Connecting Technicians to Customers Efficiently

Yes. So the very quick version. Worked for a heavy equipment dealer for almost 20 years. Then dealer was sold. I worked in all the different departments in the dealership. So I had a wide exposure to all aspects of the business. Started around COVID, started a company called Heave. We started with a little different business model than where we ended up. But then in late 2022, early 2023, we pivoted our business to field service. And then it was all systems go from really from day one, which was awesome. And so easiest way to describe it is Uber for heavy machinery field service. We refer to it as on-demand service. So customers can, if I have a wheel loader down in the field, Instead of calling a dealer, what if you could go to a website or an app and see available heavy machinery mechanics near you with their rates published and you can book someone to come fix your machine? That's what we do.

That's correct.

We do. Yes. And hundreds of technicians.

A variety of roles. So we have a field sales role, which I would say most closely resembles like a dealer PSSR. And that's really what a salesperson is for Heave. You think about it in the traditional PSSR role. We have customer success people. So like they work behind the scenes to make sure that customers are having a great experience. You know, so they'll do things like making sure that the technician is communicating every step of the way with the customer. They can monitor the text messages in our app. You know, they make sure that. customers are comfortable. They're getting, like I said, the communication, making sure questions are answered. Like sometimes, like, hey, have parts been ordered? They'll step in and order parts if need be. We have software engineers. We have a team of six software engineers all in-house that build all of our technology. And we have marketing. So that's the bulk of our team.

We're in the hundreds now. Good for you.

Well, you know, you have to have a few things. Luckily for us, the first thing is the pain of the customer. You don't have to convince customers that field service is a need. That's overwhelmingly accepted. They're not happy with what has been the experience for however many decades. So that's the biggest thing that has helped us be successful. You know, right place, right time a little bit. The good thing for us, too, is that there's plenty of independent technicians that exist. We haven't convinced anyone to leave a dealer to go independent. These skilled technicians have existed for a long time. They've just been largely invisible to the marketplace. They might know a couple of customers here or there. So both sides. have existed and both sides have had certain pains, you know, for the technician side, their pain has been what I just described. Like they don't, they're not marketers. They don't really have websites.

They've relied on word of mouth to get their customer business. And so we come along and we show them all of the customers that need service and when, and we give them access to just a wider range. So they don't have to market and they don't have to drive job site to job site with business cards handing them out to get business. So that's I would say that's why we've been able to be successful is that there's pains on both sides.

I think it's very clear. There's a couple of things. Having worked at a dealer, unfortunately, the economic environment lends itself to stasis. And you just frankly don't have to you don't have to improve. So if you are the such and such dealer in this territory. No one else can sell that product or service that product in that area. So you have a lock on it. And that breeds a culture of, well, hey, those customers have to come to us. And so they've never really had to address competition for service. And so that's been deeply rooted for a long time. So that and with that, this this happens in all the other industries, too. Right. Like, I think the the dealer business model is very similar to the cable companies. You know, if you I live in Tampa, if you move to Tampa and you want to get digital cable. Now, people might laugh because streaming is basically killed it. But but if you wanted to get digital cable, there was only like three providers.

That's it. You know. And the same thing, if you want to buy a deer or cat or Komatsu, there's only a couple people that you can buy that machine from and get serviced. And so that is why there's been really no conversations or focus on, you know, hey, are our customers happy? Are they satisfied? How can we be better? Because they've never really felt threatened before.

They are. I think the one thing that's very important to mention is that the service business is very difficult. So I think that plays into it. It's brutally difficult. Yes, there's more margin, but there are so many more things that can go wrong. Is it hard to sell equipment? Yes, it's hard. I'm not saying it's easy. I started selling equipment. I wasn't very good at it. But theoretically, I could go make 10 customer calls today and I could sell something. But think of all of the different moving pieces. Because service and parts are a logistics business. You have to coordinate all these different mechanics that you have. You have parts that you have to stock, decisions on what to stock, scheduling aspect, quality control. Service is very difficult. And I think that's why there's just not as much focus on it is because. It's really hard work. And if you're not excellent at it, you will lose money very quickly. And so it's hard.

I mean, our mission is to be a nationwide service provider. That's pretty unique for all brands. So, you know, some cool things now that 2024 is wrapped up, we've fixed over 100 different brands of equipment since we started in 2023. I think that's something we're really proud of. Not something that I necessarily expected. You know, when we started. It was like very basic, you know, earth moving equipment because that's what I knew. You know, we were a dirt house. So I know excavators, loaders. We didn't, Volvo didn't have dozers. But, you know, we were just, we were focused on repairing, you know, that type of those products. And then quickly what started happening was customers would use us and then they would ask us, hey, do you have techs who can fix generators? Hey, do you have technicians who can fix cranes? What about on highway trucks? What about, and our marketing manager was creating some materials and she came to me one day.

She's like, you know, we fixed at the time it was like 85 different brands of equipment. And I didn't believe her. And I was like, no, no, there's no way. I think you're confusing that for something else. And then she came back to me with all the logos and I was like, oh. OK, this is pretty cool. So for what's next is just, you know, we started in Florida. Then we expanded to Texas. Now we're in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee. We're in Indiana, of all places. We do some work in Ohio. We want to expand our footprint in Ohio. So what we're focused on is doing what we do, but just expanding into new markets when it makes sense for us to do so. Meaning when we have enough talented technicians to support customers in a certain area, because we don't want to just plant a flag and have one technician. If we're going to tell customers we can support them, we got to make sure we have enough technicians who can respond quickly.

Because we do very religiously monitor response time. And that's one of the more exciting things. Like, for example, we're looking at 2024 performance and like 86% of our jobs in December were completed within 24 hours from the customer request. But here's where it gets a lot of fun. So as we get more and more business. What's hard is making sure you have enough technicians to support the business. And at the end of last year, I'll give you what an average customer experience is like on Heave. And it's if I am a customer and I come on and I say, hey, I need a technician on this job site. Within a minute, you're going to get a technician, first technician to respond, telling you when they can be there. And then we find that. In thousands of jobs, it takes on average four minutes for a technician to get booked. So that is our average customer experience.

Not from us. A technician.

Yeah.

Within a minute, you're going to get a technician.

Yes. That is the average customer experience. Pretty cool, right?

Most of the time, especially like new ones, that's really fun. Like I was talking to somebody the other day, and for me, it's never going to get old when you see a customer's first impression or first reaction to what we're doing. It blows them away. We were actually like we're in a phase right now, like our territory or eight account executives, like they're trying to tell customers to wait a little bit. So they're trying to tell, hey, give it like five more minutes and you'll see more choices. Like you'll see more technicians respond. Because what's funny is like we're trying to please both sides. And so when things get booked really, really quick, it's awesome for the customer. But then we end up. getting technicians who are kind of upset because they feel like they didn't have, they don't have a shot at a lot of these jobs because they're getting booked very quickly.

So we have to tow this interesting line of keeping both really, really happy. Because if you're, if you're an independent technician and you get 10 alerts in a day and you didn't get any of those jobs, you're kind of mad at he.

Yeah, that's a really good question. And so we see similar to like customer behavior. So if it's a technician that's new to us, you can kind of see like they're dipping their toe in the water. Like, I don't know about this company. I'll try it. We probably get like 10% of their hours. And then they do a few jobs and then they see how easy things are. They see that we mean what we say. We pay them quickly. Then it's like 30 percent. I would say we now are about 80 percent of of many technicians labor hours in a week like that. We can't expect more than 80. But that's kind of like our goal is like how quickly can we get them from that 10 percent to 80 percent?

Yeah. Our average job is five hours, five and a half hours.

I don't know. I've been out of, I've been, you know, we've been doing this for five years now. I've been out of the deal. I

It's also an opportunity for others.

You talk to OEMs, you talk to dealers. They don't talk about it?

You're right about no market share for service. That always used to frustrate me. Then you just, I guess, assume. And you know what? I guess that's part of the problem, too, right? Is that no one's talking about it because they already know that they're shorthanded for the work that's on the books, right? You said backlog, and you're right. So, hey, if I can't. If I'm one to two weeks out right now for customers who call in for fieldwork, I'm very shorthanded. What is there to talk about? Now, I mean, I would argue that it's a perfect opportunity to talk about, hey, can we do our business differently so we can get more throughput? But no one has ever really talked about that.

We do some of those. Some customers that we work for have their own shops. So they've asked us to do bigger, longer, more complex jobs. Of course, we'll do that. But yeah, it's not that far off. We focus on the – our main competitive advantage is speed. Like I was outlined. So it just – And there's so many different avenues you can go down here, right? Like, you know, being at the dealership, I knew at the time, it's not great. It's cost prohibitive and it's punitive for a customer who has like a hydraulic leak to call a dealer and roll out in a $300,000 service truck to fix a hydraulic leak and then send a customer a bill for $1,200. All those small things, which are many jobs, like safety stuff, backup alarms. Like we do all of, we give customers an option to do, you know, backup, you know, fix the backup alarm, fix the horn. And here it's $200 because it was an independent technician. Get out there real quick.

You know, hydraulic leak, here's a bill, $375, you know, because somebody was 15 miles away from me too. So travel time was near nothing. Like all of this has been out there. And, you know, a company like ours can really align with the customer, get them up and running. And it's not cost prohibitive. You know, that's the kind of stuff that I love.

Correct.

Customer reviews help.

We both. You know, that's part of our terms of service. If a technician wants to be a part of our network is that they have to agree to warranty their work. And we also stand by it. Like there's so many things that we learn. Right. And like one of the things that I learned recently in the last 90 days from some new customers that came on is that. They had an impression that we were a broker and that's not how we operate. And the reason why I bring it up is the warranty piece. Like we have a team of people in the field, but also customer success. Like we are invested in every job that we do goes great. And if it doesn't, we'll figure, we'll send somebody else out and make sure the customer is taken care of. And I guess that wasn't, you know, people just had a misconception about what we were doing and thought like, Hey, we were hands off. Hey, you booked a technician, but that's not what we do.

We're actively involved to make sure that it's a great experience. And so we both, the technician and us, heave warranties.

In terms of just overall customer satisfaction. If they go out and the customer complaint. comes back up a day or two later, so they didn't fix the core issue, then we step in. Either they go back out and fix it to the customer satisfaction or we are able to send somebody else out at no charge to the customer to fix it.

Absolutely, yes.

Correct. I don't

do. I don't negotiate with technicians. That's always been like a core value of ours because number one, we know that diagnostics are not black and white. There's a lot of gray area. Fixing heavy equipment is hard. Now, if it's a repeat problem with technicians, then, you know, we then we can kind of tier them and maybe say, hey, that's this type of repair is not for this technician. But we honestly really haven't gotten to that place where we have jobs going wrong frequently. But I always pay to technicians.

Correct. I mean, part of the part of the reason why this doesn't happen is that the technicians have to opt into the job. So we don't assign technicians jobs. So a customer puts in their complaint, their service request, they state the problem. And so when opting into a job, you don't have technicians who are saying, hey, I can do this. If they don't have the software to do it, if it's beyond their skill level, you know, I think that's a huge difference. And it's something that I saw at a dealership go wrong all the time is when a dispatcher would send a technician to a customer job who wasn't prepared or didn't have the skill to do it. Because dealers are under pressure to tell the customer what they want to hear. And so they're not thinking through. They send the first available. They don't send the best person for the job. And so the kind of the way we've always designed our app to work is let the. technicians opt into the job.

So you're not going to say, hey, I'm going to be able to do that if you can't do that.

So on average, a customer's experience with us is you'll get, Three to five choices of technicians before the book.

Three to five.

So we do this a couple of ways. One of the things, sometimes I forget that we haven't talked for a little while and things are always evolving. So one of the biggest unlocks for us in 2024, I think this was. maybe April or May, because that was a common question. How do I know who to pick? And so we built a profile in our app. So every technician has a profile. And so you can click, so a customer can click, he sees his choices, clicks profile. Now he can read up on the technician, see how many jobs they've done on Heave, click into this box and they can see their prior, like a resume. It looks very similar to LinkedIn. I don't know. Maybe some people took some pointers from LinkedIn on our software team. But, oh, OK, this part. So say I have a cat wheel loader. I click into this profile and I see, oh, for the last eight years before going independent, this individual worked at the cat dealer. Atlanta, Georgia.

And prior to that, had spent six years at the John Deere dealer. And, oh, these are their skills that are listed, advanced in electrical, advanced in hydraulic. And so the profile piece was a huge help. And that was our number one question asked by customers for a long time. So we have a profile on every guy. And then like one of the other things that we've learned in the last like six months is. For customers that it's their first order or it's like within their first three orders for us, our sales reps are like they see the order come in and then they're calling the customer right away and say, hey, I would recommend that you pick so-and-so. He's done great work or she's done great work. And so we kind of steer them towards some technicians if they haven't had a ton of experience with us yet until they get to know them.

They have very large geography today. So we have one AE in the Dallas area. We have one AE in the Houston area. So, I mean, these are huge areas, right? We have one AE here for West Florida. And so we'll just keep monitoring and see. Once it gets to a certain size, we'll probably have to bring in other people. But we give our territory people large areas.

You know, we have set goals for what they should earn by year two. Because what we're doing is extremely difficult. Like, yes, there's a lot of value. It's undeniable. But when you start something from scratch and you're trying to build a brand and people haven't heard of you, it's very, very difficult to get the ball rolling. So, you know, we're talking, you know. Low six figures in year one, but increasing significantly by year two and then by year three.

Yeah, I mean, we have. We have assumptions and we have ideas, but we're still learning. Because as you can imagine, part of it is like, well, how many customers make up that order volume? Do you have more customers who are doing fewer jobs or do you have a few really, really large customers who are doing a ton of jobs? So much of this we're learning.

For us, we measured on work orders.

Okay.

Yeah, I understand.

That is correct.

We haven't had that yet.

I'm sure at a certain point. I'm not naive, but. Yeah, we just keep very close tabs on it.

No, I think you're touching a vulnerability, and that is quality of work. One of the things that we always have a list of like three to four really important things that we're trying to address with our product and with our engineering team. And for Q1, I've kind of I've made the decision. I want to tear down our review system and really reimagine it because I do want more information on every job. on like customer satisfaction. It totally is a vulnerability. And it's fascinating to me, like how all of these things, like you can get really in the weeds on, you know, there's a lot of nuance to this. Like one of the things that I found with reviews is that you have many customers who don't want to give a review because they're afraid that. that certain information is going to get to the technician. And it's like, I get it because you don't want to upset them. You still feel like you need them. But you know what?

I want that information because it helps us become more knowledgeable about the labor force. And so like, all right, we got to figure out. So now in our reimagined reviews, we have a little box where it's like, you know, don't share with. technician, but it's important to us, we collect the data. So that to me is the biggest vulnerability. And so that's why we are not trying to grow too fast in terms of geography too quickly, because we're very cautious of overextending ourselves and then losing quality control. You know, so many things pop up that you don't imagine. And like we had circumstances where certain like mobile service companies, because they have it's when I say mobile service company, it's basically a dealer without selling equipment. It's started as a technician now has 10 technicians under and all they do is service where we'd have like mobile service companies because they had multiple trucks gobbling up all these jobs or.

Somebody always responding quickly, getting booked. And then, you know, you look and it's like one individual has 10 open jobs. That's terrible. And so that was a vulnerability for us. So we had to like put in like fences to prevent that from happening. And there's just so much that you learn over time. But the quality of work piece is the most important because if we if we fix stuff correctly. We will be successful.

What do you mean specifically double it?

Yeah, I mean.

Warranty is interesting. It's kind of in my mind more as a long-term thing.

Because I see this happening. This is one of the core problems at a dealer to me, is that you want somebody to go out, diagnose, finish the job, on to the next. When you have all these open work orders, then you have customers who are waiting and you're spread too thin. It's something that we encountered early.

Well, no. So getting a little deeper. So the technician's already gone out on Thursday, had to order parts.

That was the problem was he was, in that circumstance, that person was bidding on stuff. He just wanted more and more and more work.

Yeah, that's something that we encountered, and we put something in to fix that.

Yeah.

I think it's always a case-by-case basis.

So that's you make a good point because that's why we want customers to decide. So what type of job is it? If it's a PM service, people are OK scheduling it out. Right.

They are. I, you know, like I said, getting into the weeds, like one of the things that we've kind of noticed. on experience is like, I just, we've been so hyper-focused on delivering.

I don't take it as critical, but where I was going with it is, we found that when people have a lot of open jobs, then it delays their invoicing. Like invoicing is a critical component to what we're doing. Like I love-Perfect.

Yeah.

We're working on that.

Yes.

Oh, you know, probably thousands at this point, based on the customer size. Yeah, thousands. I mean, tens of thousands.

Yeah.

It is.

The way we look, that's why we monitor response so closely. Yep. And so the very difficult thing, Marketplaces are very, very difficult because you have to have both sides simultaneously. We could not have 150 technicians in Tampa today because we don't have enough business to keep 150 technicians. So both sides have to go at the same time. That's why marketplaces are brutally difficult. You know, the first question, you know, when we just went into like Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville. And so we were recruiting our first batch of technicians. And, you know, obviously the first question is, well, how much business is coming through here? Because if you don't have a certain level, you know, they're just not going to they're going to ignore you. And so, yeah, that's you just have to do it both at the same time.

The biggest surprise to me is, and this might sound bad and a dig, but you got to remember my background. My background was with a Volvo dealer. And so I always looked at Caterpillar as the gold stand. I did. And, you know, we had, you know, over my almost 20 years, it was like a roller coaster ride. You know, there are many times where I'm like, you know, we've got to be the worst in the world. And you assume that everyone does it better, or at least I did. The biggest surprise to me is that no one does it really, really well. That, honestly, I was shocked that some of the markets were in that Caterpillar is not very good at service. And that's just an honest to God statement.

Yes.

think so. Yeah. Another way of saying it.

And this is one of our customers. Started a business and didn't get great service. And he had it in his words. He's like, you know. I just thought that, look, it's because I'm the new guy in town. I got a small, I'm not a big fish. And I, so he, he operated for years with this assumption of, all right, well, once I get to this level, then I'm going to get a better level of service. And once I bought X millions of equipment and then he got to those levels and his experience did not change whatsoever. And. That's honestly what helped him try out us. And then we haven't looked back. But yeah, that was the biggest surprise to me was that no one does it well. I won't say that I'm surprised anymore that there's not a focus on improving it. I've read enough about business and these other industries. We are following. the textbook layout of how to disrupt an industry. You know, and you mentioned it earlier.

You know, true disruption comes from someone from the outside who can compete against the incumbents, but without following any of the same rules. So we are competing head to head on service. We're a technology company. We don't it. We don't. have to employ any of those people. We don't have the capital investment in all of the tooling and the truck, all of the expensive parts that they have to supply. We're playing by different rules, you know, and that's a lot of fun.

We won't be backing up. We'll just, like I said, we keep learning every month. We keep, that is the most fun. I love, you know, we came from a similar, I came from a similar world where, you know, there was no, nothing changed over years. And like every month we learn something and we can like put something in place that fixes some of the potential issue for us. That's a lot of fun.

Oh, what to remember? Just. There's a purity in what we do. We want to provide customers with very fast service for as cheap as possible. For all their equipment. I love that we're aligned with the customer. We're brand agnostic. We can fix all of it. We can fix multiple brands on one trip. Like there's a purity and I love that. And there's and then we'll just keep doing it. I feel like we win customers one at a time every day. And, you know, now what's fun is we're starting. I think it's natural for certain customers to not want to do business with a brand new company because you want to see like, all right, well, I'm going to monitor them. Like we'll see like if they're around a couple of years from now. And I can start seeing that now where it's like, hey, we've been watching you guys. Now let's talk. So the timing has to be right for everybody. And we're just going to keep doing what we're doing, executing.

And more customers are coming aboard every month.