We service turbines and half our people are on the road. Where does software help?
In the two places a travelling crew business bleeds. First, certification: climb, rescue, first aid and manufacturer qualifications all expiring on their own schedules, and a lapse found at a gate costs you a day and a reputation. Second, the write-up: a job closed on a phone at the base of the tower is a job you can bill this week. Everything else is nice to have.
Our busy season is harvest and the money arrives in November. Can the payment work like that?
We scope to a fixed figure before you commit and we will talk about when it lands. Plenty of businesses here would rather start a build in January and pay for it out of the previous crop than sign anything in September. What we will not do is stretch a project across a harvest so it needs your attention in the six weeks you have none. Better to start after.
Twenty years of field records, contracts and lease papers are in this office. What happens to them?
They stay yours, and most of them stay where they are. There is rarely value in keying two decades of paper into a database. What is worth carrying forward is the live stuff — current contracts, current leases, parcels, growers, payment schedules. Whatever goes in comes back out in a standard format on request, and that is in writing before you pay us anything.
We are a hotel and a restaurant, not a wind company. Does any of this apply?
It applies directly, because your business changed when the towers went up. A crew that needs eighteen rooms for six weeks is a different customer from a traveller on US 41, and treating them the same is how you either turn away a campaign or lose a month of capacity to one contractor. Holding the block against the employer instead of a person, so the reservation survives the crew rotating, solves most of it.
Does a county seat business really need this, or is it a big-company thing?
Size is not the test. The test is whether you have deadlines that arrive from somewhere else and cost you real money if you miss them. A three-person service firm with forty certifications to watch has that problem worse than a large company with a compliance department. A shop on the square selling to walk-in customers probably does not, and we will say so.
What is the smallest sensible thing to start with?
One process, mapped properly, priced at a number you see before you agree. Usually the certification register or the job close-out, because both have an obvious before and after. We would rather deliver one thing that works and have you call us again than sell a county-wide project that nobody has time to adopt during planting.
How much of this is genuinely AI?
A useful amount and no more. Reading a certificate to pull the expiry date, indexing a lease amendment to the right parcel, turning a scale ticket into line items — those are AI tasks and they save real hours. Deciding whether a technician is cleared to climb is not, and anything that touches a safety decision stays a human call with a name against it.
What is the review gate you keep mentioning?
SolaceSentry. It sits between the system and the outside world: nothing reaches a landowner, a grower, a site operator or a customer until a person on your side releases it. In a county this size the person reading it usually knows the person receiving it, which is exactly why we do not let software send in your name.