Our clients are private people. What stops their details ending up somewhere we did not agree to?
Design, and a signature. Client records sit in a store you control, access is granted per named person and every open is logged, and no document leaves for a third-party service unless that is written into the scope you approved. We sign an NDA before the first working session, and for practices with professional obligations we start from your rules rather than our defaults.
How do you keep a change order from turning into an argument six months later?
By making the record the same thing both sides are reading. Every request that moves cost or time becomes a draft change order with a number and a schedule effect, and it is not work until it is signed by you and countersigned by the client. Messages, photographs and site notes attach to the line they concern, so the answer to "when did we agree to that" is a date rather than a memory.
We are three people and a truck. Is custom software really the answer?
Frequently not, and this is the market where we say that most often. Three people with a good estimating package and a discipline about photographs will outperform bad custom software every time. What changes the answer is running several jobs of real size at once, or holding ongoing histories on dozens of properties. Then the pieces stop fitting in one head.
Meridian Hills has its own board but we are also under Indianapolis rules. Which one wins?
The stricter one, in practice: the town can pass ordinances but not ones that conflict with or fall below a City-County ordinance. For a contractor that means checking both, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets skipped at eight in the morning. Where it matters to a build, we put the check in the job record so it is answered before the crew is booked. The same boundary question decides which school corporation, which police number and which permit counter applies at a given address, and none of it is signposted from the street.
Why does this page not name a single shop or restaurant in Meridian Hills?
Because there are none to name, and the mapping data that suggests otherwise is wrong. Run a bounding box over this town and you get thirty-odd businesses back — a brewpub, bakeries, salons, estate agents, an outfitter — every one of them addressed on Cornell Avenue, Ferguson Street, East 65th or North College. That is Broad Ripple, two miles south-east, and it is Indianapolis. The regulated-sites register returns nothing here at all. What is genuinely inside the line is Meridian Hills Country Club and 1.47 square miles of houses, and Park Tudor School and the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired sit just outside it on Indianapolis ground. We would rather write that down than dress a page up with somebody else's high street.
What does an engagement cost, and when do we know the number?
Before anything is built. We map your process, write it down, and price the whole thing as one figure you approve. If the scope changes, we re-price it in the open rather than sending a bigger bill at the end. Firms in this trade recognise the arrangement, because it is the one they offer their own clients.
If we ended the relationship, do we keep the project histories?
Entirely. Project files, change orders, photographs, property histories, member records — exported in open formats whenever you ask, without a fee. It is in the agreement before the first payment. Anything else would make the record hostage to a supplier relationship, which is not a position we would ask a client to accept.
Can a system tell us whether a tree is a hazard?
No, and any product claiming otherwise should worry you. What it can do is read a request, notice that somebody wrote "leaning over the garage" and push it to the front of a human's queue within the hour. The assessment is made by a qualified person on site, and the system records who made it and when, which is the part that matters if a limb comes down in February.