For Contractors, Developing the Right Tech Stack Can be a Challenge - Comprehensive Auditing Can Help

Every contractor understands the importance of having a full, robust set of tools—ensuring the right resources to tackle any challenge and to handle any job. This includes not only the right tools for the jobsite itself, but also for the back office, encompassing functions like appointment-setting, customer follow-up and inventory management.

But here’s the mistake we see over and over again: thinking that more tools equal more efficiency. With new software rolling out every year, it’s tempting to chase the latest shiny solution, hoping it will fix every problem. In reality, the best way to build a tech stack that fuels growth isn’t adding more—it’s making the most of what you already have.

Where Contractors Get Stuck

Underutilization is a common issue when it comes to contractor tech stacks, and the primary reason is simply this: contractors don’t know what they don’t know.

Professionals in the electrical, plumbing or HVAC fields frequently invest in a new piece of technology in order to solve one particular problem, or to streamline one specific process. The goal may be something like automating their marketing workflows, or ensuring technicians are dispatched more efficiently.

Too often, contractors pay for powerful software but end up using just a fraction of it. The rest sits idle—wasted potential that could be driving efficiency and profit. To address a particular area of concern, contractors may wind up investing in a much more robust and sophisticated software solution without realizing all the features and benefits that they’re leaving unused. Worse yet, the new tech may counteract existing tools, causing redundancies or broken workflows.

Taking a Deep Dive

The solution isn’t another subscription. It’s an honest audit. A good audit takes stock of your current software, your workflows, and your goals, shining a light on the blind spots.

Any good audit will begin with a careful evaluation of the contractor’s needs and goals, which will help them to address pain points and areas where their current workflows could be optimized. From there, the auditing process must include a deep dive into current software usage, uncovering modalities or functions that contractors possess but are not implementing effectively or even at all.

Essential Insights

A comprehensive tech audit can provide contractors with meaningful insight into their current tech implementation, as well as a practical roadmap for improving their tech ROI.

For example:

●      Completing a comprehensive tech audit can yield insight into the custom workflows needed for contractors to meet their goals. Today’s most advanced software solutions, including all the leading field service management (FSM) tools, provide ample opportunity for customization, allowing contractors to bend their technology toward their particular needs and objectives. Again, many contractors simply don’t know about all the ways in which their technology can be better aligned with their processes and goals.

●      An audit may also provide contractors with a game plan for training and for change management. No software implementation will be successful without a real commitment to ongoing team training; meanwhile, there may be some friction that comes from asking employees, especially more senior personnel, to adopt new ways of doing things. The auditing process can reveal practical strategies to tackle each of these challenges, not only ensuring the right tech stack is in place but also ensuring full team buy-in.

●      Cultivating a robust tech stack requires some smart investments, including not just the initial expense of software acquisition, but ongoing expenses associated with training, maintenance and optimization. As a rule of thumb, contractors will want to budget 2-5% of their annual revenue toward technology, but the initial audit may provide greater specificity about how that budget can be spent.

Turning Software Into ROI

Software can help any contractor to improve their internal efficiencies, better serve their customers and ultimately realize business growth, and what’s more, many contractors already have the software solutions they need.

When you know what your technology can really do, and you’ve got a plan for how to use it, everything changes. Efficiency goes up. Friction goes down. Your team gets confident. Most importantly, your software stops being another line item and starts becoming the growth engine it was meant to be.