We did not build a product and go looking for trades to sell it to. We built a desk for our own shop, and then each new business broke it in a way that taught us what a trade really is.
Every screen below is a real desk. Every customer, job and price in the pictures is invented.
Supercanic
Trade · Auto repair and mobile mechanicsWhere · San Jacinto, California, and mobile across nine states
Our own shop. The desk was built here first.
The first desk, and the reason we know what a shop needs. Nineteen technicians, a board that has to be right at seven in the morning, and a phone that rings whether anyone is free to answer it.
Everything on this site was learned here, usually the hard way. The vehicle with no model year that could not be saved, and so stopped quote drafting for fourteen hours. The authorization that demanded a signature image, so a customer who said yes on the phone could never satisfy it and staff got asked four times.
Fig. 01Supercanic - the morning board
Fig. 02Supercanic - a quote as the customer reads it
Fig. 03Supercanic - the front desk answering by itself
Fig. 04Supercanic - a job card
Where the mistakes were made before anybody was paying us for them.
ABC Lock and Safe
Trade · LocksmithWhere · Portland, Oregon
The trade this whole site's argument came from.
Residential, commercial, automotive and safe cracking. Three of those four happen to buildings and safes, which have no plate and no VIN.
One boolean decided whether this shop could exist on our software. Left the way auto has it, every rekey, every lockout and every safe job would have been unclosable.
The word matters too. A locksmith's job hangs off a house, a storefront, a truck or a safe. Property fails on a truck. Site fails on a safe. The word is lock, and it survives every sentence the system says out loud.
There was one more trap, and it was hiding in a single line. The customer facing page read its heading from a two way choice between garage door and our own auto wording. A locksmith customer would have opened a page headed Your Garage and read a vehicle inspection report about their safe.
Fig. 01ABC Lock and Safe - the front door, in their own brand
Fig. 02ABC Lock and Safe - the morning board
Fig. 03ABC Lock and Safe - a job card
Fig. 04ABC Lock and Safe - three shapes of thing on one page
hasPlate: false. One line, and a whole trade fits.
Silver State Locksmith
Trade · LocksmithWhere · Las Vegas, Henderson and Enterprise, Nevada
Same trade, different shape. A service area business with no counter.
No street address is published anywhere, because there is no shop to walk into. Four tracking numbers feeding one real line, which is what you get after years of marketing that worked.
One of those numbers nearly went to the wrong business. It is named for a different company that is also on the account, and the name is not evidence of anything. Its destination is. It forwards to Silver State's own phone, so the calls are theirs.
Fig. 01Silver State Locksmith - the morning board
Fig. 02Silver State Locksmith - the front desk answering by itself
Whose lead a call is gets settled by where it rings, not what it is called.
R&T's Lock and Key
Trade · LocksmithWhere · Auburn, Alabama
The first shop on the desk that is not on the West Coast.
Central time, and that is not a formatting detail. The clock decides every scheduled hour, every appointment time and the switch between the day and night version of the automated front desk.
No call tracking at all, which changed what got built. No tracking means no missed call to answer, so it would have been easy to leave the automated opener switched off. That would have quietly removed the only automatic response this shop can have, because their own website still sends them leads.
Fig. 01R&T's Lock and Key - the front door, in their own brand
Fig. 02R&T's Lock and Key - a quote as the customer reads it
A feature nobody switched on looks exactly like a feature that is working.
JC Headlight Restoration
Trade · Headlight restorationWhere · Moreno Valley, California, and mobile across Riverside County
The first trade that happens to a car and still is not auto.
The case for reusing the auto setup is real. It is a car. What does not fit is everything auto asks about the car: an odometer reading, an engine, and a customer page headed Your Garage carrying a vehicle inspection report about two headlights.
And the plate rule again, arriving from the opposite direction. This shop's customers all have a plate. Nobody is going to write it down on a fifty dollar driveway job, and auto will not accept a make and model instead. Left alone, every job on this desk would have been unclosable.
What it needs instead is the lens type, because halogen and projector are different work at different prices, and the car's color, because a mobile technician has to find one car in an apartment lot from a text.
Two trades reached the same setting from opposite directions.
Wrench Services
Trade · Auto repairWhere · Rio Rancho, New Mexico
A one owner shop on the same code as a nineteen technician one.
Master mechanic, twenty five years, mostly same day. The whole business is one person and a van, and it runs on the same system as a shop with four bays and five technicians.
That is the argument for building it properly once. The shape scales down as well as up, and nothing about the small version is a cut down edition with features held back to sell later.
The same desk, for a business of one.
Yours Would Be the Seventh
And it would break something, the way each of these did. That is the part we are good at.
