“It’s a capacity game”: Call Dad eyes $38 million in revenue 

In 2017, Matt Pozda, a former banker, purchased a Charlotte, North Carolina-based business called Sky HVAC, which had been founded in 2013. 

Today, the company — now Call Dad AC & Heating — has over 200 employees serving customers in nine markets across the Carolinas, with a budgeted revenue target of $38 million this year, a projected 87 percent organic year-over-year increase.

The big picture: “It doesn’t matter if the industry is up or down… We’re working on solving for the capacity dynamic: Do we have the capacity to take the call, and do we have the capacity to run the call?” says Pozda during a video call with Homepros. “It’s a capacity game.”

Puzzle pieces

Elaborating on the topic, “Guys hate the on-call dynamic,” Pozda notes, “so how do you stabilize that, but also give people maximum ability to have time off and still have time for their families?” 

• “[We settled on] this four-on/four-off concept, which is similar to [the] emergency response or nursing industries,” he says, clarifying that technicians who work Monday through Thursday will have Friday through Monday off, with the following Tuesday as their next work day.
• “And then we’ve got an 8 a.m., 10 a.m., and a noon shift start… So throughout the day, you have increasing capacity.”

Zoom in: While Call Dad currently covers nine markets, “Everybody in the industry told us that we were stupid to go as broad and as multimarket as we did before we had scale,” Pozda says. 

• “But it enabled us to take excess capacity in Raleigh, shift it to Greensboro, from Greensboro to Winston Salem, [and so on],” he adds. “And we do that every single day, multiple times a day.”

Hello, Abby

Pozda estimates that around 20 percent of the company’s gross inbound calls are from real customers. “Most of them are spam calls,” he says. “So [we had] what [are] supposed to be revenue-producing [CSRs], only 20 percent productive.”

• Aiming to solve the issue so that “when they answer the phone, they’re getting a live person in need of service,” Pozda adds, Call Dad earlier this year deployed an AI CSR (whose name is Abby) to handle every inbound call — she’s currently booking 78 percent of real customer calls. 

Zoom in: At the time, the company employed six CSRs. “We’ve got 11 right now,” Pozda notes. “So, we’ve actually increased, but taking them from 20 percent productive to 100 percent.”

• “We’ve enabled them to get more specialized — membership coordinators, parts updates,” he continues, pointing to reduced turnover, “because they’re not dealing with all the BS.”
• “I think that’s probably one of the biggest fallacies,” he adds. “This isn’t an opportunity to reduce cost; it’s an opportunity to increase productivity.”

Back to school

In September 2022, Call Dad launched ‘D.A.D. University,’ an in-house, state-accredited training program spanning 27 months, including a mix of classroom learning and fieldwork. Its tenth class is now underway. 

• “You’ll never hear a single person at Call Dad ever say that we have a people problem,” says Pozda. “Our last two classes, we had over 1,200 applicants, and we took 30 people.”

Zoom in: At the end of the program, which is paid, the company asks graduates for a two-year commitment back. “Any finance guy… would tell us we’re complete idiots, because it’s a massive, massive cost center for us,” he admits. 

• Today, however, “90 percent of our service techs [and] 50 percent of our management team have come through our program,” he adds. “D.A.D. U. is the lifeblood of this organization.”