As home service companies grow, it becomes harder for leaders to see every place where money moves. More jobs bring more purchase orders, more service tickets, more materials, more vendor invoices, and more people touching each process. A small pricing mistake or unused product may not seem serious on its own. But when the same issue happens again and again, it can quietly take money out of the business.
Trade Automation Pros helps contractors use technology to bring those hidden issues into view. Led by co-founder and CEO Tersh (David) Blissett, the company builds AI and automation systems for home service businesses that help leaders connect data, reduce manual work, and better understand what is happening across daily operations. For HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other skilled trade companies, that can include watching inventory, reviewing business activity, improving workflows, and finding patterns that may be difficult for one person to catch by hand.
Through the PowerChat series, Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, brings leaders into conversations about the real problems shaping the home improvement industry. In this discussion with Blissett, the focus moved beyond using AI simply to save time. It looked at how better systems can help contractors see where money is sitting, where costs are changing, and where small errors may be putting pressure on margin.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that recognizes and elevates the top leaders and most impactful companies in the home improvement industry.
The conversation gave contractors a simple but important idea to consider. Growth can create opportunity, but it can also create blind spots. Strong systems help leaders see those blind spots before they become normal parts of the business.
A growing contractor can have strong sales, busy crews, and a full schedule while money is still slipping through places that are hard to notice.
The problem is often not one large mistake.
It may be a product sitting in the warehouse longer than expected.
It may be a supplier ticket that comes in above the price leadership thought it had agreed to.
It may be a small cost change that no one catches because the person buying the material does not know the original vendor agreement.
It may be a repeated difference of 10 dollars, 20 dollars, or more that appears too small to demand attention on one ticket.
But a contracting business does not operate on one ticket.
Tersh Blissett, co-founder and CEO of Trade Automation Pros.
Across hundreds or thousands of transactions, a small difference can become a real margin problem.
That was one of the strongest points Tersh Blissett raised during his PowerChat conversation with Greg Cummings.
Blissett explained that AI can help contractors review information at a scale that would be difficult for a manager to handle alone. A system can look across tickets, inventory records, purchasing data, and vendor pricing to find patterns that deserve a closer look.
“They actually analyze every single ticket that comes in compared to the pricing that you were promised by that vendor,” said Tersh Blissett, co-founder and CEO of Trade Automation Pros.
That type of review matters because the person completing a purchase may have no reason to question the amount on the ticket.
The technician may not know what price was promised months earlier.
The warehouse team may not know when a pricing agreement changed.
The owner may not have time to check every invoice.
The problem can remain hidden even when everyone is doing their job.
This is where technology can give leaders another set of eyes.
A system built around inventory automation for home service businesses can help show what the company has, how long products have been sitting, and where too much cash may be tied up in stock that is not moving.
Blissett also pointed to the next step.
“AI has the ability to predict the inventory that you’re going to need,” he said. “It’ll look at the inventory that you have, how long it’s sat on your shelves, how much it’s costing you.”
That turns inventory from a simple count into a business decision.
A leader can begin asking better questions.
Are we buying too much of something?
Are we holding products that rarely move?
Are we paying more than expected?
Has a supplier price changed?
Is that change now affecting what we should charge on future jobs?
These questions matter because margin is often shaped by hundreds of small choices made across the business.
Greg Cummings pushed the conversation further by pointing out that a vendor price change does more than affect one purchase. If material costs rise and the contractor does not see the change, the company may keep pricing new work as if nothing happened.
That means a hidden purchasing issue can become a sales pricing issue.
A sales pricing issue can become a margin issue.
And a margin issue can continue across job after job before leadership understands what changed.
The value of AI call analysis and ServiceTitan automation for contractors may be easy to see when it helps leaders understand customer activity. The same idea applies to the back of the business. AI can help look across large amounts of information and bring unusual patterns to the surface so a person can decide what to do next.
That distinction matters.
The technology is not making the final business choice.
It is helping leaders see the choice sooner.
For Blissett, this is where AI becomes practical. It can review more detail than one person has time to review. It can compare what happened against what was expected. It can show where an issue keeps repeating.
Then leadership can act.
A contractor may call the vendor.
Adjust purchasing.
Reduce unused stock.
Update pricing.
Change the process.
Or decide that no action is needed.
The point is that the company can make the decision with better information.
This PowerChat turns the conversation about AI away from flashy tools and toward something every contractor understands: protecting what the business earns.
The money hiding inside inventory, tickets, and small price changes may not be easy to see. But once contractors build systems that bring those patterns into view, they have a better chance to stop small losses before they become part of the cost of doing business.
The deeper lesson in Greg Cummings’ conversation with Tersh Blissett was not simply that AI can process more information. It was that growing contractors often reach a point where good people can no longer watch every detail by hand. More jobs create more tickets. More crews create more purchases. More materials create more inventory. More vendors create more prices to check. The company may be healthy and well run, yet small problems can still hide inside all that activity.
Blissett’s view gives business automation for skilled trades companies a clear purpose. Technology can help watch the details that are easy to miss and bring unusual activity to a leader’s attention. The goal is not to replace judgment. It is to give leaders a clearer view of where cash is sitting, where costs are changing, and where action may be needed.
That perspective turns AI into something far more useful than another tool on a screen. It becomes a way to help contractors see the business they have already built.
Growth brings more opportunity, but it also brings more places for small mistakes to hide.
An owner running a smaller operation may know many of the daily purchases. They may notice when a material price changes or when a product has been sitting too long. As the company adds crews, jobs, trucks, vendors, and service calls, that level of personal review becomes harder to keep.
There may be hundreds or thousands of tickets moving through the business. No owner can sit down and check every line while also leading employees, serving customers, planning growth, and managing the rest of the company.
That does not mean leadership is failing.
It means the business has created more information than one person can reasonably watch.
This is where contractor automation can help. Instead of asking a manager to review every normal transaction, a system can help point attention toward the ones that look different.
Blissett explained how quickly small amounts can add up.
“It might be $10 bucks here, $20 bucks there, but then over a thousand service calls that you’ve gone on, that’s a lot of money,” he said.
A $20 dollar difference on one ticket may be easy to overlook. The same difference repeated across one thousand calls becomes $20,000 dollars.
The power is in seeing the pattern.
When leaders can find that pattern earlier, they can spend less time searching through normal activity and more time understanding why something changed.
That is how technology can support growth without asking leaders to simply work more hours.
See how Trade Automation Pros approaches automation around real contractor operations.
A full warehouse can look like a sign that a company is ready for business.
But every item on that shelf was purchased with cash.
When products move at the right pace, inventory supports service. When they stay on the shelf for months, that same inventory can begin to hold money that could have been used somewhere else.
Blissett brought this point into the conversation by showing how AI can help leaders understand more than how many items they have.
“AI has the ability to predict the inventory that you’re going to need,” Blissett said. “It’ll look at the inventory that you have, how long it’s sat on your shelves, how much it’s costing you.”
That changes the way a contractor can look at the warehouse.
The question is no longer only, do we have enough material?
Leaders can also ask whether they have too much of one item, whether a product is moving slowly, whether stock levels match real demand, and how much money is sitting inside products that are not being used.
Good inventory automation for home service businesses can help make those questions easier to answer.
The goal is not to keep the warehouse empty. A contractor still needs the right products ready when customers need service.
The goal is to understand what the business is actually using and make purchasing decisions from that information.
Better inventory data can also help leaders plan ahead. If patterns show that certain materials move faster during certain times of year, the company can prepare with more care. If another product rarely moves, the business may choose not to keep as much of it on hand.
Inventory then becomes more than an operations task.
It becomes part of cash flow planning.
Vendor relationships are built on communication, trust, and clear pricing.
Still, prices can change.
An agreement may end.
A number may be entered incorrectly.
A message may not reach the right person.
A team member at a supply house may use a different price than the one leadership expected.
The important point from the PowerChat was not that every difference is intentional. It was that contractors need a way to see those differences when they happen.
“You were promised this dollar amount, but they’ve been slowly creeping up the cost at the supply house,” Blissett said while explaining one way pricing can move without being noticed.
He also shared a more direct example.
A company believed a tank of refrigerant should cost about $1500 dollars, but the ticket showed about $2200 dollars.
That type of difference matters.
The technician making the purchase may not know the price that leadership agreed to months earlier. From the technician’s view, the ticket may look normal.
The owner may never see that single transaction.
A program using vendor pricing analysis for contractors can compare incoming tickets with the expected price and help flag a difference for review.
That does not mean the system decides that a vendor did something wrong.
It means leadership gets a chance to ask a question.
Was the price changed?
Did the agreement end?
Was there an error?
Was the business told about the change?
Once the company knows the answer, both sides can deal with the issue before it repeats across many more purchases.
Strong systems do not weaken vendor trust.
They can help protect it by making pricing clearer for everyone involved.
Learn how better automation can give contractor leaders clearer control over their systems.
One of the most important parts of the conversation came when Greg Cummings connected purchasing costs to the price contractors charge for future work.
A material cost does not stay inside the warehouse.
It travels through the business.
When the true cost of a product rises, the cost of completing the job rises with it. If company pricing does not change, the contractor may continue selling work based on an old number.
The job still gets sold.
The crew still completes the work.
Revenue still enters the business.
But the margin is smaller.
That is why financial leaks do not always appear as one dramatic loss.
They can begin with small changes that slowly become normal.
A material costs a little more.
Inventory stays on the shelf a little longer.
The sales price stays the same.
A repeated manual process creates another small error.
None of those issues alone may cause panic. Together, they can change the health of the business.
This is where home service workflow automation can support better leadership. When data moves through connected systems, leaders have a better chance to see changes while there is still time to respond.
A purchasing leader may speak with the vendor.
Operations may change how much stock is carried.
Finance may review the effect on margin.
Sales leadership may adjust pricing.
The value is not simply finding a problem.
The value is finding it early enough to have choices.
When leaders discover a cost change months later, much of the money may already be gone. When they see it sooner, they can make a decision before the same issue reaches another hundred jobs.
Most contractors are not short on information.
Their businesses create information every day.
It lives in tickets, calls, invoices, job records, inventory systems, customer relationship management platforms, emails, and conversations between employees.
The harder job is finding the part that matters.
Blissett shared an example from an onsite visit where he recorded conversations while studying a company’s operations. During the review, AI noticed that a warehouse manager had returned to the same inventory subject several times.
Blissett had listened to the conversation himself. At first, the issue had not seemed as important based on what he saw in the room.
The repeated words told another story.
“The AI actually caught it listening to the conversation and said, you know, that’s probably something that’s pretty important,” Blissett explained.
He followed up with the warehouse manager.
The concern was important.
That discovery later became the basis for an inventory automation.
This example shows the value of custom AI systems for contractors when they are built around real work.
The AI did not make the final decision.
It did not tell the business what to buy.
It did not replace the warehouse manager.
It helped find a signal that deserved a closer look.
Blissett then used his experience, asked more questions, and decided what to do next.
That is an important line for contractor leaders.
Technology can review more information than one person has time to study. It can find repeated words, unusual numbers, or patterns that may deserve attention.
But a person still needs to understand what that signal means inside the business.
The system finds what may matter.
Leadership decides why it matters.
Meet the team behind Trade Automation Pros and its practical approach to contractor technology.
Finding waste is useful.
Keeping more cash inside the company is even more useful when leadership knows what to do with it.
During the conversation, Blissett pointed to companies paying for several programs that perform work their main customer relationship management system may already be able to handle.
A business may use only a small part of a platform and then pay for several other tools to fill the gaps.
When the company understands its systems better, some of those extra costs may no longer be needed.
Blissett connected that directly to cash flow.
He explained that when contractors stop paying for several programs doing the same work, “you have that money to spend on marketing or growing the business and you have more cash flow.”
That idea gives AI implementation for contractors a much larger purpose.
The point is not to cut costs just to make an expense line smaller.
The point is to keep resources available for the places where they can create more value.
That may mean investing in marketing.
It may mean training employees.
It may mean building stronger customer systems.
It may mean adding equipment, improving technology, or preparing for another stage of growth.
Greg also noted how quickly AI is changing. What contractors understand today may look very different only months from now.
Blissett agreed that this uncertainty is real. His view was that the companies doing well are staying informed. Some build knowledge inside the company. Others use outside experts to help them learn, review systems, and understand what has changed.
That makes the work ongoing.
A contractor cannot install one system and assume every process will remain right forever.
The business changes.
Prices change.
Customer habits change.
Technology changes.
Strong leaders keep looking.
The best automation consultant for home service companies should help a contractor protect what already works while finding the areas where better visibility can create more room to grow.
That is the larger lesson behind the money hiding in the business.
Every dollar protected gives leadership another choice about where the company can go next.
Tersh Blissett’s work in the trades shows that his focus on data and automation did not begin with the recent rise of AI. Long before he became co-founder and CEO of Trade Automation Pros, he was building, testing, and sharing systems inside real home service companies.
That work earned national attention in 2019 when ACHR News named Blissett to its Top 40 Under 40 HVACR Professionals list. The publication highlighted his path from technician and service manager to business owner, along with his early use of technology to improve how an HVAC company operated. It also pointed to his goal of educating others in the industry and helping people understand the value of the trades.
Service Business Mastery Podcast CO-Hosts Tersh Blissett (Right) & Josh Crouch
That education effort grew far beyond one company. Through the Service Business Mastery Podcast, Blissett helped build a platform that reaches more than 165,000 monthly downloads, giving HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other service business leaders access to conversations about operations, leadership, technology, and growth.
His operating history also gives weight to the financial lessons shared in this PowerChat. Blissett helped take IceBound HVAC & Refrigeration through a broader rebrand into Service Emperor as the company expanded beyond its original HVAC and refrigeration identity. Public accounts of that period show his strong focus on business numbers, process tracking, technology, and better operating systems.
That history matters when Blissett talks about inventory sitting too long, vendor costs changing, or small losses hiding inside daily business activity. These are not ideas built only from watching AI develop. They connect to years spent looking at how a service company works from the inside and asking how better information can lead to better choices.
Blissett is now carrying that same practical approach into contractor education through TAP Into the Future, an AI and automation event being promoted for October 2026 in Savannah, Georgia. Current event promotion centers on useful automation strategies, business growth, and direct networking instead of theory alone. Earlier TAP programming also emphasized hands-on workshops, ready to use automations, profit dashboards, and a Savannah Bananas experience designed to bring business owners together outside the classroom.
The larger impact is easy to see. Blissett has moved from using technology inside his own service businesses to helping a much wider group of contractors understand how to use it with purpose.
That makes his message about hidden costs especially important.
The same leader who has spent years studying operations is now asking contractors to look more closely at the information already moving through their companies. Inventory records, vendor tickets, job data, calls, and reports can all tell a story. The challenge is building systems that help leaders see that story before lost time or lost margin becomes normal.
For Blissett, the future of automation is not only about what a machine can do. It is about giving business owners better information, helping them make stronger decisions, and sharing those lessons so more companies across the trades can grow with greater control.
The hardest cost to fix is often the one a leader does not know is there.
As home service companies grow, more information moves through the business every day. That creates more chances for small changes to go unnoticed. A cost can rise. A product can sit too long. A number on a ticket can be different from what leadership expected.
None of those issues mean the business is poorly run.
They mean the business has reached a point where leaders need better ways to see what is happening.
That is where Tersh Blissett believes technology can become useful. AI cannot prevent every mistake, and it should not make every decision. What it can do is help bring patterns into view sooner, when leadership still has time to respond.
That time matters.
A leader who sees a change today has more choices than a leader who finds it months later. They can ask questions, review the numbers, adjust a process, speak with a vendor, or decide that nothing needs to change.
The system brings the issue forward.
The leader decides what it means.
That balance will become more important as the trades become more data driven. Growing contractors will continue to create more job records, purchase data, customer information, and operating details than any one person can study alone.
The companies that learn how to turn that information into a clear view of the business will be in a stronger place to protect margin while still moving forward.
For contractors, the next step does not need to be complex.
Look at one area where money moves every day.
Review inventory.
Look at purchasing.
Study service tickets.
Check material costs.
Then ask what is still being checked by hand, what is not being checked at all, and where a small difference could be repeating without anyone seeing it.
That question may point to the first place where better automation can protect the business.
The next margin problem may not arrive as one large loss. It may already be hiding inside hundreds of small transactions, and the contractors who learn to see those patterns sooner will be in a stronger position to protect what they earn.
No. Power100 looks beyond how large a company is. Its ranking system studies leaders through Growth, Community, and Culture, using five layers of review. Those layers include public business signals, AI scoring, human review, feedback from customers, employees, and partners, and a final ranking process. This means a company is judged on more than sales numbers alone.
No. Power100 uses technology as one part of its ranking process, but people are also involved. Its five layer system combines public data and AI scoring with review from industry veterans. Scores are then checked against feedback from partners, customers, and employees before the final ranking is made. This helps Power100 use data without removing real industry judgment from the process.
Trade Automation Pros builds custom AI systems for contractors that can connect business data, workflows, customer relationship management systems, dispatch, call handling, and other internal tools. In his PowerChat interview, Tersh Blissett also explained how AI can help review inventory and compare vendor tickets with expected pricing. The goal is to bring unusual costs or patterns to a leader’s attention so they can investigate before a small issue repeats across many jobs.
Yes. Trade Automation Pros offers its Automation Foundation for companies that want to learn how to build and maintain their own systems. The program includes courses, a contractor community, weekly live question sessions, and access for the full team under one price. It teaches tools such as Zapier, Make.com, and AI platforms so contractors can build more knowledge inside their own companies.
Yes. Trade Automation Pros offers custom development for home service businesses. Its work can include CRM integrations, automated dispatch, AI workflows, AI call handling, lead routing, and other internal tools. This gives contractors another option when an existing product does not fully solve the problem they are trying to fix.
The company states that its team still operates an HVAC and plumbing business. Tersh Blissett is also described as an HVAC and plumbing contractor who moved deeply into automation after years of looking for better ways to run service businesses. That field experience shapes its approach to business automation for skilled trades companies, because the systems are being built by people who work with many of the same calls, paperwork, customers, and operating problems contractors face.
No. The value discussed by Tersh Blissett is in helping leaders see a possible issue sooner. AI may flag that a vendor ticket does not match an expected price or show that inventory has been sitting longer than normal. Leadership still needs to review the facts, understand why the difference happened, and decide what action makes sense. The technology finds the signal. The contractor makes the decision.
According to its website, Trade Automation Pros has built more than 200 automations for trades businesses. The company also offers AI and automation systems for home service businesses, training programs, custom development, and tools built around real contractor needs. Its team continues to operate in the trades while also speaking at industry events and teaching contractors how to use automation in daily business operations.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that recognizes and elevates the top leaders and most impactful companies in the home improvement industry. Led by CEO Greg Cummings, Power100 gives contractors access to trusted leadership insights, national rankings, PowerChat interviews, industry research, and practical business education designed to help companies make stronger decisions. By bringing proven voices and real operating lessons into one platform, Power100 helps home improvement leaders learn from the people, systems, and ideas shaping the future of the industry.
Membership unlocks every Power100 interview, PowerChat episode, and expert playbook - free for industry leaders.
Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
