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INTRODUCING GROUNDBREAKERS
GroundBreakers, a veteran- and women-owned hydrovac company serving Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois, provides clean, secure, and accurate hydro-excavation and disposal solutions.
Andrea Sloan acquired the company in 2019 after seeing an opportunity to provide critical services to construction and utility companies in the Midwest.
Starting with a fleet of nine trucks in 2019, GroundBreakers grew to include over 40 vehicles in four states, employing approximately 60 people, including 39 operators, 12 laborers, and 10 office professionals.
Director of Operations
See how GroundBreakers unlocked their growth potential by going digital with RapidWorks. We’ll hear from key members of the GroundBreakers’ team, including Andrea Sloan, President; Doug Taylor, Director of Operations; and Samantha Story, Accounting Clerk.
How Paper Job Tickets Held GroundBreakers Back From Growth
Sloan acquired GroundBreakers in 2019 because she was excited about the demand for hydro-excavation and disposal services in the region. Her goals were twofold: to grow the business and to do so while providing exceptional customer service. However, Sloan and the GroundBreakers team quickly realized their job management system, which relied on paper tickets, would not be able to support their growth goals.
“My main objective is to expand our service offerings and of course our reach as well,” Sloan explained. “We just recently moved into the Ohio territory over a little over a year ago. So to achieve this, we must persistently track our field operation.”
As a hydrovac service provider, the GroundBreakers team typically responds to emergency calls – these jobs are for same-day or next-day services, and the conditions and the duration of each job is different.
“Every job that we do is different and we have a different job every day,” Sloan shared.
This leaves the team with little opportunity for advanced planning. Managing same-day jobs with paper tickets meant they had to be filled out each morning, distributed to operators, and collected at the end of each day. GroundBreakers struggled to schedule more work via paper tickets quickly, which limited the amount of work they could take on.
The paper ticket system also impacted the GroundBreakers’ team ability to plan for growth.
“Hydrovac [jobs] are really difficult to track from a technology standpoint because of this [unpredictability],” Sloan added. “However, from a business standpoint, it’s absolutely necessary to confirm that we are tracking [our jobs] because it’s important that you track your margins and [it’s important] when you’re evaluating your strategic growth initiatives.”
After all, if you don’t know how many jobs you’re going to do in the next month, how can you build an accurate forecast or make a solid hiring plan?
“Our biggest challenge is you never know what's coming tomorrow,” shared GroundBreakers Director of Operations, Doug Taylor. “Most of our work is done the next day. So, you know, planning for future truck purchases or hiring people… trying to plan for those things or even trying to forecast anything is very difficult.”
Ultimately, GroundBreakers needed to move away from paper tickets to help them react more quickly, take on more jobs, and plan for growth.
Struggling to Digitize: The Limits of Generic Software Solutions
The GroundBreakers team began by implementing piecemeal solutions. This worked for a while as GroundBreakers expanded its operations.
“We finally moved out of [paper tickets] and went kind of digital and we tried another piece of software,” Taylor explained. “We tried to fit it for our needs. It really was for like plumbing and HVAC companies, it really wasn't for HydroVac. So we made it fit our needs for a while, but then we had to have other pieces of software and different tools to go along with that.”
But as the GroundBreakers grew and their offerings became more complex, they found themselves spending more and more time managing the various software applications. And because the different applications required so much maintenance, the GroundBreakers management team grappled over how to deliver great services and reach their full growth potential.
“We really struggled because we had to piecemeal multiple applications together to create processes that worked for us. And as we grew it became cumbersome,” Sloan shared. “We're a growth company, so we really needed an application that could help facilitate that growth.”
Rediscovering RapidWorks Hydrovac Management Software
Sloan and her management team remembered learning about RapidWorks, a job management software solution for companies just like theirs, through a trade magazine a year earlier. Even though they had gotten as far as checking out one of its demos, they initially thought the piecemeal approach would suffice.
“I think the size of us played a bit of a role,” explained Taylor. “The first time, we weren't quite at the size that we are now. We talked ourselves into [thinking] that we could manage these different [systems] and that we didn't need to change everything.” They wanted to avoid more change for fear of disruption, but the team began to realize that a new approach was inevitable.
Taylor added, “As we got larger and everything became more intricate, it really presented itself that it'd be really nice to have everything housed under one roof, you know, with the ease of doing payroll and dispatching and being able to change things [on the fly].”
At one point, the GroundBreakers team toyed with the idea of building their own custom software. “We were actually looking at building our own software solution from scratch,” said Sloan. “I'm glad RapidWorks came around because it was going to be a very costly and time-consuming endeavor.”
The GroundBreakers team decided to give RapidWorks another look. They quickly recognized that RapidWorks’s all-in-one approach could help streamline their operations. This would pave the way to scale up business operations as it expanded.
“Having a one-stop shop was really the number one most important thing that I was looking for,” Sloan explained.
“What really pushed us over the edge to go with RapidWorks was housing pretty much everything – our GPS, payroll, time tracking, dispatching (the dispatching is amazing!) and putting it all in one place instead of having four pieces of software,” Taylor added.
RapidWorks + GeoTab: A Seamless Integration for Smarter Dispatching
To achieve their vision of having a single, connected system for managing all their operations, GroundBreakers decided to upgrade their GPS hardware as well. RapidWorks integrates directly with GeoTab’s world-class GPS systems, giving dispatchers a live map view of every truck’s location.
“RapidWorks integrates with GeoTab so we switched out to GeoTab, and that was a pretty seamless project,” Taylor shared. “We had to get our trucks outfitted with GPS units, which was no problem.” He has also been pleasantly surprised by GeoTab’s excellent customer service, adding “I actually liked GeoTab's customer service a lot more [than our previous provider]."
As the team transitioned to RapidWorks, they saw firsthand why switching to RapidWorks was the right choice. Their responsiveness and support demonstrated to Sloan and the GroundBreakers’ team that they now had a very effective partnership.
“I really appreciated the RapidWorks team and their willingness to work with us,” she said. “And I really felt that… they weren't just talk; they actually did help immensely.”
“[RapidWorks is] working on changes for things that we've suggested,” Taylor affirmed. “We've had meetings of, hey, we wanna change this, and they say, we're gonna take that back and see if we can make that happen. I'm really surprised at how much they've wanted to give to us, and [it] really helped."
RapidWorks Hydrovac Software Facilitates GroundBreakers' Growth
The GroundBreakers team now relies heavily on RapidWorks to manage their operations.
“We rely on every aspect — from the first step of scheduling a job to the last step of invoicing a client and utilizing monthly reports,” Sloan noted.
Scheduling the right people for the job
Using RapidWorks, GroundBreakers’s office personnel can schedule jobs while seeing who is available and who is out on jobs.
“Our dispatching definitely has gotten better,” Taylor shared. “We have crews here and we have crews in Ohio, and I can quickly navigate and see exactly how many trucks are in Indiana, how many trucks are in Ohio.”
He also appreciates that RapidWorks makes it easy to assign the right operator for each job by tracking operator certifications.
“[We] can house some of our safety [credentials]... If a guy has OSHA 10, you can put that in there. Their drug tests, you can put that in there. Different safety things that a guy would need, you can put in there and if you need to know if a guy has it, you can quickly look at a guy and see who has what.”
Billing customers for services performed
Once the job is completed, the job ticket is instantly transmitted where it can be validated by the back-office.
“Once the ticket’s transmitted, I review everything," noted accounting clerk Samantha Story. “I verify the pricing scheme, [the] start time and [the] job time should line up. I check that their disposal site has been entered. If they have more than one [job], I make sure that the time they actually left their first job lines up with the second job’s timesheet.”
Once the ticket is validated, Story automatically generates the invoice and can send it to customers straight away.
Streamlined book-keeping with QuickBooks Online invoice integration
Thanks to RapidWorks’ new invoice integration with QuickBooks Online, the GroundBreakers office staff can keep their accounting books up to date with just a touch of a button.
“I was manually entering every invoice into QuickBooks. There's just a lot of error with that,” Story added. “It was very time-consuming, so it definitely helped to be able to export everything that quickly.”
New business insights with automated reports
RapidWorks software is also excellent for generating reports quickly and efficiently.
“I love the reporting capabilities,” Sloan says. “RapidWorks collects a lot of information and has a plentitude of reports that help me and my team make business decisions.”
According to Story, “Andrea [Sloan] wanted to see a weekly report of the average hours to track the productivity. And there is a report in there for that. I was going to pull a report directly from our actual payroll processing [software]. And then I realized, well, RapidWorks has this!”
RapidWorks’s reporting system helps the GroundBreakers team better manage their business. Thanks to these reports, GroundBreakers office personnel can view the specific number of jobs per customer and easily determine which customers to re-engage. They can also check each truck’s utilization or establish the month’s number of billable versus clocked hours.
Working Together and Providing Exceptional Services
With RapidWorks’s software solution in place, GroundBreakers has a centralized, unified set of tools that makes everyone’s lives easier. With more unified operations, all GroundBreakers employees, from management to operators to office personnel, can finally operate as a team.
RapidWorks’s easily integrated and streamlined software solutions allows GroundBreakers to book, schedule, and dispatch hundreds of jobs in the same week. Out in the field, operators have one app to complete their tickets and DVIRs. The back-office uses the same information to validate tickets and invoice customers. The invoice integration allows the back-office staff to accurately and efficiently transmit their invoices to QuickBooks Online.
“RapidWorks has really given us the opportunity to work together as a unit,” said Sloan. “Not just dispatching on one side, invoicing on another side. It allows us to come together with one system working towards the same goal.”
Thanks to this efficiency and integration, GroundBreakers has overcome the operating challenges of the hydrovac business and expanded its operations to new heights.
“You never know what’s coming tomorrow,” Taylor had shared. With RapidWorks on its team, however, GroundBreakers’ “tomorrow” looks more manageable — and a lot more profitable. “We should have done this a long time ago,” Taylor added. “[That’s] what we said; we should have just done this a long time ago.”
Both Sloan and Taylor highly recommend RapidWorks to any hydrovac or heavy equipment services business looking to expand.
As GroundBreakers discovered, it’s never too late. Schedule a demo of RapidWorks to learn how their hydrovac management software can help your team take on more work, grow faster, and offer exceptional customer service.
