The correctional centre is moving to Crest Hill. Does it make sense to invest in systems now?
It makes more sense, not less. When a large employer leaves, the businesses that survive are the ones that can sell somewhere else quickly — and selling somewhere else means having your insurance, licences and references ready to hand rather than scattered across a filing cabinet. We build the vendor side so it is buyer-agnostic from day one. If your entire revenue was that one contract, we will say so plainly before you spend anything.
The hospital and the county each have their own portal. Can you deal with those?
We do not log into a buyer’s portal for you, and we would not want that access. What we do is hold the current, correct version of everything those portals ask for, alert you before a document expires, and assemble the packet so that filling in the portal takes twenty minutes instead of a morning of hunting. Where a buyer offers a real integration, we will use it.
Half our customers work nights. Will an online booking system actually help?
That is precisely where it helps. Somebody coming off a night shift at seven cannot phone you at ten to book, because they are asleep. A booking page that is honest about your early and late availability captures that customer at the moment they think of it. We also time reminders around shift patterns instead of blasting everyone at nine in the morning.
We are three people in a shop on Broadwell. Is this priced for us?
Small builds are most of what we do around here. The scope is fixed and written down before you agree to it, so the number does not move once work starts, and the first project is deliberately narrow — one problem, solved properly, in four to eight weeks. If we cannot see how it pays for itself within a year, we will tell you not to buy it.
What is SolaceSentry, and does it slow us down?
It is the review gate. Anything the system would send outward — a quote, a roster, a vendor packet, a reply to a customer — stops and waits for a person to approve it. In practice that is a few seconds per item and it is the reason nothing embarrassing ever goes out with your name on it. You choose which categories need a look and which are routine.
If we stopped working with you, what happens to our records?
They come with you. Your customer list, your documents, your quote history and your schedule export in standard formats on request, and that right is written into the agreement before you pay us anything. We have no interest in holding a Lincoln business hostage over its own paperwork.
How much of this is genuinely AI?
The parts where reading and sorting are the work: pulling dates off a certificate, spotting a revision number on a drawing, routing an enquiry to the right person. The judgement stays human — whether to bid, what to charge, who is fit to go into a client’s home. When a plain database rule would be more reliable than a model, we write the rule and the bill is smaller.
Do you work with people in Lincoln in person?
Yes. We are a US-based team working the Central Illinois corridor, and Lincoln sits an easy drive from most of it. We come out, walk the process with whoever actually does it, and map it before anyone writes code. Confidentiality agreements are normal for us — most institutional suppliers need one anyway.