d say so, and he’d keep answering the way he does now.
Everything customers actually call Northgate for: his read on a failing system, his pricing judgment, his relationships, the save-the-day calls. We don’t touch those. We take the routine off his plate so he has more of himself left for the work only he can do.
The goal isn’t a business that runs without him. It’s a business that stops spending his expertise on things that don’t need it.
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