Background
A Service Team Trying to Sell What Made Them Different
Electrical contractor (EC) is full-service with a service and special projects division that runs IR thermography, NFPA 70B preventative maintenance, metering, arc flash, and smaller-scope construction work alongside the company's larger new-construction operation. The service department currently has 49 employees. EC's leadership has tasked the department with growing to 85 over the next five years.
The Service Department Manager came into the role last May after working as a field tech, with a prior background as a facility manager. That dual perspective — contractor and owner — shaped how he attacked the department's biggest gap: preventative maintenance.
"We are trying to grow in the preventative maintenance field, and we've always kind of struggled on how and what we should do to grow it," he said.
The timing helped. NFPA 70B became mandatory in 2023, which moved documented electrical maintenance from "recommended practice" to a code-driven requirement. Owners now have to prove they're maintaining their equipment. The EC had the technical chops to deliver. What it didn't have was a way to sell or scale it.
the problem
A Documentation Process That Quietly Killed Margins
Before Condoit, the EC’s IR scan process looked like this: a tech would go to a facility, capture thermal images and notes, return to the office, and spend roughly a week building a custom report in Excel — moving pictures one by one, formatting findings, assembling the deliverable. The output was usable. The economics were not.
"Our margins were a lot lower," he said. "You'd have a tech go out and do it, and then they would spend a week or so trying to upload it into Excel… We had to build our own IR report and move the pictures here to there. It literally took like a week." Beyond the time sink, the documentation itself disappeared after delivery. Records lived on a single internal drive, accessible primarily through one person — Brandon Jacobson — who owned the preventative maintenance file. If a tech needed historical context on a piece of equipment, there was no fast way to get it. Each service call effectively started from zero.
The EC had also tried a previous tagging/asset-labeling vendor. That effort, the service manager said, was "a big failure" — described internally as overpriced and over-promised, with stickers and processes customers didn't want.
The result: a service practice that wanted to lead with preventative maintenance but had no infrastructure to make the work fast, repeatable, or differentiated.
The Switch
An Electrical Data Platform, Not Another Software Tool
Condoit reached the EC through an early conversation between Condoit's team and one of their executives. The relationship landed with the service department manager shortly after he took over the department.
The pitch resonated immediately, partly because his facility-manager background let him see both sides of the value. As a contractor, he saw a faster, cleaner deliverable. As a former owner-side operator, he saw something owners had always lacked: a permanent, queryable record of the electrical system itself.
His own framing for it has become the way he explains Condoit internally and to prospects:
"The best way I found to be able to explain it is that it's a digital health record for your electrical systems."
The analogy goes further. The EC now positions itself as an "electrical health physician" — the contractor that does the initial scan, surfaces what's actually wrong, and builds an ongoing maintenance program around the findings. Condoit is the chart. Condoit Asset Tags™ on each panel and breaker are the patient ID.
What the service manager specifically wanted from the platform on day one:
• IR reports delivered in hours, not a week
• A complete history of every piece of equipment, accessible on-site via QR scan
• GPS-located assets so techs could find equipment they'd never personally seen before
• A trustworthy one-line that wasn't dependent on someone's flash drive
"You don't trust anything in the service world," he said. "The picture carries a million words" — more than labels, more than legacy documentation, more than what the original installer claimed was inside the panel.
The fact that Condoit pulls IR data directly from FLIR cameras — Condoit is FLIR's only Global Approved App — meant the EC's existing camera investment fed straight into the report, no SD cards or third-party software in the middle.
The Impact
40+ Hours Saved Per Report, More IR Scans Than Ever
The biggest, most quantifiable change is turnaround time on IR reports.
"We've gone from a week to a few hours in getting the report out and being done," he said. Asked to estimate the time saved per report, he put it at "at least a week's worth of time. So at least 40 hours."
The EC has run roughly 50 IR scans in the past year — "more IR scans in the last year than we've done, like, ever," he added, attributing the volume directly to how much easier the platform makes both the field work and the delivery.
Three operational shifts followed:
Recovered billable hours. Tech time that used to be absorbed by in-office report assembly is now back in the field. "Rather than them spending so much time on the IR report side of it and being clocked into that job while they're here in the office, they can be out making money somewhere else."
Tech handoffs stop costing the office. Previously, when a different tech returned to a customer site, they often had to call the office or dig through job numbers to figure out who'd touched the equipment last. Now they scan a Condoit Asset Tag™. "All they have to do is scan the QR code and they know instantly what was done, what was touched, what it last looked like, and have a GPS location and know where to go next."
Equipment history becomes a troubleshooting asset. "You can be able to see what's a history of that piece of equipment and how healthy it was and how healthy it is now," he said. "Where before, you just didn't have that information."
The platform has also reset the EC's pricing posture. They no longer compete on being the cheapest, and Condoit gives the sales conversation something concrete to point at. "We feel that you get the best value for your buck with us. And I think with Condoit, it goes hand in hand with what we do, that we're the best in the business."
Looking Ahead
Building a Traveling Team, a Better Warranty, and a Data Moat
The service department's five-year target — 49 to 85 employees — isn't going to be hit by staying inside their state. The service managers plan is a traveling team that can move into surrounding states, and beyond with a light kit: an IR camera, Condoit Asset Tags™, hand tools, and the platform.
"Condoit is a huge part of my development and growth," he said. "What we can do is take an IR camera and some stickers and some hand tools and go and sticker the crap out of everything and show them what needs to be fixed or how healthy those systems are."
The EC’s mix of work has also shifted from multi-family residential toward semiconductor facilities, hospitals, and data centers — owners with capital, recurring remodel cycles, and a real appetite for documented maintenance.
The service manager is also working with leadership to fold Condoit into the company's warranty offering: a six-month post-installation IR scan tied to the panel schedules already in the platform, designed to make their warranty materially better than competitors'.
The data-ownership upside — the idea that once the EC has tagged a building, it becomes the default contractor for everything that happens in it — is where the service manager sees the next phase.
Asked what would happen if Condoit disappeared tomorrow, he was direct: "It'd break my soul. My whole preventative maintenance idea and plan really would [break]. I don't know how we would do it or sell it or be different. Our IR scans would be going back to crappy."
His recommendation to a peer at another electrical contractor: "It's 100% worth it. It increases accountability. It makes you more efficient. It makes it so you can be at the job site without being at the job site."
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