AI and automation for service businesses
Before Larken, we built automation for Fortune 500 companies. This is the same engineering pointed at a front office: calls answered, leads followed up, quotes out the same day, books current. Four systems, each built to fit the tools you already run.
Book a 15-minute walkthroughThe phone gets answered, even when you're on the roof.
Most service businesses lose jobs to whoever picked up first. When the crew is working and a call hits voicemail, the homeowner dials the next name on the list and never calls back. Voice AI answers every inbound call, asks the questions a good office manager would ask, books qualified jobs into your calendar, and sends the hot ones straight to your cell.
Good fit if You take twenty or more inbound calls a week, and whoever answers them is also doing field work.
- + Every inbound call answered, during jobs and after hours, without an answering-service bill.
- + Leads qualified with real questions, not a phone tree.
- + Qualified jobs booked straight into your scheduling calendar.
- + High-priority calls flagged and routed to your cell in real time.
- + Every call summarized and logged to your CRM.
The lead didn't go cold. The follow-up stopped.
Almost every form fill and missed call is a person who wanted to hire someone. Lead recovery sends a personalized text and email within minutes of every inquiry, then keeps following up on a schedule until the lead responds. The moment they book or opt out, it all stops. No awkward messages after the sale, no lead sitting three days because the week got busy.
Good fit if Leads come in faster than your team can respond, or follow-up depends on whoever remembers to do it.
- + Every new lead hears back within minutes, by text and email.
- + Multi-step sequences run without anyone managing them.
- + Everything stops automatically the moment a lead books or opts out.
- + Response rates and lead sources tracked, so you know which marketing pays.
- + Plugs into the forms, CRM, and phone system you already have.
Quotes out the same day. Invoices that don't wait on you.
The job you quoted first is the job you usually win. Quote-to-cash pulls the details from field notes or your CRM, generates a formatted quote, sends it the same day, and follows up if it sits unopened. When the customer approves, the quote becomes an invoice without anyone re-typing it, and the payment lands in QuickBooks on its own. Sunday-night data entry stops being part of the job.
Good fit if You send ten or more quotes a month and they wait on one person, or QuickBooks always runs behind.
- + Quotes generated from field notes or your CRM and sent the same day.
- + Automatic follow-up when a quote sits unopened or unsigned.
- + Approved quotes become invoices with no re-keying.
- + Payments sync to QuickBooks both ways, so the books stay current.
- + The paperwork stops bottlenecking on one person.
If you can describe the work, we can build for it.
Some work doesn't fit a product category: supplier pricing lookups, lien waiver tracking, subcontractor coordination, compliance paperwork. For those we audit first, map how the work actually happens, and build to fit.
The clearest example is CRM migrations. A roofing company's legacy CRM had no export tool and no API, so we built an automation that drove the old system's own interface and moved ten years of customer history and attachments into the new CRM over a single weekend, with zero staff hours spent. Read the case study. More recently we built a conversational connector on JobTread, so a builder can ask their job-management system a plain-language question and get a straight answer.
Good fit if A specific, repeatable workflow eats real hours every week, and off-the-shelf software hasn't solved it.
- + Designed around your workflow, not a template you bend to fit.
- + No forced platform migrations. We build to the tools you run.
- + Documented in plain language, with your team trained on it.
- + Maintained and improved on the Manage retainer, not handed off as a black box.
When we'd talk you out of automation.
Automation multiplies whatever you point it at, which is exactly why it's sometimes the wrong first move. We'd steer you elsewhere if:
- Lead volume doesn't justify it yet. If the phone rings a few times a week, the money belongs in getting found: the website and local SEO come first.
- The process isn't stable. Automating a workflow that changes every time you run it gets you a faster mess. We'd help you pin the process down first, and sometimes that's the whole engagement.
- An off-the-shelf tool already does it well. When a standard product covers the need, we'll name it and point you at it instead of building something you'd pay us to maintain.
What does automation cost?
It depends on what we're building. The drivers are how many systems the automation touches, whether it's assembled from proven parts or engineered custom, your call and lead volume, and how much monitoring it needs after launch. Scope is fixed after the audit: one build price, one monthly number for Manage.
A voice AI answering one phone line is a smaller project than a quote-to-cash pipeline threading a CRM, e-signature, and QuickBooks together, and a custom build is its own conversation. That's why the audit comes first: it turns "what would this cost" into a written scope with a number on it, ranked against everything else we found. The full engagement model is on the approach page.
Automation FAQs.
Will callers know they're talking to an AI? +
Usually, yes, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. The measure isn't whether the voice fools anyone. It's whether the call got answered, qualified, and booked instead of hitting voicemail while your competitor picked up. Callers forgive an assistant that helps them fast. They don't forgive ringing out.
Do we have to switch CRMs or phone systems? +
No. Everything we build plugs into the forms, CRM, calendar, and phone setup you already run. Migration is a service we offer when you actually want a new system, never a requirement for working with us. If your current tools are the problem, we'll say so and show you why.
What happens when something breaks? +
The Manage retainer exists for exactly this. We monitor the systems we build, catch failures before you feel them, and fix them as part of the monthly fee. You also get documentation and a trained team, so nothing we ship depends on us being reachable to understand it.
How long does a build take? +
The scope document fixes the timeline before work starts, so you're never guessing. A single system built on proven parts typically goes live within weeks of a signed scope. Custom engineering takes longer, and we say so up front rather than discovering it on your invoice.
Automation is the back half of the pipeline. The front half is getting found, which is what the website and local SEO pages cover. All of it runs on the same audit-build-manage model.
Tell us where the hours go.
Book the walkthrough and describe the worst bottleneck in your week. We'll tell you whether it's automatable, what it would touch, and whether it's even worth building.