How Cardinal took the bias out of dispatch, lifted average ticket 20%, and scaled through four tuck‑ins

Cardinal is a full-service residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical company serving the Madison and Milwaukee areas of Wisconsin. Founded in 1984, it joined Redwood Services in 2025.

Cardinal was growing quickly, and their dispatchers were drowning. Their process was manual and riddled with bias: dispatchers often fell back to assigning by location and relied on gut feel about which technician was “good” at a given call. Dispatch Manager Shawna Aaron spent entire days shuffling the board on emotion. If a technician pushed back on a call, she moved it.

Probook replaced the location-and-reputation guesswork with a real-time model that puts the right technician on the right job.

Matching techs to the right calls had an almost immediate impact on the top line. In the first six months on Probook, Cardinal’s average ticket across trades rose over 20% year-over-year.

Reliable, automated dispatch let Cardinal scale without scaling their team at the same pace. The company has since tucked in four acquisitions, added more than 13,000 customers, and brought on 14 technicians, and Tim Pederson says they couldn’t have handled that without Probook.

With Probook covering the board, Cardinal’s dispatchers picked up work they never had time for. They now debrief every technician at the end of every job to catch anything that was missed. Before Probook, they were too buried in the board to do any of it.

Cardinal also added Probook’s AI CSR to answer the afterhours and overflow calls that used to go to voicemail. In its first four months, it booked over 850 jobs and generated more than $715,000 in revenue at an 82% true booking rate.

Cardinal evaluated several AI platforms before choosing Probook. What stood out, and what they credit as critical to these results, was the hands-on support and implementation. Tim Pederson calls the white-glove service “second to none in the industry,” and Dispatch Manager Shawna Aaron says Probook support gets back to them almost immediately.

With dispatch running on data and the AI CSR handling overflow around the clock, leadership can keep tucking in companies and adding technicians without piling on headcount. As Tim Pederson puts it, Probook is “hands down one of the best business decisions we’ve made in the last five years.”