What a Hackathon Can Do for Your HVAC, Plumbing, or Electrical Business (And Why You've Never Heard of One)
You've probably never used the word "hackathon" in a sentence that also included the words "dispatch" or "service call."
That's fine. Most people in the trades haven't.
But the concept is worth understanding — because what it produces is exactly what service businesses need right now, and almost nobody in this industry is doing it yet.
First, What Is a Hackathon?
In the tech world, a hackathon is a focused event where a team gets a few hours, a problem to solve, and permission to experiment. No approval chains. No death-by-meeting. Just: here's a challenge, here are the tools, go figure something out.
The output isn't always a finished product. Sometimes it's a half-built idea that turns into something real six weeks later. Sometimes it's the moment a quiet employee shows you something you never would have seen otherwise.
What it reliably produces is this: a team that starts thinking like builders instead of order-takers.
That shift — from "I do my job" to "I can improve how this works" — is one of the most valuable things you can create inside a service business. And it doesn't require a tech background or a six-figure hire to get there.
Why This Matters More in Trades Than Anywhere Else
Here's something the tech industry figured out early that the trades are just starting to encounter: the people closest to the problem are usually the ones best positioned to solve it.
Your dispatcher knows exactly where scheduling breaks down. Your CSR knows which calls go sideways and why. Your lead tech knows which part of the job generates the most callbacks.
That institutional knowledge is sitting in your business right now, largely untapped — because nobody has ever handed those people a tool and said "show me what you'd fix."
AI changes that equation. The barrier to building something useful has dropped dramatically. You don't need to write code. You don't need an IT department. You need someone who understands the problem and a few hours to experiment with the right tools.
A hackathon creates that window.
What It Looks Like in Practice
You don't need a conference room in Silicon Valley. You need four to eight hours and a clear brief.
Here's a simple structure that works:
The setup (30 minutes): One short presentation. Not a lecture on AI — a reframe. The goal is to get your team seeing the same thing: there are gaps in this business that cost us money, and some of them can be closed faster than you think. Name a few specific ones. Missed calls. Cold estimates. Manual follow-up. Give people a target.
The work session (4 hours): Break into small groups. Each group picks one problem and tries to build something — or at least sketch a solution using AI tools. It doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be real.
The share-out (1 hour): Each group presents what they built or what they were trying to build. You'll be surprised what surfaces. Some of it will be rough. Some of it will be genuinely useful. All of it will tell you something about how your team thinks.
That's it. No budget required beyond a few hours of payroll.
What You're Actually Building
The point isn't the output from a single afternoon.
The point is what happens after.
When your CSR spends two hours trying to automate estimate follow-up and gets halfway there, something changes. She stops seeing that problem as your problem to solve. She starts seeing it as something she can work on. That's not a small thing in a business where most employees are trained to execute, not improve.
The companies that are going to pull ahead in this industry over the next five years aren't necessarily the ones with the best technicians or the biggest ad budgets. They're going to be the ones that figured out how to get their whole team building — not just their owner.
Right now, most of your competitors are waiting for someone to hand them a finished AI solution. The ones who run a hackathon first are going to be several steps ahead before anyone else realizes the race has started.
The Honest Caveat
A hackathon won't fix a broken process. It won't replace a real system. And if your team is burned out or your culture is fractured, four hours of forced creativity isn't the answer.
But if you have decent people who are engaged in the business and you've never given them a structured space to improve it — this is one of the highest-ROI afternoons you can put on the calendar.
What to Do Next
If this sounds interesting and you want to try it, start simple:
Pick one problem your business has that involves communication or follow-up. Write it down in one sentence. Then ask yourself: who on my team deals with this every day? Start there.
If you want to go further — I'm leading ten of these across Indianapolis in April. Small groups, real problems, one afternoon. I'm putting together a limited number of spots for home service companies who want to be in the room when we run the first ones.
If that's you, reach out.
Either way, the concept is worth sitting with. The businesses that start treating their teams like builders — not just technicians and schedulers — are going to look very different in three years than the ones that don't.
Spots are limited by design. Just shoot me an email and I’ll get you booked: elizabeth@raisethetraes.com
What This Looks Like With Me
I’m running a small number of these with local service companies.
Not as a workshop. Not as a presentation.
As a working session inside your business.
Here’s how it works:
I join you and your team for ~4 hours
We identify 1–2 real problems (missed calls, slow follow-up, unclosed estimates)
We build a working version of a solution using AI tools
You leave with something usable—not a slide deck
After that, we decide together what’s worth building further.
The goal is simple:
👉 the first improvement should create enough value to pay for the next one
Who This Is For
This is a good fit if:
you’re getting consistent leads but not converting all of them
you know things are slipping through the cracks
your team is capable, but everything still runs through you
If you are looking for a practical guide on how to get started with AI for your business, check out these resources: