About G.L. Hunt Foundation Repair
G.L. Hunt Foundation Repair is a family-owned Texas business specializing in foundation repair and drainage solutions. They've been serving homeowners with trusted expertise since 1987. For this success story, we interviewed their Director of Marketing, Jeff Ciarelli.
The problem
G.L. Hunt's CEO Hayden is a big fan of automation and working smarter. The company had a lot of touch points with clients and saw the opportunity to standardize and automate them.
The team was spending too much time on outbound outreach rather than speaking with ready-to-engage prospects. And missed calls were going to voicemail with no follow-up, meaning lost opportunities.
"Hatch lets us spend our time speaking to customers rather than finding them."
The solution
G.L. Hunt uses Hatch automation to trigger best practice outreach across the customer journey. By "best practice outreach," that means:
- Multi-channel: SMS, email, and ringless voicemail
- Multi-step: Triggering across several days
- Right messaging: Personalized and short
Current campaigns include:
- Speed to lead: Instantly reaching out to new leads as soon as they fill out a form
- Missed calls: Instantly reaching out to customers who couldn't get on the line with someone
- Recent estimate follow-up: To keep the customer engaged and increase close rates
- Nurture: Aged leads that never booked, aged estimates that never closed
- Canceled appointments: Both recent and aged
- Appointment confirmations: To ensure someone will be home
This results in 4X higher response rates without having to do 4X the outreach work.
What the AI agents do
G.L. Hunt has AI agents attached to each campaign so that when a contact responds, the bot engages according to the goal of that campaign. This allows them to keep up with higher response volume, because the AI agent is fully knowledgeable about the business and can handle a large portion of the conversation before a human is needed.
"Our AI bots are texting back and forth with customers all day long," says Jeff. "I see the notifications on my phone."
For appointment booking, G.L. Hunt takes a softer approach: the bot qualifies the lead, gathers all necessary information, and tentatively books the appointment. Then a human jumps in to confirm.
"The bot takes care of the booking and then we call to confirm it."
Hatch as a central lead hub
G.L. Hunt uses Hatch as their central collection hub for external partner leads. Some partners have a ServiceTitan API, others require a Google Sheet, and others have yet a different process. Everyone goes into Hatch first, then gets filtered into ServiceTitan.
This eliminates the cumbersome work of monitoring several lead dashboards throughout the day.
"Hatch is our central collection hub for leads before they go into ServiceTitan. It's just cleaner that way."
The results
Jeff shares that there are two major impacts: freeing up the team from outbound calling to focus on real prospects, and a measurable increase in appointments.
40% higher booking rates
"We're up about 40% in appointments month over month for the last eight months. We've done a lot to get there, so it's not just Hatch, but Hatch has been a big part of that."
198 appointments a month from missed calls
In the last 90 days, G.L. Hunt's missed call campaign saw 5,711 launches and influenced:
- 594 appointments booked for a 10% set rate
- 279 sales
- $1.8M in revenue
"This is a no-brainer feature. It only took a couple seconds to set up, and the number of booked appointments from missed calls is quite impressive."
The missed call campaign also filters out spam, so Jeff's team doesn't waste time listening to voicemails or returning calls that don't matter.
27% of revenue influenced by Hatch
Across all campaigns, 27% of G.L. Hunt's total revenue is influenced by Hatch.
Favorite features
- Central hub for lead sources — "We use Hatch as our central hub to receive external partner leads. Everybody goes into Hatch first, then gets filtered into ServiceTitan. It's just cleaner that way."
- Standing up new lead sources is easier — "My support team members are smart and quick. I'll come to them with a new lead vendor and it's all set up two days later."
- Excellent support — "If every Account Manager I worked with was like my Hatch Account Managers, my life would be amazing. I'd be ahead on everything."
What's next
Jeff has been focused on pre-appointment efforts, so post-estimate campaigns and results are still being built out. Next on the roadmap: estimate follow-up, cancellation campaigns, appointment confirmations, and accounts receivable follow-up.
"There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we're excited to dig into for post-estimate follow-up."
