When a business has been around for 70 years, you know they're doing something right. McRae's Environmental Services has grown from humble beginnings to become a major hydrovac and excavation service provider across Western Canada, with locations in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Vancouver Island.

With over 100 trucks just in their main location and approximately 130 employees, they're the people you call when you need specialized vacuum trucks, hydro excavators, or robotic sewer inspection. Their customers range from municipalities with yearly contracts to private contractors with one-off jobs—all requiring careful coordination and timely service.

The email avalanche that threatened revenue

Like many established businesses, McRae's has seen a dramatic shift in how clients communicate. "More and more of our correspondence with our customers is through email," explains Kyle, who was tasked with finding a solution to their growing email management problem. "The phones aren't ringing as much anymore because everyone just wants to communicate through email or virtual meetings."

This shift created a serious challenge for their six-person dispatch team. On busy days, their shared operations inbox would receive up to 1,000 emails. Using a basic Outlook setup with no structured system, emails would frequently get overlooked.

"Things would get missed, not taken care of, or pushed to the wayside," Kyle explains. "People would take the easy jobs as opposed to doing the hard jobs. And we had to come up with a solution because every missed job is missed revenue."

The problem was particularly acute because of how their dispatch team was structured. Each team member had specialized knowledge in different services, from financial invoicing to hazardous waste handling to robotic sewer inspection, making it crucial that the right emails reached the right people.

When a free-for-all becomes a free-fall

The team's previous workflow in Outlook was, in Kyle's words, "just a free-for-all." This created serious problems:

• No way to know if someone was already responding to an email
• Sometimes sending duplicate emails to the same customer
• Complex jobs getting pushed aside for easier ones
• No accountability for who handled what
• No way to assign tasks based on specialties

The search for a solution

When management realized they were losing revenue from missed jobs, they gave Kyle what he describes as "basically a blank check" to solve the problem. He explored several options:

• ‍Outlook automation and PowerShell: Didn't provide the collaborative features needed‍
• Microsoft Teams: Couldn't achieve the workflow they required‍
• Monday.com: Required running multiple programs simultaneously, which would be too complicated for team members with varying technical skills

Many of McRae's dispatch team members had come directly from field operations—former truck drivers and laborers who knew the business but weren't necessarily tech-savvy. "Throwing too many steps at them just complicates things," Kyle notes.

Finding Missive: Sometimes Google knows best

After trying several solutions without success, Kyle did what many of us do in moments of desperation, he started randomly putting search terms into Google for collaborative inboxes.

That's when Missive appeared in the results. After exploring the free trial and demonstrating it to his manager, they quickly realized they'd found their solution. The team particularly appreciated that Missive could completely replace needing to keep Outlook open, while offering the collaborative features they needed.

Kyle initially tested Missive with just one other manager who had less technical experience, to ensure the platform would be user-friendly for everyone. After confirming its ease of use, they deployed it to their six-person dispatch team.

The results: No more missed opportunities

After about a month of full deployment, the impact has been significant. The team can now assign emails based on individual specialties:

• Financial and invoicing emails go to their accounting specialist
• Hazardous waste and vacuum truck inquiries are directed to those specialists
• Robotic sewer inspection requests are assigned to Kyle

"Now we're able to assign emails to each other," Kyle explains.

Just the beginning: Plans for automation

While the team has already seen significant improvements, they're just scratching the surface of what's possible with Missive. Their next steps include:

1. Setting up AI rules to automatically categorize and assign emails based on content
2. Creating specific labels for different service specialties
3. Potentially developing custom integrations with their dispatch software using Missive's API

"We're paying for the service. I want to use as much as I can," Kyle says, expressing enthusiasm about leveraging more advanced features to further streamline their workflow.

The bottom line

For a 70-year-old company handling high-value contracts through email, missing customer communications isn't just an inconvenience—it's lost revenue. With Missive, McRae's Environmental Services has transformed their chaotic inbox into an organized system that ensures nothing falls through the cracks.

As Kyle puts it: "We needed a way to solve this issue because every missed job is missed revenue, and we can't have that."