01 / THE MOMENT
My first deep dive into the business was unforgettable.
Soon after I joined Total Drain Solutions, Justin, the owner, took me to Las Vegas for a week to understand the operation from the inside.
The company had recently lost its only administrator. That person had handled service tickets and invoicing and had access to information the rest of the team needed. As we dug in, we realized that several weeks of service tickets could not be found. The work had been done, but some of it had never been invoiced.
We hired a new administrator quickly. I also saw that hiring alone would not solve the underlying problem. We needed a dependable way to track opportunities, document service work, and check that completed jobs made it through to billing.
02 / THE BUILD
Two teams. Two different adoption paths.
I began interviewing software providers immediately. The sales and office teams could move quickly, so within about a week I chose HubSpot, built out the pipeline, and introduced it to sales and leadership.
Field service needed a different approach. I spent about two weeks evaluating options before choosing Zuper FSM. I then spent roughly six weeks configuring it around the way our teams worked, followed by two weeks training our Las Vegas and Sarasota teams.
That rollout taught me something I still carry into every implementation: the right system has to fit the people using it. Office staff and field technicians face different conditions, and both groups need a process they can trust in the middle of a busy day.
~1 weekHubSpot selection and sales pipeline launch
~2 weeksField service software evaluation
~8 weeksZuper configuration and team training
03 / THE RESULT
Work became visible from first contact through invoice.
Both systems were adopted quickly and used every day for the next two years. The missing-ticket problem did not repeat. If something looked incomplete, we had a straightforward way to cross-check the systems and make sure the work our people had done was billed correctly.
For me, the result was bigger than a software launch. The team gained a shared view of the work and a more reliable handoff between sales, field service, administration, and invoicing.
04 / THE WAKE-UP CALL
A stack of invoices was standing in for a process.
Ownership needed to know which vendors we owed and how much. We could not give them a reliable answer.
Late payments had strained vendor trust and affected our ability to order materials for projects. I flew from Florida to Las Vegas to sit with our bookkeeper and trace the AP process. I found unpaid invoices on a desk that had not been entered into QuickBooks.
I should have reviewed that process sooner and made sure the team had the support it needed. Once I saw the gap, I took a sample of roughly 50 to 100 invoices, scanned them, and began testing a way to capture the information consistently.
05 / THE EXPERIMENT
Test the tool. Then test whether it belongs.
My first attempt used Docparser with Outlook, but the results varied across the different invoice layouts our vendors used. I then built a workflow with Azure AI Document Intelligence and Power Automate. Invoices sent to our accounting email were parsed for the vendor, invoice number, dates, line items, unit prices, taxes, discounts, and totals, then recorded in an Excel tracker with vendor tabs and a totals view.
I trained the model with more than 20 invoice examples. It reached about 98% extraction accuracy and gave us the visibility to identify what was outstanding. We paid the overdue vendors and apologized for the disruption.
Once the immediate problem was solved, I asked whether that setup was repeatable and affordable for a growing company. It was repeatable, but the cost did not make sense. I looked again at tools we already had and moved the ongoing AP process into QuickBooks' invoice capture and reporting features, where it was easier to track and sustain.
50–100invoices sampled to understand the gap
20+examples used to train the model
~98%invoice extraction accuracy in the test workflow
06 / THE HANDOFF
A process should outlast the person who fixes it.
I owned AP and AR for several months while we stabilized the work. When we hired a part-time bookkeeper, I trained that person on the new process so I could move to the next gap.
Commission tracking needed the same attention. Salespeople had lost confidence that their commissions would be paid as expected. I took ownership of the tracking and payment process for several months, then trained others to run it. In both cases, the goal was to replace uncertainty with a process the team could see, check, and eventually own without me.