Trades Businesses
Turn field data into margin.
SkipForward embeds engineers with trades businesses — HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, mechanical — to build the systems your off-the-shelf stack never will, on your job data, inside your environment.
Where the margin leaks
Typical first engagement- Quote turnaround
- 3 days → 4 hrs
- Calls closed first visit
- +18%
- Unsold estimates recovered
- 23%
We start with one workflow, take the baseline with your operations team, and put a date on it. If the number does not move, neither does the invoice.
The Gap
The trades run on software written for someone else.
Your field service platform was built for a franchise playbook. Your accounting system was built for a retailer. Everything between them — the part that is actually your business — lives in spreadsheets, group texts, and the head of one dispatcher who is retiring in three years.
Trades businesses do not have a data problem. Every job already generates quotes, tech notes, photos, timecards, parts orders, and phone calls. It is unqueryable, so it never comes back to help the next job.
That is where SkipForward comes in.
The knowledge that wins jobs is already in your business. It is just sitting in a truck.
What We Build
Custom, because your work is.
No platform to license and no seats to buy. We build against the way your crews already work, then hand it over running.
Quoting & estimating assist
A photo set, a site visit note, or a full drawing package in — a priced scope out, checked against what your own crews actually billed on similar work, not a national average.
Dispatch that knows the job
Route on skill, certification, truck stock, and drive time instead of whoever answers the phone. The whiteboard becomes a system.
Service history you can query
Years of tech notes, photos, equipment models, and serial numbers turned into an answer a first-year can ask for in plain language, from the crawlspace.
Call intake & unsold estimates
Every inbound call triaged, booked, and summarized — and every quote that never got a yes followed up before it goes cold. Revenue you already earned and never collected.
Permits, warranties & compliance
Permit packets, warranty registrations, licensing renewals, and safety documentation assembled from the data your crews already enter once.
Field-first interfaces
Built for a phone in a glove, one bar of signal, and a tech who has ninety seconds. Offline-tolerant by default.
No Rip And Replace
We build against the stack you already run.
Nobody is migrating a trades business off its dispatch platform in peak season, and we would not ask. We integrate with what is in place and leave your systems of record where they are.
- Field service & dispatch
- ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, Service Fusion
- Accounting & payroll
- QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Foundation
- Estimating & takeoff
- Accubid, ConEst, PlanSwift
- Project & docs
- Procore, Autodesk Build, Egnyte
How We Work
Forward deployed, then gone.
A small team of engineers deployed into your organization, shipping in your environment on a clock we set together — with the handoff planned from the first week.
Phase 01
Embed
Our engineers sit with your team, map the workflow end to end, and agree on the one number we are here to move.
Phase 02
Prototype
A working system against your real data, in your environment. Narrow scope, honest evals, no demo-ware.
Phase 03
Productionize
Guardrails, regression evals, monitoring, and CI. It runs on a Tuesday morning without anyone watching it.
Phase 04
Transfer
Documentation, pairing, and training until your engineers own the roadmap. We stay on call, not on payroll.
Four phases, no fixed calendar. Each phase is sized to your scope rather than to a template. One well-bounded workflow can run embed to transfer in about three weeks; several systems in a regulated environment take longer. We size the phases with you during Phase 01, and the dates go in the contract before anyone writes code.
Fixed-scope pilot
One outcome, one price, agreed before we start.
Your stack, your cloud
We build in your repos and your accounts from day one.
Handoff in the contract
Exit criteria are written down, not left to good intentions.
Start Here
Let’s find your first outcome.
Thirty minutes to walk through the workflow you want to change. You leave with a one-page scope, a measurable target, and a price — whether or not you hire us.