One place to run the job. One flat fee. No training required.

The Problem: Software Built for Someone Else's Business

Before ServiceIQ, this contractor ran on a system that cost north of $600,000 to implement, and still needed three full-time employees permanently modifying it just to keep pace with the business.

The math never worked. Every department had to compromise to make the shared system function, and the department that mattered most (service, roughly 80% of the business) got the short end of it.

It's a familiar shape for contractors in this range. Big construction firms running five jobs a year at $30M each can manage those projects in a spreadsheet if they have to, five is a small number. This business runs 500 jobs a year at $300K each, and each of those jobs has hundreds of small things that all need to be tracked precisely, at once.

“Somebody had to suffer. My accounting department didn't love the accounting portion of the software, but they recognized that since we were 80% service, the service portion of the software was the most important.”

The Search: Too Much, Not Enough, or Both

Before finding ServiceIQ, Devin did look at Procore, but assessed it as "very expensive", comprehensive, but not necessarily everything he needed. It had features he'd never touch and gaps where the things he actually needed should have been.

He'd seen this pattern before. A competitor in the electrical trade spent well over a million dollars customizing an off-the-shelf platform to fit their business. But even that wasn't quite right. Every general-purpose tool he'd encountered, from project-management platforms to CRMs, was built for a category of business, then bent, rather expensively, toward his.

A HubSpot referral pointed him toward ServiceIQ. What made it worth a second look: it was already integrated with QuickBooks, and it wasn't charging per user, which was a direct answer to the tools he'd been evaluating, most of which taxed him for every technician he added.

“Everything out there is already into a square can or rectangular can or circular can. And we're creating our own trapezoid.”

Why It Stuck: Built by the People Who'd Use It

What separated ServiceIQ from every alternative was who was doing the building.

Rather than buy a finished product and pay to bend it, Devin became a Founding Partner, building the platform from the ground up, specific to service contractors like E&EDS, rather than adapting someone else's category-general tool.

That ground-up approach shows up in the details that off-the-shelf platforms treat as an afterthought, because those platforms started somewhere else. How the folders get structured. What information goes where. How checklists gate the next step so nobody can skip ahead. None of it is exotic, all of it is exactly how E&EDS's construction and project-based jobs actually run, which is the one thing a general-purpose platform can't be customized into cheaply.

And critically: no training required to get a crew running on it. Nobody's sent to a classroom. A new hire tells the system what they need, and they're productive on day one.

“If I went anywhere else and said, 'I want to build my own software,' it would cost me a few hundred thousand dollars.”

A Living Product, Not a Finished One

That's the trade at the center of ServiceIQ: instead of buying a static tool and living with its limits, partners get a say in the roadmap, and in return get a platform that keeps arriving, feature by feature, built around how their business actually runs rather than a generic template.

“This is a living software package. It is never going to be finished. It is always going to be continuously upgraded, and the good news is the team that we work with is always willing, ready, and able, and getting it done within a week.”

The Vision: One Screen, One Truth, for Every Job

Asked where this ends up, he doesn't hesitate. He wants one screen that shows everything about a customer: a schedule view across the next six months, with every job visible, and clicking any one of them dropping straight back into that same one-screen view. Different project managers looking at the same data in whatever layout makes sense to them, because two people running the same job don't always need to see it the same way.

The goal is a platform where "you can get to Rome with many different roads", one underlying job, however many ways there are to look at it.

Why Devin Recommends It to Other Contractors

He's not being paid to say any of this, and he's said as much directly: no commission, no referral fee, no ask. What he's offered instead is his name, and his time, pointing other contractors his direction, taking their calls, and telling them plainly what building a platform from scratch, with the vendor, actually looks like from the inside.

For a contractor evaluating whether to make the switch, his advice comes down to one thing: a platform designed by people who've actually run a service business beats a generic tool bent sideways to fit one, every time.