Most fire protection companies that stall do not stall on the work. The techs are good, the customers renew, the trucks roll. They stall on the business around the work: nobody can say what share of revenue recurs, deficiencies get found and never quoted, invoices sit for sixty days, and the numbers that would explain any of it live in four systems that do not talk. This article names the six problems that come up again and again with Inspect Point customers, and walks each one through a simple improvement loop.
A loop for fixing business problems, not just naming them
| Check | The question | What to measure |
|---|---|---|
| Business mix | How much of the revenue recurs? | Recurring inspection revenue as a share of the total |
| Systems and assets | Do you know what you are responsible for? | Systems and devices on record per building under contract |
| Collections | How long from work done to cash? | Days from job completion to payment |
| Business intelligence | Can you see the whole business in one place? | Reports that need no re-keying to produce |
| Proposals | How much found work never gets quoted? | Deficiencies quoted as a share of deficiencies found |
| Labor | Are technicians spending their hours on billable work? | Billable hours per technician per week |
Six Sigma's DMAIC cycle (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) is a useful frame for a contractor because it forces the first two steps most of us skip. You cannot improve collections if you do not know your current days-to-paid, and you cannot know that without data. Define the problem in a sentence. Measure it with a number. Analyze why the number is what it is. Improve the process. Control it so it stays fixed. Every challenge below follows that shape.
1. Business mix: how much of your revenue recurs?
Define. Many small and mid-sized contractors cannot say what share of revenue is recurring (inspections, test and maintenance contracts) versus non-recurring (installation, construction, one-off service). Without that split, forecasting is guesswork and you cannot tell which side of the business deserves investment.
Measure. Tag every invoice by type for one quarter. Recurring inspection revenue, service revenue that came out of inspections, project revenue.
Improve. Inspection work is the side of the book that scales, because it recurs on a schedule the contractor controls. Contractors that grow the recurring base and turn its deficiencies into service work build a business that can be forecast, staffed, and eventually valued.
2. Systems and assets: do you know what you are responsible for?
Define. For a company running multiple locations, keeping track of every building, system, and device, its inspection frequency by jurisdiction, and its maintenance and recall history, is the job. When that record is a spreadsheet per branch, things get missed, and a missed inspection is a customer's compliance problem with your name on it.
Measure. How many systems are past due right now? If the answer takes more than a minute, the record is the problem.
Improve. One data model for buildings, systems, assets, and deficiencies, with the inspection frequency attached to each system so the schedule fills itself. That is the difference between managing a portfolio and remembering one.
3. Collections: how long from work done to cash in the bank?
Define. Without a dedicated collections function, payment is whoever has time to chase it. Long collection times mean less cash to hire, buy trucks, or take on a large customer, and in a bad month they mean trouble making payroll.
Measure. Days from invoice to payment, by customer and by job type.
Improve. Invoice from the completed work order, not from a pile at month end. Send reminders automatically on a cadence. Let the technician take a card or a deposit on site. Contractors that collect in the field shorten the cycle without adding office staff. The payments page covers what that looks like.
4. Business intelligence: can you see the whole business in one place?
Define. Larger contractors run several platforms: accounting, dispatch, inspections, CRM. If they do not share data, the information that would answer a question falls between them, and the answer becomes an opinion.
Measure. Pick five numbers leadership asks for every month. How many of them require someone to export from two systems and reconcile in a spreadsheet?
Improve. Integrate the field system with the system of record so financial data and field data land in the same reporting layer. Inspect Point connects to QuickBooks, Sage 100 Contractor, Vista, and the other platforms on the partners page so the inspection record feeds the books instead of being re-keyed into them.
5. Proposals: how much found work never gets quoted?
Define. For most contractors the service revenue behind an inspection book is a multiple of the inspection revenue itself, but only if the deficiency the technician found becomes a proposal the customer sees while the finding is fresh. Deficiencies that wait for the office to type them up lose momentum, and some never get quoted at all.
Measure. Deficiencies found per month, proposals sent per month, and the gap between them. Then the acceptance rate.
Improve. Build the proposal from the deficiency, with the photo and the code reference attached, before the technician leaves the site. Send it the same day. Customers approve work they can see. The proposals page shows the workflow.
6. Labor: are your technicians spending their hours on inspections?
Define. Qualified technicians are scarce and expensive. Every hour they spend re-entering paper forms, driving back for a missed device, or waiting on the office is an hour not inspecting.
Measure. Inspections completed per technician per week, and the share of a technician's day that is not on site.
Improve. Give the technician the right form for the system and code year on the truck, let several techs work one large building at the same time, and make the report generate itself from the field data. Field inspections go faster with digital forms in place of paper, and the report needs no retyping. The inspections page covers the field side.
Control: the numbers to watch every month
The improvement sticks when the measurement continues. A short dashboard, reviewed monthly, is enough:
- Recurring revenue share, and inspection revenue versus the service revenue it generated.
- Systems past due, by branch.
- Days from invoice to paid.
- Deficiencies found, proposals sent, proposals accepted.
- Inspections per technician per week.
If those five numbers come from one system without a spreadsheet in between, the tech stack is doing its job. If they do not, that is the next problem to define.
For how the platform fits a company of your size, the plans page maps the Inspect, Propose, and Dispatch tiers to the workflow above.
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