How we cut 7.5 hours of admin a week for Above Plumbing and Heating, without them hiring an administrator
A plumbing and heating company that had outgrown the way it was run, and no website bringing in the work that would have paid for an assistant. We built the system that runs the business and the site that feeds it.
Darren started Above Plumbing and Heating as a sole trader and grew it quickly into a business with multiple engineers. He was still on the tools himself.
The company ran on a diary, apps on Darren’s phone, and WhatsApp messages. That holds up for one man. It does not scale to a team — organising several engineers, running the company and keeping everything inside the regulations had become more than Darren could handle.
The obvious next move was to hire an assistant to take the admin off him. That was where it compounded.
Above had no website. The business had grown on word of mouth and offline marketing, and it had hit the upper limit of both. Darren could not justify the assistant without more work coming in, and could not take on more work without the assistant.
We started with discovery sessions with Darren and his engineers. The point was to understand where the friction actually was, so that anything we built would fit how Above needs to work rather than the other way round. Those conversations also surfaced something important: a core app the business relied on and paid for monthly had recently updated, and the change caused real disruption. Whatever we built had to give Above ownership and control.
The same sessions gave us real insight into who Above’s customers are, which informed the structure and content of their new website.
We ran a full audit of every piece of software Above was using. That made sure what we built would cover everything, and it surfaced that their accounting software already worked, that their accountants already used it, and that it had an API. It meant we could integrate it fully into the solution rather than leave it standing outside.
We built two things at once: the software that runs the business day to day, and the website that brings the work into it.
The software does the job the assistant would have done. Work is scheduled and assigned from one place, with the day ahead, the engineer on each job and anything still unassigned on a single screen. Engineers pick up their own jobs, addresses and notes on their phones. Job history is held against the property rather than in anyone’s memory, and every Gas Safe registration is stored with its expiry date and flagged before renewal falls due.
The website was built from the customer personas that came out of discovery. It establishes what Above does, puts the Google reviews their reputation had already earned in front of people who have not been given the name by someone else, and routes every enquiry to a single form.
The two are one system rather than two projects. An enquiry submitted on the site arrives in the software as a job, ready to be scheduled. Completed work passes to the accounting platform Above already used. And Above owns all of it, with nothing in it that can be updated, repriced or withdrawn by anyone else.
Above is winning more work than it ever has, and none of it has needed an assistant to handle. Scheduling, dispatch and certificate tracking run out of one system now, instead of a diary, a phone and a WhatsApp thread.
The website feeds that system directly. Enquiries land as jobs, ready to be scheduled, and landlord gas safety checks — the work word of mouth was never going to bring in — have climbed sharply.
Darren is still on the tools. The company has grown. The overheads have not. And all of it belongs to Above.
“Nathan and George were good to deal with from the start. They took the trouble to understand how I run the business and the problems we were having, rather than turning up with something they’d already decided on. They were professional the whole way through and I always knew what they were doing and why. I was on the verge of taking someone on just to handle the admin, and I haven’t had to.”