Prepared For
Dave Nguyen
A diagnostic of current AI & automation readiness across six operating pillars — with a prioritised 90-day plan, tool stack, and projected ROI tailored to your business.
4 points below the Trades & Field Services SMB median of 44. The gap is closeable inside 90 days — biggest upside in Data and Process.
Peak Plumbing Co. is doing a lot of things right operationally — a known and trusted local trade, four skilled hands in the vans, and a steady book of repeat work. What is holding the business back is everything that sits between the job and the bank account. Scheduling lives on a whiteboard in the office, invoices go out three to seven days after the job is done, and there is no follow-up process for quotes that don't convert in the first call.
The single highest-impact move is a field service management platform — ServiceM8 or Tradify — that turns the whiteboard into a scheduled work queue, lets the team invoice from the ute the same day, and reminds the office to chase quotes. Nothing else on this report comes close in dollar terms. Combined with two small automation moves, the business recovers $41k–$78k a year of revenue that is currently leaking through process gaps.
Team Capability is the watch-out. The owner is a skilled tradesperson, not a software adopter, and the three employees have low appetite for change. The 90-day plan therefore picks one tool (ServiceM8), uses its built-in onboarding, and deliberately defers heavier moves until the team has felt the time savings from the first one.
Job history is in a folder on the office laptop, invoices live in Excel, and customer details are in a shared Google Sheet. None of it is queryable, none of it is backed up, and none of it talks to Xero. The business is operating with no data foundation — which is also why the upside is so large.
Needs work — data silos are the bottleneckThe whiteboard is the source of truth for scheduling, invoicing happens days after the job, and quotes have no follow-up. Each of these is independently expensive; together they are the difference between a sustainable 4-person business and a 6-person one.
Needs work — manual effort is the constraintXero is the only modern tool in the stack and it is used well for accounting. Everything else — scheduling, dispatch, customer comms, quoting, job documentation — is done on paper or by phone. The fix is one tool (field service management), not five.
Needs work — stack gaps blocking AIThe owner is a skilled tradesperson with limited appetite for software change, and the three employees follow his lead. This is the constraint to design around: pick one tool, use its onboarding, and prove time savings inside the first month before introducing a second.
Needs work — capability is the bottleneckField service management with AI scheduling is the obvious play and is well-trodden in Australian trades. Quote follow-up via SMS is the second. Beyond those two, AI-specific use cases are limited until the operational data foundation is in place.
Solid foundation — scope and prioritiseNo cloud backups, customer data in a shared Google Sheet without 2FA, and no password manager. None of this is expensive to fix; all of it is a hard prerequisite before any tool with payment or customer access is connected.
Needs work — address before scaling