A day with Brian Woodward

Every so often we spend a day riding along with a customer. We watch the actual work, see how Crowfly holds up in the field, and look for the spots where we could make the day run smoother. As a bonus, we’ll hold your tools and help carry things back to the truck.

I rode along with Brian Woodward of Woodward Home Services on one of his jobs to see how he runs the dryer vent cleaning side of his business. Did I know dryer vents needed cleaning before I met Brian? No, but I also had a ventless dryer in my last apartment, so I’m legally excused.

The process of cleaning a dryer vent is fairly straightforward. Move the dryer to expose the vent, disconnect the dryer, then hook up the shop-vac to the vent, and from the other side you push through your drill-mounted brush. Rinse and repeat. After that, Brian took great care while cleaning up the filter and the inside of the dryer. He even retrieved the orphaned socks from behind the dryer and left them in a little pile on the counter. The last step was collecting the lint and showing the customer just how much had come out.

He’d worked with this customer before, and you could tell by the way they spoke that she was yet again happy with his work. I suspect she’ll keep booking him. Brian has been good to work with from the start, so I wouldn’t expect anything less.

From the very beginning, questions were forming as I watched Brian work, both on the vent itself and in how he was with his customer. He had an answer for every one, so I learned a lot about what matters to him on a job. He has to know where the vents are, what he needs to reach them, and how hard it is to get at both ends. That got us talking about how he keeps notes on each customer, and the gripes he has with the way Housecall Pro makes him store them.

After the appointment, we sat down so I could show Brian a few of the new things we had built since our last chat, some of them shaped by his own day-to-day. One of them was a route optimizer we built to help him cluster his appointments to save time and gas while fitting more into his day.

We also kicked around the idea of sending a booking link to a list of customers, steering them into specific days or slots. That conversation is what sparked the booking link generator, which we’ve since built.

This is how the route optimizer happened, and it’ll be how the next feature happens too. We’d rather build from a real day in your truck than guess from behind a desk. If you’d like us along for a day, reach out here.