We bid in Lafayette and in Crawfordsville. Can one system handle two sets of rules?
Yes, and keeping them apart is most of the value. Each job carries its jurisdiction, and the checklist, the inspection points and the documents follow from that rather than from someone remembering which town this one is in. What we will not do is claim to know your permit offices better than you do — you tell us the steps, we make them impossible to skip.
The bridge and the creek only make money about four months a year. Is it worth building for that?
Only if it is small. A seasonal business should not be carrying software cost through the winter, so we scope those builds tight and cheap, aim them at the two things that actually leak money — unfilled weekends and waivers collected in a car park — and leave the rest alone. If the honest answer is a better booking page and nothing more, that is what you will be quoted for.
We are eight hundred people with no school and no depot. Is there enough here to be worth your time?
The size of the town has never been the thing that decides it. A place that still runs Darlington Power & Light and Darlington Water Works with its own people is well used to doing serious things at a small scale. What decides it is whether the same information is being written down more than once, and whether somebody is driving miles they are not billing for. Both of those are common here and both are fixable in a short, small job. If neither applies to you, we will say so.
When does this get paid for, given our work is all weather?
We fix the price before we start and we agree the timing to suit a trade that cannot work in a wet fortnight. That usually means a build over the winter, a go-live before the season opens, and an invoice that does not fall in the month you were rained off. We would rather structure it that way than chase a contractor for money he genuinely does not have this week.
What actually happens to our job histories and customer list if we part company?
They come with you. Bids, job records, waivers, customer details — exported in plain formats, on request, with no charge for leaving and no clause that makes it awkward. It goes in writing before you pay a deposit. A contractor’s customer list is the business itself, and no software firm should be sitting on top of it.
Where does the AI part actually apply on a building job?
Mostly on the reading. Pulling quantities and awkward items out of a set of drawings, matching a photograph to a job, and sorting enquiries by where they are and how urgent they sound — that is real work the technology does well. Pricing, sequencing and deciding whether the ground will carry a machine are not, and we would be doing you harm to pretend otherwise.
Our crew is three people and none of us want another app to check.
Then it should not be an app. Most of what we build for crews this size runs on a text message, a photograph and a link, so nobody installs anything and nobody logs in twice a day. If your people have to be nagged into using it, the design failed and we will fix the design rather than blame the crew.
How do we know it worked, rather than just feeling busier?
Because we agree the measurement before we build. On a job like this it is usually days from enquiry to quote and unbilled travel hours per month, both of which we take a baseline for at the start. If those two numbers have not moved a quarter after go-live, we have a conversation about why rather than sending you a case study.