Beginner's Luck

A young carpentry shop that came out swinging, and the system that is making sure it lands.

"Absolutely incredible. This is gonna make it so much easier to use and incorporate everything into FieldStone." — Adam Ginn, Highlands Carpentry

The shop

Adam Ginn runs Highlands Carpentry, a residential carpentry and remodeling business in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The work is finish carpentry, framing, and window and door installs, and almost all of it comes through referrals and repeat clients. Adam handles intake himself — usually by text — and during the busy season, he's on job sites far more than he's at a desk.

That's the core tension of a trades business this size: the person who has to answer the phone is the same person up on the ladder. As Adam put it, "If I'm only in the office 2 days a week right now during busy season, a lot of admin work happens on my phone at lunch."

The problem

Before FieldStone, Adam had to keep attention on everything and remember every last detail. In some cases, he would use his spreadsheets to make sure things were going well.

The clearest measure of the cost came from Adam himself. Asked how much time admin ate in a given week, he said: "Admin work really depends on the week but probably 8–16 hours." For a one-owner shop, that's up to two full working days a week spent not working.

The smaller misses added up too. On the daily grind: "Probably when I forget materials. That throw everything off track time and money wise."

What changed

FieldStone put every customer conversation on one line. Adam's business calls and texts now run through a FieldStone number, and the assistant catches each one, records it, and ties it to the customer. The pieces he actually lives on then moved onto his phone: mobile jobs, scheduled texts, file uploads, a shared job checklist.

He noticed each one as it landed. "I love the schedule texts feature. That's great." On mobile jobs: "Oh perfect, that'll make jobs easier to use." On the job checklist living in the app: "I just checked it out. I think this would be really helpful! It looks great."

The biggest shift was moving his calls through FieldStone. After his first real customer call on the system, Adam wrote: "I did, It worked really well! ... other than that it was flawless. I'm excited to get the numbers switched though."

The results

The figures below are cumulative over the pilot and drawn directly from FieldStone usage data.

Since Highlands came onto FieldStone, the platform has handled for the business:

• 120 voice calls
• 337 text messages
• 233 logged customer conversations
• 103 inbound calls — 1 fallback (≈99% caught), and that single miss got a callback within 24 hours

The number that tells the real story sits next to those: across all of that activity, Adam has spent roughly 6 hours total in the dashboard (27 sessions, 385 minutes). Hundreds of customer touches, handled — and only a few hours of his own time spent tending the system. It runs in the background so he doesn't have to sit in it. That is the entire point.

What it's worth to Highlands

Adam told us he loses up to 16 hours a week to admin. FieldStone doesn't ask for that time back in the form of another dashboard to babysit — it absorbs the admin overhead that used to demand it. The calls get answered, the texts get caught, the conversations get logged, whether Adam ever opens the app that day. For a business where the owner's attention is the bottleneck, moving customer capture off his plate is the difference between an evening of callbacks and none.

Where it's headed

Adam's own wish list is the roadmap: a QuickBooks connection so his financials and jobs live in one place, and deeper mobile so he can run everything from his phone or iPad on a job site.

And the clearest signal of all: he's started sending people our way. Unprompted: "I have a friend who just started a contracting business... Would you want me to give him your number?"

That's the direction. FieldStone becomes the single place a contractor's whole business runs through, not one more tool to check, but the one that remembers everything, so the owner doesn't have to.