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Plumbers, electricians, builders, installers, landscapers, cleaning and maintenance firms. You are on site all day and running the business at night. Most of that night work is the kind a computer should be doing.
Field businesses lose money in a very particular way: not through poor work, but through the gap between the job finishing and the paperwork catching up.
If three or more of these are true, there is a straightforward first project in here.
Frequent, repetitive and expensive to get wrong — in that order.
Any call you cannot take triggers an instant text: who you are, that you have seen it, when you will call back, and a link to book a slot. It turns a lost lead into a queued one and costs almost nothing to run.
Dictate a voice note on the drive back. It becomes a structured draft quote against your own price list, ready to check and send from your phone in two minutes instead of two hours.
Marking a job complete triggers the invoice, the payment link and a polite chasing sequence that escalates on a schedule and stops the second they pay.
Anything a tradesperson does on site has to work with cold hands, one bar of signal and a cracked screen. If a system needs someone to sit at a laptop to keep it fed, it will not get fed. We build for the phone first, and we would rather automate three things that get used than ten that get ignored. If you work across Gippsland or the Peninsula, patchy coverage is a design constraint, not an excuse — anything we build has to tolerate going offline for an hour.
Related reading: The first five things a small business should automate
You will always know what is being built, what it costs and how to switch it off.
You describe a normal week. We listen for the parts that get done twice.
As it really happens, including the workarounds nobody admits to.
A written definition of done, a fixed price, tested on your real jobs.
Your team trained, documentation left behind, and a check-in a few weeks later.
Usually the opposite. Those systems are good at holding jobs and weaker at the edges — what happens before a job exists and after it is marked complete. That is exactly where missed calls, late quotes and unchased invoices live. We tend to build around what you have rather than replace it.
If they need training to cope, we have built it wrong. The best automations for field teams are invisible: a text that sends itself, a form already half filled in, a reminder that just arrives. Our rule is that if it adds a step for the person on site, it has to remove two.
Less impersonal than voicemail nobody returns. Customers overwhelmingly prefer a straight answer about when they will hear back to silence, and the alternative is not a warm personal call — it is them ringing the next mob. Keep it short, sound like yourself, and it reads as organised rather than automated.
Often more so, because there is nobody to absorb the admin. Two-person firms usually get the most from exactly two things: instant enquiry response and automatic invoice chasing. That is a small, cheap project and we would rather sell you that than a system you do not need.
Twenty minutes, no slides, no obligation. Worst case you get a clear opinion on whether it is worth doing at all.