Capacity Board Driven Digital Lead Throttle
Pull live capacity data from Service Titan into a board and adjust digital ad spend per branch daily to match leads to available labor
Peterman Brothers runs a centralized marketing team that monitors a real-time capacity board pulling live job data from Service Titan. The board shows, for each branch and each service line, how much open capacity exists on a given day and across the following days. When a branch is full, the digital team shuts down or scales back that branch's campaigns in real time. When a branch has open slots, spend increases. Traditional media like radio and TV is fixed in place once purchased. Digital is the flex layer. The team also manages the reality that with 10 locations and 3 trades, they are effectively managing 30 separate businesses with different daily capacity needs. At Peterman's scale they are exploring splitting the digital team into groups of five locations each to reduce cognitive load.
- Traditional media is a fixed cost; digital is the variable throttle
- Lead generation without capacity visibility wastes spend and frustrates customers with delays
- 10 locations x 3 trades equals 30 distinct capacity management problems
- Real-time data from the job management system is the input; campaign spend is the output
- Splitting digital responsibilities by location group reduces cognitive switching costs
- Integrate Service Titan job data into a live capacity boardBuild a dashboard (Peterman built one internally) that shows open slots per branch and per trade in real time. The board is the single source of truth for both the customer service center deciding where to book calls and the digital team deciding where to push ad spend.Pro tipThe CSR center and marketing team should be looking at the same board simultaneously. If CSR is booking to branches that marketing is not actively sending leads to, they are working against each other.WarningStatic reporting pulled once a day is not sufficient. HVAC demand can shift within hours on hot days; the board needs to reflect current state, not yesterday's state.
- Set spend rules against capacity thresholdsDefine explicit triggers: if Branch X has fewer than N open slots for the next 48 hours, reduce or pause digital campaigns for that branch. If Branch Y has more than N open slots, increase spend. These rules should be documented and consistently applied, not left to individual judgment each day.Pro tipSet different thresholds by trade; HVAC replacement leads are expensive and should not be generated into a full install schedule, while service calls are shorter and the threshold can be tighter.WarningDo not apply the same threshold across all 30 business units. A branch running three HVAC techs and one electrician has very different threshold dynamics than a branch with twelve HVAC techs.
- Split digital team responsibility by location clusterAt scale, managing 30 business units in one person's head is a cognitive liability. Peterman is moving toward having one digital manager cover five locations and another cover the remaining five. Assign location groups based on geographic clustering so the manager has intuitive familiarity with the local market dynamics.WarningSplitting the team by location only works if the capacity board gives each manager full visibility into their group's status. Splitting without shared tooling just creates silos.
During a peak summer demand day, Peterman's capacity board shows Indianapolis fully booked through the next three days. The digital team immediately scales back Indianapolis HVAC campaigns and shifts spend to Fort Wayne and Bloomington, which still have open slots. The CSR center simultaneously stops routing new Indianapolis HVAC calls and redirects booking to Fort Wayne. This happens within the same business day.
Extracted from Owned & Operated ($100M HVAC episode). Chad Peterman described the capacity boards as pulling live Service Titan data and feeding the customer service center and digital marketing team simultaneously.