Gabriel Pinchev, Founder, CEO, FieldPulse
Gabriel is the Founder and CEO at FieldPulse. FieldPulse is field service software that acts as the digital hub for running your entire contracting business from a single app.
Gabe’s background is in the technology sector. After working with multiple contractors and seeing the amount of hand-written paperwork they were sending out (and not getting paid for), Gabe started FieldPulse to help contractors keep track of their businesses and get paid faster.
Today he continues to talk to customers and prospective customers daily to keep up with the latest issues and trends in the contracting world.
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive
[00:00:58] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldtl. I'm your host. And our guest today is Gabriel Pinchev. He is CEO of FieldPulse. There, a software solution for service based businesses. We're going to learn more about this. I think it's fascinating. I think technology and service based businesses is just have a great area. There's lots of interesting applications. And I think one of the challenges in surface space business is the fact that you're dealing with so many people and keeping them alive, keeping them on point. Keeping your delivery consistent, well-managed is a key to growing and scaling these businesses with that. Gabrielle, welcome to the program.
[00:01:31] Thanks, Bruce, for having me on.
[00:01:33] So why don't we talk a little bit about your background and Field Paul's kind of how things got started, why you chose service based businesses, and then we kind of dig in to the work that you're doing, the insights you're developing. So tell us a little bit about the backstory.
[00:01:46] Sure. So where's software for small service businesses? Think of like electricians, h back plumbing, specialty contractor, stuff like that. And I think typically when you go into software, you start a software company. You either came from specific domain expertise within the industry you're trying to help or you have a software background. And for me, it was really on the software side and I was doing I.T. consulting specifically in mobility.
[00:02:12] And so I had a very mobile centric or mobile focused background in applications. And I had a good idea of what was out there. But I also saw that most of the solutions out there were mostly geared towards larger companies. They were a bit more dated and they weren't very mobile focused. And as mobile apps have gotten much more powerful and smaller, the market was underserved. And I thought there is a big hole of needing mobile first software for small service businesses. So these are typically companies under under 20, under 30, under 50 people that are really trying to grow. And so I left and decided to start the company feel pulse with mobile apps and web based applications designed specifically for the small end of the market.
[00:03:00] Yeah. And how are you? I'm curious how the decision process worked or how your kind of strategic choice thinking process worked in terms of picking this particular market. You know, you mentioned you were looking at some kind of competitors or looking at solutions out there and primarily focused at large companies. But how did you end up sort of zeroing in or deciding to build a software solution in this particular area? That was their experience you had previously inside, or was this just a process of deduction for you in terms of figuring out where the needs were?
[00:03:29] Yeah. So my last consulting role was staffed at a large company that also resold small business software solutions on their mobility group. So they're all basically mobile apps, design or small service businesses.
[00:03:44] I've a lot of exposure. While I was out there, a couple of them were kind of pseudo competitors in the space, but really fully different model and weren't as geared towards small companies looking to get something affordable and get up and running and easy to use, easy to learn, easy to get going and also affordable for them.
[00:04:02] And so it was combination of that. But also having dealt with different contractors and service businesses right around that same time that were causing a lot of different mistakes. I remember one vividly sat on my floor in handwrote an invoice. You have a photo of it somewhere, too. And then the math is wrong. So you get to redo it by hand again and fix it. And there's a ton of mistakes are happening. And I knew there are solutions out there for the larger in the market. But the smaller and where we think 90, 95 percent of the market is is underserved and they don't have time to spend months implementing an onboarding a an experience experimental software that they want to get going really easily and really quickly and get their team trained really quickly. And that's what we focus on.
[00:04:46] I think it's smart in the eye can see that, you know, part of this is driven by the fact that you're just just mobile first is becoming a general trend. I mean, it would be difficult to do this, right. I remember seeing companies trying to do this, you know, 15, 20 years ago where they were building their own devices and having to issue hardware to folks, you know. But the world's changed now.
[00:05:05] Exactly. And a lot of the older solutions weren't even cloud based. They were computer based and they didn't have mobile applications. But when you're a mobile service business, it's everything. So we focus on both sides, both the management side and the field tech side. So obviously, the field tech needs something mobile. Focus to be even able to do anything, but also the managers are often out in the field, whether they're providing estimates or checking on jobs or doing the work themselves if they're on the smaller end owner operator.
[00:05:32] The mobile aspect is key, but a lot of this you couldn't do up until a few years ago in terms of Internet speed capabilities, things like that. So that is the right time to build something that had that mobile focus. But then still had a robust computer based system as well that's fully integrated and stored in the cloud. So everything syncs seamlessly and you get your whole team organized and on the same page.
[00:05:55] Yeah, I look at it in terms of the competition or when you were kind of looking at this market, you know, I always say that the fact that you see competition, you see people in the market is not necessarily a bad sign or it doesn't mean that you're you're late.
[00:06:06] You know, oftentimes it can mean that, you know, it's validating the market or it's giving you more insight into where people are focusing and where there's more specific apps. But it gets did you see opportunities where you could do it better? You saw competitors or companies that were in the space and you felt like you could create a better solution? Or was this there were there were competitors in this space, but there was unserved sort of niche markets within it that you thought you could come in and develop a more focused product around or both. I mean, what was your kind of assessment when you first got involved?
[00:06:35] Yeah, I think it's both. I personally think this is the one of the largest markets that that is underserved by technology. I think most service businesses are still using pen and paper or some form of fragmented software solutions like Excel and text messaging and Google Calendar to do their scheduling and management. And so a lot of the time we're kind of going up against pen and paper and trying to show them the value of moving to a store or when I started it. They were mostly type of older software that was sold directly with the sales rep that was doing outbound.
[00:07:11] And so our model's very inbound driven. You find us on our website through search or content or how have you come across us? And then you just start a free trial right on our Web site and we help you along the way. We'll do demos for you if you need them. Answer questions right in the chat. But the idea is that you can start it very quickly. You can get implemented within the day on your own or with our help, and then you're putting a credit card and get going.
[00:07:36] So it was a lot easier, simpler model for people who don't have much time rather than older solutions where they're doing account based billing and selling direct and counting licenses and things like that. The idea is to make it much easier and seamless for them to get going. In addition to the fact that it's a more moderate solution with mobile apps and the problems that you're solving.
[00:07:58] So the people that are using well, actually, let's let's talk about the industries specifically that you're you're dealing with, too. You listed off a few kind of examples, but tell us about the kind of the real kind of domains that the industry is that you're focused on the service types of service providers you're focused on and why look, what makes there the service that they provide or the business model or the business kind of operational aspects that make that that create the situation that you serve? Like how have you chosen your markets? What are they and why if they fit strategically for you?
[00:08:31] Yeah. So simply put, I would say our customers are a mobile service businesses. And so we do have a focus on things like h back electrical, plumbing, special contracting, a handy man, stuff like that. We get all types of customers across the board really.
[00:08:48] If they do any type of mobile service work or project based contracting, we end up getting them as customers. We even have things like beehive and swarm removal companies.
[00:08:59] Sharon Chim sweeping really anything you can think of. So it's it's a very enormous market because there's so many different industries that fit the bill. In terms of our marketing, it's hard to market to a very specific one. So we we kind of position towards the larger segments, but all those other issues are still great fits because they have a very similar way of operating their business. And so typically these are under 20 under 30 person companies that are really looking to get organized.
[00:09:25] And so as a solution, we handle lots of different things. So we kind of position ourselves as an all in one solution for small service businesses. So we help with job scheduling and dispatching cuts from our management estimates and invoices, payments, timesheets, customer communications, customer portal scheduling, commission tracking really a ton of stuff and ideas that it's an all in one integrated solution where all the different components interact with each other.
[00:09:55] And so people who are coming from either pen and paper or fragmented solutions. When you put all together, it keeps you much more organized and your team organized as well.
[00:10:04] Yeah, and I like it. And I guess what. As you've looked at kind of your feature set, your backlog or your kind of your product strategy. Is there anything that you specifically chosen not to try to do? I'm almost curious when people are developing these kind of broader integrated solutions. And you know that, you know, it can be it can be tempting to try to do everything. I'm always curious about where you start drawing lines or or things, areas that you've decided that you're not going to tackle or at least not going to tackle now.
[00:10:32] Definitely. So we definitely look at ourselves as a software company. So what we focus on things that are in the realm of building out software. And so we have an ecosystem of add ons and some of them are are our own in-house platforms. But we also have other third party ecosystems that are partners and they're typically not software based. And those are things we would never touch. Things like birth control reception is services that we partner with fleet tracking because there is a hardware component, financing payments, things like that we use as partners because they're not. Or SAS competencies of US building software. But there's there's there's room for us to always add on new software components.
[00:11:17] We're constantly looking to build new features and really grow out the base of that. It is all in one for them and they're not having to look at multiple components.
[00:11:27] So talk to me about the kind of the key challenges that you address.
[00:11:31] I mean, when you when you're speaking to a prospect or when when someone is considering your software, why did they end up buying it as this? Is it helping to increase their revenue? Does it do tricks cost? Is it removing drama? I mean, what's what's the kind of value proposition or. At the end of the day, like the benefit that a company is going to get by moving to a platform like yours.
[00:11:50] So overall, we think there's a ton of different benefits from each type of module because it's a it's a conglomerate of different modules. And each module, we think adds a ton of value. Overall, we kind of segment into what people are looking for.
[00:12:04] They're looking for two things, or possibly both. So either to better organize and manage their business if it's gotten chaotic or they want to grow their business. And one of the toughest issues, the service base is service based businesses face or their employees not knowing in terms of hiring and finding them, but making sure they're doing what they need to do, that they're accountable, that they're reliable, that they're on time servicing the customer correctly.
[00:12:30] And so that's a lot of what our focus is on addressing is managing their schedules, giving them the information they need, letting them provide photos and feedback, being able to take payments on the spot and not dealing with cash, location tracking so managers can verify where their field tech was when they said they got to the job so they can confirm it.
[00:12:51] Because Miss Clocked hours is a huge issue in the industry. I've talked to thousands of contractors now and the funny the funny stories we hear that some of the employees sitting in cars, doves trying to build their clock when they when they're actually done that. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of accountability issues with the employees that you're trying to address with the software.
[00:13:14] I'm curious how you how you did your research show when you're kind of looking at this space and trying to figure out what problems to solve and developing your solutions and getting feedback on solutions.
[00:13:23] What was that like to do? Were you shadowing chimney sweeps, you know, helping them, you know, do their job to develop inside? Were you doing surveys, collecting data? Tell us about your research process.
[00:13:36] So a lot of a lot of it was actually from the consumer side of watching and seeing how they operate. And speaking with different providers. But I think when my approach for designing the software initially is I wanted to do it differently than other solutions, that they're not copy their design and really take on my own knowledge from different products, stuff and things that I was learning to design it, how how I wanted it and how I viewed it would be good for our customers and then getting feedback and refining from there. So we actually ended up changing the design several times early on and it looks completely different than really initial prototypes.
[00:14:11] And it is it has expanded and we've been developing and changing it for I guess four years now, redoing it as we gather more feedback, see usage complaints. But then still, the initial research was mostly discussions with service providers and seeing how they operate and and seeing the issues firsthand from the consumer side, because you see a lot of issues when guys aren't on time, when they don't have the information and they're calling back when they're taking payment of being the phone to their office rather than on the spot or they can't take credit cards at all or their handwriting invoices and then they don't have it again when you need it in the future, when they don't have all the information. There's a ton of issues that that you see from the consumer side as well. Help me formulate how we want to design the software and how it should work.
[00:15:01] And talk to me about. Is there anything that you tried to tackle or tried to design and you realized you'd just just got wrong. You decided to get to Bailamos gears out now on on the learning kind of learning experiences, things, things that didn't work out so well. And what did you learn from it in terms of how do you effectively. Solve these problems for service companies?
[00:15:23] Yeah, I think there's definitely different components to the software that we've had to rebuild over time. Some of that was for technical reasons because we had to redo things. I think the one that jumps out for us is the estimate at invoicing process because we had to realign it with QuickBooks. Just how saturated they are in the market. We've had to adjust our s many invoice system that we've originally created without QuickBooks to better match the QuickBooks integration.
[00:15:52] But ultimately nothing has been a huge miss.
[00:15:55] But obviously when you look back, you could have prioritized different features and things you're working on differently and getting things out to market different timing based on the customers you're serving or going after.
[00:16:06] And that's always evolving. I think what we thought we were going to build a year ago, we're building differently now.
[00:16:12] And we just released in data a great, great product that we think that we think has tremendous upside.
[00:16:18] But we didn't think about a year before and that one specifically, is it fully integrated phone system into our actual tool so that your team is not using their own device or using a phone system, but it's a field poll. So all the historical customer information, their jobs or asswards invoices are linked to the conversations. You can text you can do this from the computer. You can do it from your mobile app, manage can jump into their team members conversations and take them over if they need and have full visibility. But this is also something that we weren't really thinking about a year ago and very recently said A, I think our customers love this. We got some feedback and then we moved it up in our roadmap and decided to build it quickly. It's in beta right now for existing customers and it's been great feedback so far. But I think in general, our roadmaps kind of always evolving based on things we're seeing technology that's developing because a lot of the stuff we couldn't have done also is a few years ago without new technology and new API is from a company like Twilio making it available and yet fluid in your approach. And I'm guessing what we think we're going to build a year from now might change as well as as things come up.
[00:17:26] Yeah. And if you're responsive to the market and responsive technology, it probably will. And I like that idea of listening to customers, discussing with customers and finding new opportunities that you may not have thought about a year ago, but given given insights, given changes in the market to just tech that you can you can now think about and contemplate and actually implement. You know, one thing I talk about a lot with with companies that are looking to grow in scale and figuring out how to just get alignment around people and processes as is having very clear kind of standard operating procedures or playbooks around service delivery. Talk to me about how you're supporting or how you've kind of grappled with the whole, you know, helping helping the service providers actually perform the service or go through the checklist of the service to make sure that you're maintaining kind of quality standards and then that part of it. Do you do deal with that? Tell me about how you've kind of grappled with that in terms of the software solution and how you support it.
[00:18:21] So our software really manages that full lifecycle. And so it puts them into a process. At the same time, it's flexible because these they all operate a bit differently depending on if you do an estimate ahead of time or if you do it at the time of more of a diagnostic, if you do a written estimate or just a verbal estimate.
[00:18:39] But basically where we're taking their workflow and putting it into a controlled system where everything is tracked, updated, maintain and everyone has full visibility. So it starts with creating a customer and having that information stored and having all the relevant information that the company needs for that customer. And you're storing in one place and then you go to creating the job or scheduling an estimate and then you need to put in all the information you need for that job and estimate and everything that the service tech needs to be able to perform that job. And then from there, they'll end up either creating an estimate or doing a verbal estimate, performing the work or providing status updates.
[00:19:16] We do have the ability for subtasks within a job that a lot of our customers use as like the task lists to keep interesting service, tech, organize and knowing what exactly they want to do and following a specific protocol. So it might seem cumbersome, but a lot of times they have them fill out service reports based on what they're doing.
[00:19:35] A lot of it is just kind of put in control back into the system with employees and ultimately creating a system for them to follow so that they're not deviating, they're not forgetting key components and they're serving the customer well.
[00:19:48] And along that entire channel, you have customer communications that that go along with that. So after you create a job, you might have a customer communication auto sent to the customer of appointment confirmation with a calendar invite, you might have a twenty four hour reminder auto triggered to them. You might have it on the way message with location tracking and then a follow up, either thanking them or asking for a review. But all of this is really part of the overall process and cadence to create and feel pulse for your team and you make sure that they follow it. And that's by filling out the necessary fields that they want customer profile on the job, on the estimate of invoices, sending out the right communications, updating the statuses, clocking in and clocking out so that when the managers look at it at the end of the day, they see the full cycle of the job, how it is done and make sure is done exactly to the process they want. And they have a lot more control and visibility into it.
[00:20:43] Well, before are using a pen paper, they're often sending the messages over text message to the guys and and hoping it's done as needed and seeing back later how the customer reports back. But having it all in software, you really control the process from start to finish.
[00:20:59] Yeah, I like that. Have you noticed any changes in what your client users are finding in terms of the employees or service providers that or more or less willing to use this kind of technology? Like I could imagine that the actual kind of switching to a very tech based system for a lot of this stuff might mean that certain people, you know, certain people are going to be more kind of open and embracing of this and adopt quickly. And certain people may not.
[00:21:28] If you notice that, I mean, I'm just kind of curious what your feedback from your clients are in terms of, you know, their adoption or challenges they've had to get employees to, you know, service providers actually use the system. And if there's been any kind of interesting insights there.
[00:21:41] It's very interesting in general. So most of our customers use employee owned devices. So they're just putting the software right on there.
[00:21:47] There's really no privacy issues in terms of tracking outside of work related stuff. But there's always concern from that in. And maybe just because if they're using our timesheets functionality, they are being tracked much more closely when they clock in and clock out. Not only is it done digitally and timestamped, but it's also tagging their location. So it shows where where when they did that versus if you're doing kind of a pen and paper manual timesheets and they could be a lot more lenient with how they did it. And so there's obviously some pushback on the team member side in regards to that. But that's something that I think benefits the management side enough that that is something that they have to work out. On the flip side, I think it gives the field techs the ability to be much more organized and have all the information they need in one place without doing it manually. So instead of them having to take a text message put in their calendar, they're just opening a pulse and looking at their calendar that their manager created.
[00:22:44] And when they click the job record, it's going to show the customer's name, their phone number, their address, which you can click. And it opens Google Maps right for them. Perfect. It shows a street view of the house to see you can see what you're going to beforehand. And he notes custom fields. They might even have their estimates and invoices pre populated by the managers in the system so that that manually going through and recreating it, they're just having a prepared and invoicing it on the spot.
[00:23:13] So I think there's a lot of efficiencies for the field to tax themselves.
[00:23:17] But I think where there's the most pushback is when. Wow. Now I need a clock in and it knows exactly where I am. And an honest and I think that's where you get a little more of that pushback.
[00:23:28] Yeah, I could see that. It's kind of there's some benefits and some tradeoffs to tack in that way.
[00:23:34] You know, as a business owner, once you implement a system like this and you start tracking these disinformation and you've got, you know, very kind of low level or detailed information about the operations of the business, you know, oftentimes there's some interesting data and analysis you can do. I guess how how much have you seen or how much have you provided business owners with then kind of the analytic side of this of being able to actually capture metrics around service and about employees and about customers and different different tasks and challenges that come up? What insights do you start developing or do you see customers starting to develop once they start using a system like this?
[00:24:14] Yeah, that's that's a huge aspect that I actually didn't touch on. So we have full reporting.
[00:24:19] And I think one of the biggest issues in the industry in general is that a lot these companies really don't know how much they're making on a job, their profit. Yeah, absolutely. And we also think some some of them are doing the model wrong and doing a kind of time materials versus fixed price. And that's kind of a separate topic in itself. So one thing we help a lot with is really being able to track your profit margins on job. So when you're creating estimates or invoices in the polls, you can also put your costs for items and ad expenses so that when you look at your invoice at the end and we have a second tab called cost basis that lets you look at the costs of that job relative to what you invoice. And then it shows you the margins and it breaks it down by whether it's a service or a product. So you can look at your margins there and really have a much better handle because I feel like a lot of jobs.
[00:25:10] These contractors don't know if they're actually making money on them or not because they're not backing them and they don't have a great way of tracking that.
[00:25:17] It's a big issue, but this helps you do that. And then in of. Also lets you do commission tracking for companies that have sales based reps, specifically H back where they're selling and selling components and things like that.
[00:25:29] Sure, you can take your margin or just gross gross revenue on an invoice and apply commissions to that automatically.
[00:25:38] A But but not knowing your profit margin can be really killer and that's the biggest thing I think we help with on the data side.
[00:25:45] But beyond that, they really have reporting across the board from customers in terms of marketing efforts, jobs, in terms of looking at how long certain jobs take because we have a job duration field that's automatically calculated how much certain jobs are making, and that ties back to the invoice looking at profit margin by job.
[00:26:04] And so there's a ton of data across the board. But the ultimate I think the biggest eye opener thing that they're not looking at that this helps with is profit margin and your costs.
[00:26:14] Yeah, I could see that. I think that's it's such a buried piece of data for most businesses. And really understanding drug costing is that, you know, they just look at, you know, their kind of employee costs and they look at, you know, supplies and things like that and actually sort of netting out, you know, how much is it? How much time do they spend on the job or my raw material costs, you know, my labor costs and then actually make money on this thing or not. Most those businesses probably couldn't tell you. They know they make money on average, but on a client by client drop by job basis. Talk to me about the CRM side of this, because I could also see then once you have data around customers and customer segments, do you do anything with the marketing side in terms of promotions and sales and being able to actually generate demand? Once you have existing customers and customer database in there.
[00:26:55] So we're going to get into more marketing software soon.
[00:27:00] But right now, the way we treat it is that the CRM is great for getting the data and collecting it and using tags and segmenting and things like that. But ultimately we have a one click export where you export and if you want to do any email marketing, you do something like mailchimp. But there is a lot of value in the segmentation because we let you do tags on the customers. And if you if you combine that with the aspects of how much they've spent, where they're located, type of customer, the status, all that information gives you great insight into which are the best customers, where are they located and then who are you remarketing to and how, you know, and from a software side of we we don't do that currently, but that's something we're deeply looking into to do in the future.
[00:27:45] Yeah. It seems like once you're kind of on premises, you're there to do a track filter replacement. You know, you can notice that, oh, they've got a lot of landscaping or they've got a pool or they have a security system.
[00:27:57] Like you start developing some really interesting data for you to be able to market other products and services to those folks. So, yeah, it's interesting. Interesting situation. Once you once you have data collection capabilities.
[00:28:08] Yeah. Especially if they're a type of business that is somewhat recurring like H back then.
[00:28:14] You take note on when you performed at the last job and then you can you can send out reminders six months or a year later basically saying, hey, it's time to get your units checked again. I mean, it's hard to do without software, without some type of data tracking, but something that systems like pulse can help you.
[00:28:32] Well, yeah. And if you actually know what kind of each fact system they have, what kind of furnace they have, and it's you know, it's September, you can start sending out promotions that actually, you know, are priced to that specific furnace and stuff so you can actually get ahead of the game. And that's fascinating. So tell me a little bit about what your roadmap looks like.
[00:28:49] You mentioned a couple of things that you're looking to add, but what are some strategic areas that you're hoping to tackle over the coming, you know, 12, 24 months in terms of new aspects of the product or new new upgrades and features that you're looking to implement?
[00:29:02] Yeah. So it's always a balance for us between finding new innovative features that add value while simultaneously improving the existing components of little items that customers are reporting that they like to see enhance. So ultimately a balance of the two will also be going after a new segment.
[00:29:21] I mean, another country's in an interesting. That's why or what we can buy.
[00:29:28] So we're up for that and localizing it for that market. But so in the short term, we we plan address a lot of little feature requests and smaller things.
[00:29:38] But but larger, longer term, we have some sales tools that we're going to work on.
[00:29:45] I think it's very interesting and kind of goes into the issue of growing profits for service business.
[00:29:53] And other times when these companies start is that you go into the wrong mentality of not looking at overhead costs and you kind of look at it in terms of how you got paid as an employee before you went out and then trying to carry that over using time and materials. And so you sales tool we're gonna be building is to create flat rate price books based on work you do that has a. Price point already fleshed out and calculated so that you're not doing time and materials and there's a lot of psychology in it in terms of selling to the customer at a flat rate. So time you're building in a higher profit margins that they need and not not doing just time and material which ultimately doesn't account for things like overhead time spent doing estimates and things like that. So it's a big tool we're gonna build for this, but we think it will help grow profit margins, which is a big issue in the industry in our opinion.
[00:30:51] Yeah, I agree.
[00:30:52] I think that one of the things that I'm often advising service companies to do is is treat their services more like products and fix prices, because I think that not only does it allow you to capture more margin, but the whole idea of improving like if you if you spend a whole bunch of time improving your process and take something that was, you know, three hours and you make it make it a one hour process, well, you know, you're not winning your time and materials that doesn't help you. So I think it misaligned incentives. And I think if you move to a fixed price, you really create an aligned incentive where, you know, the customer doesn't want to spend as much time. You know, they they actually oftentimes will pay more for something that actually takes less time because they want you in and out more quickly and you can use your margins to track that.
[00:31:33] Like you say, you're getting penalized for getting better at things. But it's an interesting balance with consumers because they often look at the time that you took to something rather than the expertise it took to gain it.
[00:31:48] In the end, there's that there's a joke that you're not paying for the time. It took me to do the job you were paying for the time. It took me to learn how to do this job this quickly.
[00:31:59] And I think I think showing and demonstrating that value to the customers is also an issue in the space in general, because a just gets amplified when you do time in materials, because you're literally tying costs back to your own time and materials rather than the value of what you spent learning on how to fix that and being able to do it quickly and getting that getting paid for your expertise.
[00:32:23] I agree. Gabriel this has been a pleasure. If people want to find out more about you, about the software product, whereas the best way to get that information
[00:32:30] Yeah. www.fieldpulse.com. We have an academy that talks about general business content. It's a it's a blog. And of course if you want to try the software, you can just sign up right on a website and ask us for some help along the way to get you going.
[00:32:44] Great. I'll make sure that those are in the show notes so people can click through. It's been a pleasure. I love seeing Tach being applied to services and, you know, using particuarly mobile tax to help organize and reduce drama sites or space businesses. I think it was a really interesting work. I'm excited to see how the roadmap plays out. What areas get into what the new international move is excited here about that when it launches. But thank you so much for taking time today.
[00:33:09] A Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.
[00:33:16] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.