Benjamin Dyer – CEO and co-founder of Powered Now – shares his DIY experience gone wrong:
Against the advice of my wife, George, my chiropractor, and every instinct I have ever possessed, I decided one Sunday to fit an under-sink water purifier myself.
I had wanted the sensible BWT one, the German choice people who understand water actually buy. But I am a sucker for good marketing and, apparently, bad water, so I bought the one with Bear Grylls’s name on the box, reasoning that if it can strain a puddle in the Hindu Kush it can manage the Isle of Wight.
Lee Brown, the Peaky Plumber, took one look and told me it was crap. He was right. But how hard could the fitting be? I had watched a man on YouTube do it in four minutes while barely looking.
I did not manage it in four minutes.
Somewhere under the sink, folded into a cupboard designed for a cat rather than a grown man, I closed the isolating valve, which turned out to isolate precisely nothing, and undid the connection anyway. And so I found myself flat on my back in a widening lake, one thumb jammed over a fitting now doing a passable impression of a garden sprinkler, unable to move.
Which is, of course, exactly when the phone rang. It was on the worktop above me, roughly two feet and one universe away, buzzing hopefully. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it. It’ll be a robot about my car accident, I told myself.
It was not a robot about my car accident. And here is the part that should worry every plumber and heating engineer reading this. I build software for the trades for a living, and lying there in the puddle I had just experienced the single most expensive moment in your working week.
Because when a phone rings out for me, it’s a wet floor and a bruised ego. When it rings out for you, it’s a job, often a good one, walking off to the next name on Google. And you never find out it happened. It arrives not as a cancelled job or an angry email but as silence. You cannot grieve a customer you never knew you had.
We went looking for proof of this in the NOW Report, our national research carried out with Installer. More than half of tradespeople, 55 per cent, admit they have definitely or probably lost work because a quote crawled out too slowly. A missed call is that same problem, one step earlier and twice as costly.
And installers, of all people, are built to miss it. You cannot answer the phone with a blowtorch in one hand and a joint that needs soldering right now in the other, or with your head inside a combi. The job is, at a basic physical level, incompatible with the phone.
That is why we built the Powered Now Receptionist, and no, it is not voicemail with ideas above its station. Voicemail is where jobs go to die, because nobody under ninety leaves a message any more. It holds a real conversation with the caller, asks what the job actually is, and books it straight into your diary. So by the time you have mopped up and climbed out of the cupboard, you are not staring at a missed call and a mystery number. You are looking at a confirmed job.
It is part of Powered Now, which runs the whole life of a job in one place, from the first enquiry to the quote, the schedule, the invoice and eventually the tax return that makes everyone want to lie down. The same report found the average tradesperson loses five hours and twenty minutes a week to admin, most of it at night and at weekends. The Receptionist does not add to that pile. It takes a corner of it away.
None of it replaces you. Customers still want the person who turns up, fixes the leak properly, and leaves the kitchen drier than they found it. The only thing that changes is the moment just before that, the call that used to ring out while you were flat on your back under a sink.
As for the purifier, I gave up, called an actual plumber, and paid him handsomely to repair the plumbing and the section of wall I had by then removed. The water still tastes faintly of pond, though that is Bear Grylls’s fault rather than his. He answered on the second ring. Of course he did. He had the right software behind him. I was under the sink with a thumb over a pipe. He was running a business.
Benjamin Dyer is CEO and co-founder of Powered Now. Powered Now’s mobile app and AI Receptionist aim to make it easier for plumbers, heating engineers and other trades to run their businesses. www.powerednow.com
