American Fire Protection Case Study

The Case Study

(To protect our client’s market position and intellectual property, we’ve changed a few of the details in this case study—including their name.)

For 35 years, American Fire Protection (AFP) had protected the people and property of New York City by maintaining and preparing commercial sprinkler systems. Despite their decades of expertise, exceptional service, and name recognition throughout the southern district, AFP eventually topped out at about $12 million in annual revenue.

That’s when they reached out to us.

AFP was fantastic at what they did (sprinkler maintenance and repair) but horrible at documenting it. When we first talked, they were trudging along with a pen-and-paper system that was inefficient, indecipherable, and nearly impossible to manage.

Ink got smudged, papers were lost, and management was in the dark. All it would’ve taken was one missed inspection, one failed insurance claim, one lost life… and AFP’s reputation would have been ruined.

AFP was in pain, and they needed some relief before they could grow again.

Brand New Results

After 4 months of production and testing, AFP feels like a brand new company. From the founder to their technicians, everyone is excited about the future. AFP’s simple investment in a customized app recharged employees and gave them a sense of growth and excitement (not to mention job security in a rapidly evolving marketplace).

With better accountability, top employees were able to prove their diligence. Underperformers were challenged to pick up their game or move on. In all, AFP was empowered to break through their performance ceiling and begin to grow again.

Encouraged by this rapid success, the founder of AFP is convinced of the potential that technology can bring to his typically non-technological industry.

Moving forward, AFP is looking to revamp its customer-facing software to better match its newly-upgraded internal system. We’re also exploring exciting new ways to deploy the latest advances in technology to grow their business:

More Research

After digging into the heart of AFP—their mission, vision, values, goals—and learning about their processes, we could see clearly how technology would drastically improve their quality of service, compliance standards, and team-member accountability. 

Without disrupting their workflow, we saw a way to increase process efficiency, maximize their value proposition, and set the company apart in the marketplace.  

How?

By building a custom mobile app for AFP’s technicians—complete with maintenance checklists and automatic GPS-enabled logging. And we connected it to a central database so that managers and clients could access the information at any time.

Thanks to their new app, AFP was able to eliminate the pen and paper and recapture the countless hours they used to spend shuffling, filing, and searching for records. Along with that immediate boost inefficiency, the app gave managers crucial insight into their team members’ performance that they could use to further improve their operations.

Conclusion

Most clients come to us in AFP’s position. The founder’s built a successful business. He’s got a desire to grow, a vision for the future, and the resources to make it happen, but the company is still stuck. Our job is to help them see how technology can move them forward and then design the custom solutions to take them where they want to go.

AFP didn’t need us to reimagine their company. What they needed was for someone to understand who they were and what they wanted to accomplish. Then, we simply showed them what was possible and translated their technological dreams into reality.

Now that they’ve seen what technology can do for their business, they’ve learned that the sky’s the limit in terms of potential value-adds. For the founder personally, he’s also made an investment in his own future, because he knows that investors and/or future buyers will be far more interested in a company that’s dominated its market through technology.