The $80,000 Software That Paid for Itself

I read a stat recently that blew my mind: according to research from the University of Chicago and others, construction is the only major industry to register negative average productivity growth since 1987. Not slow growth. Negative. US residential construction productivity today is close to the level of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, manufacturing kept improving. The auto industry went from 4.8 cars per employee per year in 1939 to around 25 per employee per year by 2020. Construction went backwards.

How is that possible? We have cloud computing, AI, mobile devices that fit in your pocket with more power than the computers that landed us on the moon. And construction actually got less productive?

Geoff Farinha runs USI HVAC, a mechanical service contractor in the Boston area. When he joined the company in 2011, technicians had Nextel phones—you know, the ones that beeped. They mailed in their time slips with a stamp and hoped it arrived by Monday so they'd get paid. Everything was done over the phone.

Now they're on cloud-based field service management software that costs $80,000 a year.

The old system? $2,500 a year.

That's not a typo. They went from $2,500 to $80,000. And it was worth every penny.

The Hidden Cost of Cheap Software

When Geoff started at USI, the company's software was hosted on-premise. If a salesperson was on the road and needed to access the system, they had to tunnel into the network through a VPN.

"It was just a horrible process," Geoff told me. "You'd spend an hour working on a proposal, and there'd be some sort of glitch and it would be gone. You're calling suppliers, getting pricing, and you just lose all that."

I've suffered through that exact experience—connecting through VPN while on the move, making a single update, hoping it synced to the server. If it didn't sync, you're redoing the entire form. Hours wasted just inputting data.

The $2,500 software wasn't actually cheap. It was costing them in ways that never showed up on an invoice: lost proposals, wasted time, salespeople who couldn't work efficiently on the road, technicians who couldn't enter their job notes until they got back to the office.

What $80,000 Actually Buys You

The jump to cloud-based field service management wasn't just about access from anywhere. It was about capabilities that didn't exist before:

Reporting at scale. You can actually see what's happening across your entire operation, not just what someone remembers to tell you.

CRM functionality. Customer relationships tracked systematically instead of in someone's head or a spreadsheet.

Dispatch visibility. You can see your field capacity in real time and make decisions accordingly.

Technician access. Geoff's technicians can now enter their closeouts directly in the system while they're on site. No more mailing time slips. No more calling the office.

And here's the part that really matters: when COVID hit, USI didn't skip a beat. They were already fully remote-capable. The operation kept running.

"We were very fortunate there," Geoff said. But it wasn't fortune. It was preparation.

The Transition Point

Every growing company hits a moment where their infrastructure can't support their ambitions. I've seen this across every industry I've researched—businesses that grow faster than their systems can handle.

Geoff put it simply: "If you're at that transition point where you're going from maybe an individual running three or four teams and you want to scale it to 20 teams, that's probably one of the first things you want to iron out. How are you going to manage that?"

The companies that figure this out early can seize opportunities when they come. The ones that don't get crushed by their own growth.

USI made the investment before they needed it. When the moment came—a global pandemic that shut down offices everywhere—they were ready. Their competitors who were still running on-prem systems? Not so much.

The Pain Is Real (But Temporary)

Geoff was honest about the transition: "There will be pain when you first start. We actually just went through another migration to a totally different system this past summer. We're now on the other side of it. But there is pain. You just have to get through it and it will be worth it."

This is the part that kills most companies. They start the migration, hit the pain, and either abandon it or half-ass the implementation. Then they're stuck with a system nobody uses properly and they conclude that "software doesn't work for our business."

The software works. The implementation just requires commitment.

The AI Opportunity

Here's where it gets interesting. Geoff uses Service Titan now, which allows API integration. When I asked him about using AI for demand planning—correlating weather forecasts with service call volume—he lit up.

"I would love that. Right now it's a very manual process for us. We use Weather Underground and check historical weather sets, and that goes into making the on-call schedule."

But then he took it further than I'd thought about:

"If something could plug into Service Titan and say these customers last year you had this many after-hours calls with. But on top of that, to take equipment age—this customer has equipment with an average age of 25 years, well past its lifespan—be prepared for potentially more calls because the equipment's older. Something like that would be fantastic."

Weather data plus service history plus equipment age. That's three data streams that could predict demand weeks in advance. Right now Geoff does that analysis manually for customer reviews. Imagine if it happened automatically.

That's not science fiction. That's just connecting data that already exists.

The Real Question

Geoff's advice for companies still on legacy systems: "Get as much of it within the cloud as possible so that you're not tied down to one location. Lean into it and do it as quickly as you can. I understand for a startup especially the cost is significant. But nine out of ten times you will make that back and then some."

The question isn't whether you can afford $80,000 software. The question is whether you can afford to keep losing proposals to VPN glitches, keep paying people to do manual data entry, keep being unable to see what's actually happening in your business.

The $2,500 system was never cheap. It was just hiding its costs.