Take the stress out of your business admin

Gas engineer Billy Wilgar talks to Registered Gas Engineer about why the need to manage his business better prompted him to create the Surefire management system for plumbing and heating businesses.

Iserved my plumbing apprenticeship in Belfast in the 1970s before moving to England in 1980. By 1984 I was working for myself: on the tools all day, then doing all the estimating and quoting at night and on the weekends.

Back then, I did all the quotes and my wife did the estimates, all while raising four young children. She would type out my quotes at night, then the next day I would come back with a catalogue, price up the materials, then she would correct the estimate and send it out by post the next day. It would take at least five days to get a quote back to a potential customer – but that’s just what you had to do.

By 2000 I’d built some houses and become an NHBC-registered builder while continuing with the plumbing and heating business. But it got to the stage where trying to keep up with my diary and all the business admin was crazy and just so stressful on us both.

That’s why I started looking for business management software, to find something that would help me cope. There was nothing available back then that was specific to plumbing, so in the end I bought a licence for a big piece of customer relationship management (CRM) software. The problem was that it was designed for large companies, so we only really needed to use 5 per cent of its features.

Developing Surefire

In 2004 I had a chance meeting with a young man in York who had just qualified as a software developer, and together we began creating what became Surefire. He built an app that ran on a handheld PDA long before apps were a thing, before smartphones, and what it could do just blew me away.

It wasn’t long before my plumbing and heating business, AC Wilgar, was running a system that was way ahead of its time, and it’s continued to evolve from there.

I talk to engineers daily and the headaches of running your own business are the same 20 years on. I think one of the reasons why Surefire works so well for plumbing and heating businesses is because it’s been tested through my own company. We now employ 43 people, so Surefire has grown in scale and features as AC Wilgar itself has.

Getting paid on time

A real benefit of management systems like this is that payments go through with no need for human interaction. Software just generates an invoice and synchronises automatically with accounts on both Xero and QuickBooks, so we never have large amounts of customer debt outstanding.

By contrast, back in 2006, we had five or six plumbers working for us and the company was owed £112,600. But when we introduced a payment facility on to our app so that customers could pay us digitally, we collected every penny of that debt within the first month, because we’d made it so much easier for customers to pay. It also helps that invoices are generated, so we weren’t making the mistake that so many businesses do, and leaving the invoicing for weeks because we’re so busy working on the next job.

I spoke to a self-employed engineer two weeks ago who was owed £26,000 purely because he hasn’t got around to invoicing his customers and hasn’t had a materials for a job would be £1,000, and then I’d add, say, £400 for labour and that would be my quote. But often, when I went to purchase it, the materials would cost £1,080, so immediately I’m £80 down on my labour – and it’s worse now that prices are changing so quickly. Our software quote tool plugs directly into the merchant’s system, so it gives a live price on everything we need to buy. When we quote, we create a basket through the merchant with all the components we’ll need, push the button, and it generates a quote using my net terms with the merchant. You can’t be more accurate than that.

Booking in jobs

chance to chase the ones who haven’t paid. It’s so common, and the longer the customer has the money in the bank, the less they want to part with it, or the higher the risk that they’ve spent it on something else. And then when you do chase, they suddenly become an angry customer.

Giving accurate quotes

When I was quoting for a job, I always knew roughly how much a particular boiler was and how much copper tube was, so I would have a rough idea that the

We’re currently testing a booking engine that allows customers to go online and book a service. When they enter their postcode, it immediately checks the engineers who cover that postcode and, if they have a slot available, it’s booked immediately. Then, the night before, the customer receives a text reminding them about the appointment and giving them a three-hour window. That’s already massively reduced calls from customers asking where their engineer is, which frees up everyone’s time in the office. ■ www.surefiresoftware.co.uk