Apex HVAC & Cooling
How one Phoenix HVAC shop added $340,000 in 6 months by answering every single call
Apex HVAC & Cooling was losing an estimated 18 to 22 calls a week to voicemail during the Phoenix summer crush. After switching to Kaldr Tech and turning on the virtual receptionist, Miguel went from 6 techs to 11 and pushed monthly revenue up 42 percent in half a year.
+42%
Revenue growth
First 6 months
5
New techs hired
Jan to July 2025
$340,000
Missed call recovery
6 months
Under 30 seconds
Average response time
Since launch
The summer that broke the phones
July 2024 nearly ended Apex HVAC. Phoenix hit 118 degrees for nine straight days, the phones rang nonstop, and Miguel's office manager Tina was fielding calls while also trying to route six trucks across the valley. On a Tuesday that Miguel still talks about, Tina went to lunch for 40 minutes and came back to 23 voicemails. Eleven of those callers had already booked with someone else by the time she called back. Miguel did the math that night on the back of a parts invoice. At an average ticket of $1,850 for a repair and around $8,400 for a full system swap, he figured he was leaving somewhere between $18,000 and $24,000 on the table every single week during peak season. The shop was on a dispatch platform that charged $189 per user per month, which meant $1,512 a month just for the six techs and two office seats, and the system still dropped calls into a voicemail box nobody could clear fast enough. After-hours calls were the worst — a woman in Ahwatukee called at 9:47 p.m. with a condenser out and two kids asleep, left a message, and by the time Tina heard it at 7 a.m. she had already paid a bigger shop $11,200 for an emergency replacement. Miguel knew the leads were there. The problem was catching them. He told his wife he either had to hire a full-time night dispatcher at $52,000 a year or find a system that could pick up the phone when his people couldn't.
"I was paying $1,500 a month for software that couldn't answer a phone at 9 p.m. Kaldr picks up on the first ring, books the job, and texts me the summary before the tech even leaves the driveway."
— Miguel Alvarez, Owner, Apex HVAC & Cooling
Virtual receptionist first, everything else second
Miguel found Kaldr Tech in August 2024 through a contractor forum where another HVAC owner in Tucson had posted a screenshot of his call log. The thing that sold him was the virtual receptionist — a smart phone agent that picks up on the first ring, qualifies the caller, books the appointment directly into the dispatch board, and texts Miguel a summary. He turned that on day one, before he even migrated his customer list. Within 48 hours it had booked 14 jobs that would have gone to voicemail under the old setup, including a $6,200 package unit replacement in Glendale at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday. Week two, he moved his dispatch board over and dropped the old $1,512 a month platform entirely. Week three, he turned on route optimization so his techs stopped criss-crossing the valley between Mesa and Surprise. Week four, he activated the customer financing integration so Tina could offer 0 percent for 18 months right on the estimate instead of sending people to a separate portal. By October, every call, text, and web form was flowing into one board. Miguel's implementation took about 19 days of real work, most of which was importing 4,200 customer records and tagging maintenance agreements. He did it in evenings after his daughter's soccer practice. No consultant. No onboarding fee. The Kaldr support team walked him through the financing setup on a 35-minute screen share on a Sunday afternoon.
Features that mattered most
From 6 trucks to 11 in six months
By the end of January 2025, Apex HVAC's monthly revenue had climbed from roughly $218,000 to $310,000 — a 42 percent jump that Miguel attributes almost entirely to catching calls he used to miss. The virtual receptionist booked 487 appointments in its first 90 days, and internal tracking showed 312 of those were outside normal business hours or during times Tina was already on another line. At an average job value of $1,710, that single feature conservatively drove about $534,000 in booked work, of which roughly $340,000 closed and collected in the first 6 months. Miguel used the extra margin to hire five new techs between February and June, bringing the crew from 6 to 11, and he added a second dispatcher named Raquel because the board was getting too dense for Tina alone. Route optimization cut average drive time per tech from 94 minutes a day to 58 minutes, which meant each truck could handle one extra call most days. Customer financing pushed his system replacement close rate from 31 percent to 54 percent because Tina could quote the monthly payment on the phone instead of sending people home to think about it. Monday morning call-back rates dropped from 22 percent of customers needing a second visit to just 7 percent, because techs now had full job history and part availability on their phones before they rolled out of the yard.
Advice to another contractor
If you're losing calls, fix that first. Don't rebuild your whole operation on day one. Turn on the phone answering piece, let it run for two weeks, look at the booking log, and you'll see the money you were leaving on the table. That's what gave me the confidence to hire five guys in one quarter without losing sleep.
— Miguel Alvarez
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