Digital: Disrupted: Technology Even Powers the “Tech-Free” Jobs

Paul Muller: Just curious, what does the day in the life look like of an organization that hasn't been through these sorts of transformations? I have to admit, I haven't done this sort of work in, well, not since I was in probably high school.

David Giannetto: So, in our world, if we're going to break down field service from big to small, we would say there's industrial scale, field service. Think of working on airplanes, massive companies, Honeywell, Schneider, that's industrial stuff. Then you're going to come down into commercial grade field service, that is all your commercial facilities. There's 10 air conditioning units on top of the building, it is strip malls, it is places of business. And then you come down to residential field service. And when you get down to residential field service, you may or may not have technology. If it's a smaller local business, they may not have gone through that digital transformation yet. So, they are literally using pen and paper. They're like my pool guy, when he does three services and he has to fix the pool robot again, he fills out a paper invoice and he hands it to me and wants me to write a check and send it to the PO box. He can't take credit cards or put a card on file or any of the things that bigger businesses do to try to move money more quickly. So, there are a tremendous, tremendous number of folks still using pen and paper, but it's only down in the smaller companies that are mostly focused on residential work. You cannot scale without technology today.

PM: So, from your experience, how are these jobs implementing technology into their workflows? Because, well, I've got two questions. How are they implementing it? And then I want to ask the question, how are they reacting to this technology? Because in my experience, I think Mark Twain said, I'm all for progress, it's change I don't like, right? So, let's start with first and foremost, how are businesses implementing technology into what were traditionally seen as automation free jobs?

DG: If it's okay, I'll flip them around. The mindset of, let's just say it's the owner of a small business, small service business. It doesn't matter if they fix air conditioners, they do pest control, it could be cleaning lawn mate. It doesn't matter what the act of service is. If they are thinking about growing their business, progressing the business, giving better service to customers, getting a better quality of life by having things scheduled by a system. If they're looking for that next thing to help the business grow and thrive, then they're happily embracing technology as progress. But if they are overwhelmed because the business is spinning out of control, getting a little bit too big or they can't tell what the problem is, they can't grow because they don't understand how to get online reviews, how to respond to comments.

They don't know how to get their money in fast enough because they're mailing out invoices, they're just getting overwhelmed by the business, then that is change and they are dealing with it very negatively. And those are much harder customers for us to have because we have to remind the employees at WorkWave when we're interacting with those type of first-time buyers that look, technology to them is a necessary evil. They didn't really want it. They don't really want to figure it out and embrace it. And the one key ingredient to success with field service software is it's running your business. The more time you invest in understanding it and how it thinks and how it can help you or hurt you, the better off that business will be. It will absolutely help you be more efficient and effective if you use it properly. And once you really embrace it, it will help you grow your business more profitably and make that business more valuable if you embrace it.

So, the folks that embrace it really need a lot more training, they spend a lot more time talking to our implementation team to understand it. They put more energy into making sure that when they're setting up the customers in the software for the first time, they do it properly, they're thinking about their business in a structured sense for the first time. And they're welcoming that because they know that that is the start of the path for them to grow, to improve profitability, to even have a better personal quality of life where they might get a day or two off a month, maybe take vacations, build a more valuable company they can sell and make their life and their kids' lives better or just do a better job for their customers that they want to do right by. So, it's very, very often affected by the mindset of the person embracing it.