What we're actually looking for
We stopped sorting prospects by industry a while ago, because it kept putting very different businesses in the same bucket. This list is a better predictor than any trade category:
- 01You run crews or vehicles that leave a building and come back
- 02Somebody sequences the day, and that person is a bottleneck
- 03Roughly five to fifty people — big enough to hurt, small enough to change
- 04Your systems don't talk to each other, and at least one of them has no API
- 05The owner still personally feels dispatch, payroll or follow-up every week
Hit four of those five and the work we've already done translates. Hit one or two and you should probably spend your money somewhere else, and we will tell you that on the call.
What it's called in your business
Most of the distance between industries turns out to be vocabulary. Here is the honest mapping between what we run and what you'd call it:
Dispatch
Route sheets, job boards, service calls, turns, pickupsSomebody decides every morning who goes where in what order. The constraint changes name by industry — skills, licences, parts on the van, tenant access windows — but the decision is the same decision, and it is nearly always made by one person under time pressure.
Fleet
Vans, mowers, equipment, rigs, plows, doorsAnything that breaks, needs servicing, and stops revenue when it is down. If you have assets with a maintenance history, the same diagnostic reading applies.
Crew performance
Techs, cleaners, applicators, installers, adjustersDistributed people you cannot watch, doing work you are judged on. The measurement problem does not care what is in the truck.
Customer messaging
Confirmations, ETAs, quote follow-up, review requestsOutbound at volume, where one wrong message reaches a real customer. This is the one that needs a guardrail before it needs horsepower.
The estimate that didn't close
Proposals, bids, quotes, unsold work ordersEvery field business has a pile of work it nearly won and never followed up on. It is the most portable thing we have built and usually the fastest to pay for itself.
Cash and receipts
Fuel, materials, disposal, parts, per-diemMoney spent in the field by people who are not accountants, arriving as photographs. Universal, and universally reconciled late.
Industries this crosses into
These are the sectors where we've worked through how the build would translate — what carries over cleanly and what would have to be rethought. Read the note as our current thinking, not a case study.
HVAC, plumbing and electrical
Licensed trades with dispatch boards, truck stock and a pile of unsold estimates. The closest translation to what we run — same shape, different skill matching.
Landscaping, pest control and route services
Fixed recurring routes with seasonal load. Route optimisation and crew measurement port almost directly; the scheduling constraint is weather and chemical licensing instead of dump hours.
Commercial cleaning and facility maintenance
Night crews, distributed sites, thin margins and supervision at a distance. Crew performance and receipt capture matter more here than routing.
Property management
Work orders instead of jobs, vendors instead of crews, tenants instead of customers. The stale-work-order problem is the same problem as the unfollowed estimate.
Restoration and remediation
Emergency dispatch with documentation obligations. Higher stakes on the paper trail, which is an argument for the guardrail layer rather than against automation.
Multi-unit franchisees
Operators running several units on corporate systems they cannot modify. This is our own situation, so the constraint of building around a system you don't own is one we have already had to solve.
Professional practices with a back office
Law, accounting, bookkeeping. No trucks, but the same administrative queue and the same reporting that a person rebuilds by hand every month. The furthest translation on this list, and the one we scope most carefully.
One industry deep, not seven industries wide
Everything on this site was proven in one business. We are not going to pretend the list above is a portfolio — it is a set of translations we have reasoned through, and the first build in any new industry will teach us something we did not know.
What travels well is the operating layer: routing, outbound with a guardrail on it, asset diagnostics, receipt capture, reporting nobody has to rebuild by hand. What does not travel is anything that depends on regulation, licensing or liability specific to your trade. We will name those parts in the roadmap rather than discover them halfway through a build.
Not sure yours translates?
Tell us the one thing that eats your week. That answer is usually obvious within a sentence or two.