Question - :You will meet with Jon Clifford for this exercise for approximately 20 minutes. Your preparation is to think about the questions you want to ask Jon Clifford and the types of answers you need to hear in order to decide whether or not to consider buying the service. The case provides information about your operation, information about ServiceBox and a reference to a SaaS-based competitor of ServiceBox, ServiceMax. You can find information about their features and value proposition using the link provided. It is up to you to decide how much of this information to share in your pitch. You do not know much about the person you are meeting except that Jon Clifford is the owner of a small local software company. Your preparation should include deciding how to gather the information you need to evaluate ServiceBox properly. Remember, this is your money ? do the deal only if you believe it will be a benefit for you and your company!

CASE STUDY

INTRODUCTION

The first time you heard about ServiceBox was three months ago, when you received a flyer in the mail, advertising a field service management Internet service.¹ You looked at the website but did not really think about the service until the ServiceBox owner, Jon Clifford, called you on your work cell to ask if you remembered getting the flyer and what you thought of the service. After a brief conversation, you agreed to meet Clifford at a local coffee shop so that he could explain the service. You were willing to listen to his pitch but were a little skeptical about whether ServiceBox will have any real value foryou.

YOUR BUSINESS

You own a heating and cooling installation and servicing business that has been in continuous operation for 35 years. Because your uncle started the business and involved you in the business for years prior to you taking over, you are considered as a part of the establishment by other tradespeople, a reputation you enjoy. You have a small operation employing eight service/installation technicians and two office staff, one person who handles all the accounting, billing and office management and one person who is responsible for customer-facing work, mainly providing quotes for work. You have been running the business yourself for the past five years after working for, and eventually buying out, your uncle. He still works on some jobs but is essentially retired.

Upon your uncle's retirement, the four original service/installation technicians stayed on. Because you worked with these technicians under your uncle, you have a very good relationship with each of them. But you are the one who understands how to best run the business. Doing so keeps you very busy. You work both in the business by doing service calls when it is busy, but also on the business by actively looking for new business from general contractors and homebuilders. Many people try to "help" you todo so by selling you this "solution" or that "solution" to the problems they see you as having. While you could use some of what they might be selling, sometimes it feels as though these kinds of white-collar professionals, such as Clifford, are just trying to get a share of the profits, which has begun to grow in the last five years. This suspicion makes you feel a bit uncomfortable.

The company has grown from four service/installation technicians to the present eight, and along with that growth came a larger vehicle fleet (10 vans, complete with tools and equipment). You spend as much time as you can on building the business, which involves meeting with homebuilders and general contractors to secure more and ever larger jobs. Within the next five years, you would like to double the number of technicians to 16 and to double the number of vehicles and the amount of equipment. You recognize, however, that this goal is ambitious, since growing from four technicians to eight was harder than you had expected it would be. Your uncle ran a profitable business with four technicians, but increasing to eight meant you had to add a lot of overhead to cover vehicles and equipment as well as the office staff to help manage the operation. Your gross margins showed the effect too, falling from around 25 per cent when you took over the company down to single digits for the next few years. Only last year did you return to the 25 per cent margin level that your uncle was familiar with. Based on your experience, you know that growing again will involve a similar hit to gross margins because you'll need to make big purchases upfront and wait to regain profitability lateron.

The one additional issue you know you will face is in managing your employees. You inherited a very traditional way of managing the business with a paper-based system of issuing work orders and invoicing. In the paper-based approach, you or one of the two office workers receives calls from a prospective client to have work done, that work is scheduled and a work order ? which contains the detailed instructions for the job ? is printed. The technicians then come in each morning to pick up the work orders and then go to the customers' sites to complete the work. Details about the work being done are recorded on the work orders during the day, and at the end of the week, the technicians fill out their timesheets and give everything to the office worker. The office worker then sends the invoices to the customers for payment. This process then repeats itself the nextweek.

You already know that this process has serious limitations. You would like to spend more time out chasing bigger and more profitable work but you end up having to go back and forth to the office to find out which technicians are on which jobs, who is available and which jobs are almost complete. Adding more technicians will only increase the non-productive chasing around even more. If you want your business to grow, you will need to manage your operation differently, but you have not given much thought yet on what those differences wouldbe.

For instance, you did explore the possibility of vehicle-tracking software, which you find very interesting. But the software suite you looked at required the equivalent of basic cellphone plans for each van. Like most others in your business, you already provide a smartphone for each technician and do not see the value in spending an equal amount for an additional secondary plan (especially for vans that may not always be in use). As a result, you decided not to go with that software because it seemed like a high cost by the time you factored in the number of vehicles needing individual plans. There are other options out there. You frequently get phone calls from a company called ServiceMax.²You have done some research on their product, but would actually need to schedule a formal sales call to get any more information. And generally speaking, you do not like getting sales calls. It is the salespeople's job to get your money.

In addition to vehicle tracking, you have four issues (constraints) you would like to resolve so that you can start thinking about increasing the number oftechnicians:

• You want to make your life easier, have fewer roadblocks and spend less time spent doing "busywork." Any software you would consider paying for must offer the ability to manage work orders, timesheets and scheduling. The provider must also be reputable. The last thing you want is to get involved with a company that does not listen, does not return your calls when you need to talk to them or might not be around longterm.
• You need a way of managing your employees that "scales" better if growth is going to occur. The current system would require too many non-billable office staff in place if you were to ramp up to 16 technicians, and going that route would mean the gross margins would simply not besufficient.
• You do not want to commit to spending much money. You are comfortable with spending money when you know it will lead to profitability (e.g., spending $20,000 per year on equipment that generates $45,000 per year), but you need to be comfortable that there is a path toprofitability.
• You do not want to inconvenience your technicians. Tradespeople are comfortable with the "tried and true" and can be resistant to change, although your technicians are reasonably tech-savvy from working with electronic systems so much in modern heating and cooling systems. The four older technicians might be a bit less comfortable changing how they do things than the newertechnicians.

Clifford certainly is not the first salesperson to talk to you about buying something. You talk to sales representatives on a weekly basis, all of whom want you to purchase equipment, sales leads, attend management seminars and so forth. Sometimes there is value in listening to the pitch and deciding whether to try something out. But you really dislike when they go into the hard-sell mode, especially because sometimes there is no value. When they go into hard-sell mode, you usually find an excuse to end the call or meeting. As part of making these kinds of decisions about whether to buy, you have developed a list ofcriteria:

• Does it seem worthwhile to take the risk? What is the size of theupside?
• If possible, I want to own it. Avoid things that have ongoing costs. I would rather take out a loan and own it than get involved in subscriptions or annualfees.
• Does it fit my operation or the way I want to go with my operation? Does it align with mybusiness?
• How will my technicians react? Happy technicians are busy technicians and anything that makes them uncomfortable concerns me. Tradespeople can be resistant to change unless they see other trades doing itfirst.

NEXT STEP

You have the pricing information from the ServiceBox website and you are ready to meet with Clifford (see Exhibit 1). You have the available cash flow to pay for this service but it must make sense from a business perspective. From the looks of it, your business fits the Silver package in terms of number of users, customers and jobsites. But these factors would change as you grow your business. Some questions include whether this new system is something you really want to do. Do you trust Clifford and his business? Are subscriptions the right way to go? Can you get better terms? Will the service solve or minimize your concerns about growth? Does anyone else use this service? You are prepared to sign ifClifford can convince you that his service is the fit for you. You might want to push off the decision to give you more time to think and ask around. You might just decide that Clifford and his service are not right for you.

You start toward the coffee shop. Time to talk.

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