Opinions are cheap, jobs are real
Ask a technician “would you use a tool that does X?” and most will say yes. It costs nothing to say yes, and it tells you nothing about whether they will pay for it, carry it in the van, or still use it after the second week.
So every conversation in our field research starts with a recent, real job. Not a typical job, not an imagined one: the last time this step came up.
The five things we ask
What happened, and how often does it happen? We want the actual sequence, step by step, and a frequency the person can stand behind.
What did it cost? Time, a second person, rework, a callback, a damaged part. In their words, not our estimate.
What have you already tried? Every trade is full of improvised fixes. The workaround someone built in their garage is the best evidence a problem is real, and the best benchmark a new tool has to beat.
Who approved the last comparable purchase? A tech, a lead, an owner, a purchasing department. It changes everything about what a product has to be.
What varies from job to job? A step that's different every time is a custom job, not a product.
What we never do in these calls
We don't pitch. We don't show sketches. We don't describe a solution and wait for a nod. The person on the other end is the expert on the work; our job is to understand it well enough to decide whether a tool is worth building at all.
Talk to us
If you work in HVAC, construction, maintenance or operations and there's a step on your jobs that still needs a helper or a rigged-up fix, we'd like to hear about the last time it happened. It's a 30-minute conversation, anywhere in the US.