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Boosting business with better scheduling with ServiceTrade

October 7, 2024

Billy Marshall, Founder and Strategic Advisor of ServiceTrade, discusses how technology bridges the gap between contractors and customers, reducing risk and improving business relationships

Can you tell us about your background and the mission of ServiceTrade, Inc.?

ServiceTrade helps contractors in the fire, life safety and mechanical industries use technology to improve their relationship with customers and grow their business.

Our goal is to make contractors more important to their customers and improve their business.

The idea is simple: contractors perform periodic reviews of equipment, but customers don’t understand the technical details or care about code compliance—they care about reducing risk.

Whether it’s compliance, equipment failures, or life and property safety, they want to avoid risk but don’t understand the contractor’s work.

That’s where technology helps—by creating clear records of what’s been done, including videos, photos and comments.

Without this, customers can’t fully appreciate the service.

It’s like the saying: if a tree falls on a distant island with no one to hear it, did it make a sound? Similarly, if you provide a service and don’t clearly communicate it to the customer, did you really do anything?

The premise of our business is to bring the customer into the contractor’s world.

If all you provide are cryptic reports or invoices, they’ll focus only on price.

We aim to foster a mutual understanding between contractors and customers, reducing operational risk for building owners and their equipment.

That’s what we do.

How is the skilled labor shortage impacting the fire safety industry today?

All the trades are facing this issue. It might be reversing a little, though, as there’s a growing debate about whether college is the best path to vocational and financial success.

We haven’t culturally promoted trade skills enough and now we’re seeing the consequences.

As a result, we’re collectively suffering because the work we need done will take longer and cost more due to the lack of skilled workers.

In the fire market, there’s more work than the available labor can handle.

When supply and demand are imbalanced, prices rise because limited supply allows higher charges.

Substitute products also emerge, but in fire safety, the code moves slowly—innovation in this field means risk and you don’t want to be known for taking risks with life safety.

So, substitute products will also take time.

For our customers, the opportunity is twofold.

First, be selective about the demand you service.

Focus on the highest quality customers.

Second, prioritize technician productivity.

Ensure that technicians are spending their time on tasks that truly require their skill and delegate any tasks that don’t need technical licensing to someone else.

What strategies do you recommend for adapting to the labor shortage using technology and data?

On the technology front, use the information you have to plan a better schedule.

It’s not just about having a better scheduler—there are strategies like minimizing drive time and grouping work to improve efficiency.

But beyond that, consider selling to better customers.

If a customer’s equipment is prone to failure, even if it’s currently compliant, talk to them about replacing it with more reliable equipment.

Good scheduling happens when work is well planned and you can’t plan for emergencies caused by unreliable equipment.

Maximize your planned work by using data about equipment reliability and customer behavior.

You can build a better schedule if most of your work is planned.

Emergency work might offer good margins, but it’s not sustainable. It disrupts your operations.

The second strategy, not necessarily technology-related, is to delegate tasks that don’t require a licensed technician.

Things like washing or restocking the truck, or quoting repairs, can be done by others.

Let technicians focus entirely on engaging with customer equipment, reporting on risks and completing maintenance routines.

Delegate everything else to improve productivity.

You can afford more overhead if it increases supply and output.

A great example is when technicians are still asked to type everything they discovered at the customer site, using their mobile phones with greasy hands—that’s inefficient.

Instead, we enable technicians to take videos, photos and record audio.

Typing on a small keyboard might happen at 25 words per minute, but they can talk at 80 to 120 words per minute. So, we teach them to just talk.

This data shows up as digital files in the office, where AI can transcribe it.

AI can then clean up the transcription, removing jargon and poor grammar and combine it with other work data to produce a readable report for the customer.

What are the best practices for scheduling to maximize technician productivity?

In fire and life safety, you have recurring schedules, like annual or bi-annual inspections required by NFPA 25.

So, each month you already know the work that needs to be done.

I like to focus on what I call “anchor jobs.” These are high-quality customers with larger scopes of work that occur annually and you likely have a specific technician or team that handles them.

I believe in scheduling the first two weeks of each month with these anchor jobs.

They’re pre-planned with the customer, so you know exactly who’s going, when and for how long.

Once those anchor jobs are on the map, you can fill in any extra hours with smaller tasks around them, ensuring full productivity for the first two weeks.

The last two weeks of the month are reserved for less routine work, like repairs, where the scope is less certain.

This approach improves cash flow and technician satisfaction because the first two weeks are well-structured and efficient.

What steps should companies take to integrate new technologies without disrupting current operations?

I had a marketing executive candidate here and I was talking about metaphors.

She suggested offering our technology as a free trial.

I explained the issue: when you first open our application, there’s nothing there.

You have to input all your data—your customers, their equipment, schedules—before it’s usable.

She compared it to getting a new heart: it’s great, but first, you have to undergo open-heart surgery. No one likes surgery and that’s the challenge.

Companies have built up processes they’re comfortable with and switching to something new is like undergoing surgery.

It requires trust and effort.

Most of our customers are companies without dedicated IT departments, so adopting new technology is a big leap for them.

They want to avoid doing it repeatedly, so when they choose, they need to choose wisely.

What emerging trends in fire safety could help address the labor shortage?

The code changes very slowly, by design, which means innovation in fire safety also progresses slowly.

No one wants to be responsible for approving something that could lead to property damage or loss of life.

However, some advancements are happening, like RFID for device identification, which speeds up inspections by pre-populating information as you approach a device.

There’s also technology allowing remote activation of devices via the panel.

While these innovations help, the best solution lies in using more reliable equipment that requires fewer repairs.

This would allow technical resources to focus on inspections rather than unnecessary repairs.

Improving the reliability of equipment is likely the most effective way to address the labor shortage.

What final advice do you have for fire safety business leaders facing the labor shortage?

I often point them to Eliahu Goldratt’s book The Goal, which focuses on manufacturing but applies here too.

It says that whatever your critical bottleneck is, you need to eliminate variability and risk from it.

In our case, that’s the technician.

It’s okay to invest in extra administrative work or capacity around that resource because increasing throughput from your technicians will boost your overall productivity.

I tell them they can spend more on administrative overhead and technology than they think.

Freeing up technician time for billable work will more than compensate for those investments.

I even walk them through the accounting, showing how raising prices and improving technician productivity can lead to 50% more revenue.

Even if they double their overhead, it’s still a more profitable business with that increased technician output.

The math is simple, but many don’t take the time to see it, so I often prove it to them.

Many business leaders think the best way to improve their company is by cutting administrative overhead.

In reality, the best way is to increase technician productivity and revenue. That’s how you improve your business.

This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue of Fire & Safety Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital copy, click here.

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