Is Your Back Office Leaking Revenue?

Most AI talk in the trades stops at answering the phone, but Podium Sales Manager McKay Rasmussen tells the ACHR News Newsmakers podcast that the bigger opportunity is behind the scenes. Rasmussen, who leads a home services sales team at Podium, walks through where contractors are quietly losing money — stale manufacturer leads, unpaid invoices, unaccepted estimates, and wasted technician drive time — and how an AI "business manager" can recover it by booking overflow calls, renewing service contracts, and running reports tailored to each business.

The conversation lands right as shoulder season turns into heating season, and Rasmussen makes the case that waiting to address these gaps only gets more expensive as the market — and the software powering it — keeps changing faster than contractors expect.

Key takeaways

• Podium's AI can analyze a 15-technician schedule and cut as much as 10 hours of weekly drive time by rebooking jobs with the right tech instead of the nearest available one.

• Podium refunds its $1,000 onboarding setup fee once a customer is live, and over the last eight months that has happened in an average of 19 days, not the six months contractors often expect.

• In the first quarter of this year, Podium used AI to write as many lines of code as it had written in its first three years as a company, underscoring how fast the underlying software is changing.