Pick the assessment shaped for your trade.
The vendor stack diverges enough between licensed FSM-anchored dispatch trades and route-based lawncare that we built three type-specific pages. The framing, threat surface, and lens questions on each one are tuned to the actual vendors and the actual exposures of that trade. Pick the one that fits.
Licensed electrical contractors.
ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, Jobber on the dispatch side. Panel-check recurring data, service-reminder workflows, municipal and state licensing data flowing into the vendor stack. The quote-follow-up wedge is the natural sharp edge.
Assessment for electrical contractors →Licensed plumbing and HVAC contractors.
The PHC and PHCC stack: ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, ServiceFusion dispatch lock-in, recurring maintenance plans as the vendor-gated recurring-revenue lever, EPA Section 608 refrigerant data layer for HVAC. Higher per-ticket value, longer service histories per customer.
Assessment for plumbing and HVAC →Lawncare and landscaping firms.
Route-based, seasonal, high-volume customer records. Jobber and Service Autopilot dominate. Gate codes, alarm codes, and access data for residential properties make this a sensitive-data layer even without HIPAA. The seasonal scheduling cycle is its own vendor-lock-in lever.
Assessment for lawncare and landscaping →If you are in general contracting or remodeling, specialty security installation, or commercial and industrial mechanical contracting, the work shape is different enough that we have not yet built a type-specific page. The general success.build/risk assessment fits, and we will flag during the discovery call if a future type-specific surface would serve you better.
The broad threat surface, named.
Four exposures that show up across all three trades in different shapes. Each type page sharpens these to its specific vendor stack and customer-record reality. None of these are hypothetical. All of them are showing up in current vendor terms of service, state attorney general enforcement actions, Federal Trade Commission complaints, and the trade press.
Threat 1: Dispatch platforms claim broad rights to your customer-derived data. The performance data is the part that matters.
ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, Jobber, and adjacent dispatch platforms typically distinguish "Customer Data" (what you put in) from "Usage Data," "Performance Data," and "Aggregated Data" (what they derive from your operation). The latter categories are usually broadly licensed to the vendor under the standard terms of service. The result: your customer list as a static export may be portable, but the performance data, the service-call patterns, the pricing intelligence, the recurring-customer cadence, the technician productivity, usually is not. The performance data is what makes the customer list valuable for resale or for competitive analysis at the moment of sale. Migration costs are real and growing. The vendor knows it; the renewal letter reflects it.
Sources: ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, and Jobber published terms of service 2024 to 2025 (verify current language at assessment time); Gartner SaaS Spend Management research 2025; Sterling's anti-lock-in doctrine (REFERENCE_anti-lock-in-doctrine.md).
Threat 2: Your dispatch platform activated AI on inbound calls and customer communication. You may not have noticed.
ServiceTitan launched AI call summarization and AI dispatch optimization across 2024. FieldEdge and Housecall Pro shipped parallel features. Jobber introduced AI features into its home services and lawncare configurations. Most owners have not read the terms-of-service update that authorized those features to process inbound customer call audio or to draft outbound customer messaging. The customer's understanding of "what happens when I call the shop" has changed without their consent. State attorneys general have begun signaling interest in undisclosed AI processing of consumer communications, particularly where sensitive data sits behind the conversation.
Sources: vendor product release notes and terms-of-service amendments 2024 to 2025; OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise terms 2026; state attorney general advisories on undisclosed AI processing (varies by jurisdiction, verify at assessment time).
Threat 3: State privacy law convergence applies to your customer list, your route data, and your access codes. Even though you are not healthcare or finance.
Maryland MODPA, California CPRA, New York SHIELD Act, and roughly seventeen other state privacy laws apply to most trades in the $500K to $20M revenue band. Customer addresses, service histories, payment data, and sensitive-customer information (alarm codes for security-relevant trades, access codes for property managers, gate codes for residential lawncare on gated properties) are all in scope. Most of these laws were not written with trades in mind, but the definitions of "personal information" and "sensitive personal information" pull these data categories in by default. Penalty exposure under state laws is real and growing. Most owners have never reviewed compliance. The state attorney general is the enforcer, and trades firms are not on the priority list yet, but the floor keeps rising.
Sources: IAPP US State Privacy Tracker 2026; Maryland MODPA; California CPRA enforcement actions Q4 2025 to Q1 2026; New York SHIELD Act; state-by-state privacy law tracker (verify current state-of-play at assessment time).
Threat 4: Lead-generation marketplaces and BNPL financing partners hold a parallel data set you do not control.
Angi, HomeAdvisor (now under Angi), and Thumbtack on the lead- generation side. GreenSky (Goldman-owned), Synchrony Home Improvement, and Wisetack on the financing side. Each holds customer financial application data plus behavioral data. The trade's relationship with these platforms is structurally extractive: the platform's interest is owning the customer relationship, not preserving the trade's. When the platform changes terms, raises rates, or is acquired by a competitor, the trade's recourse is limited. The Federal Trade Commission has brought enforcement actions against several lead-generation marketplaces across 2023 to 2025, with consumer-protection theories that overlap with the trade's own exposure as the counterparty.
Sources: GreenSky, Synchrony, and Wisetack published terms 2024 to 2026; Angi, HomeAdvisor, and Thumbtack contractor terms 2024 to 2025; Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions against lead-generation marketplaces 2023 to 2025 (verify current FTC case posture at assessment time).
The two lenses, sized to the shop.
Every type-specific page narrows these to the trade's actual vendor stack and customer-record reality. At the hub level, the lenses are the broad shapes of inquiry the assessment uses.
Lens 1: Customer list, route data, and operational sovereignty.
What does the dispatch platform actually own when you read the terms carefully, not the marketing page? What does the payment processor hold, and what does the BNPL partner hold separately? What does the lead-generation marketplace claim? Can you export cleanly today, with the performance data and the service-call history attached, to migrate or to support a sale conversation? What happens to the customer list and the route or gate-code data on a vendor change-of-control, an acquisition, a bankruptcy, or a material-adverse-change clause being invoked? The assessment names the gaps with specificity and the remediation paths with proportion for the size of your shop.
Lens 2: AI vendor activation and consent-by-silence exposure.
Which AI features has your dispatch platform turned on by default since you signed up? Which inbound calls are being processed by what model, with what retention, under what terms? What did the most recent terms-of-service amendment authorize, and was it accepted by your silence? What does the customer understand is happening when they call the shop, and what is actually happening? For shops using consumer-tier AI tools (the unspoken ChatGPT or Claude tab open on the office computer for drafting marketing copy or summarizing notes), the assessment names that as the exposure it is. State attorneys general are watching this surface; the floor on disclosure obligations is rising.
Who this is for.
The fit is clearest for family-owned trades in the $500K to $20M annual revenue band with 5 to 75 employees including owner-operators. Single-truck operators under $500K should start with the general success.build/risk assessment. Multi-state companies above $20M typically have internal operations and compliance teams large enough that this surface is the wrong shape; the success.build/conformance assessment serves that buyer better.
- Licensed electrical contractors on ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, or Jobber with municipal or state licensing data flowing through the vendor stack. Assessment shaped for electrical.
- Licensed plumbing and HVAC contractors with maintenance plan workflows, EPA Section 608 refrigerant data, and PHC or PHCC bundled operations. Assessment shaped for plumbing and HVAC.
- Lawncare and landscaping firms on Jobber, Service Autopilot, Pollard, or YardBook with route-based, seasonal operations and gate-code or alarm-code data for residential customers. Assessment shaped for lawncare and landscaping.
- Second and third-generation family-owned shops planning succession, an internal handoff, or an outright sale where the customer list and service-call history determine the multiple.
- Growing shops in the ten-to-seventy-five-employee range that have added vendor relationships faster than vendor governance has kept up.
Adjacent trades and structures we also work with
- General contracting and remodeling firms on Procore, Buildertrend, or CoConstruct with project-management-heavy workflows and longer engagement cycles. Different vendor stack, may warrant its own type page in the future if engagement justifies it.
- Specialty trades with elevated data sensitivity — locksmiths (access codes), security installers (alarm codes plus monitoring data), home inspectors (property and financial records), pest control (location and access data). Smaller audience, distinct data exposure.
- Commercial and industrial mechanical contracting (refrigeration, large-format electrical, industrial mechanical) with B2B-heavy customer bases that may overlap with general-contracting work shape.
- Fraternal organizations and veterans posts running building-maintenance operations as in-house trades (a Knights of Columbus council or American Legion post that owns its hall and runs the maintenance, the lawncare, and the small-mechanical work as a fraternal operating function). The trades-vendor questions are the same shape this page treats; the multi-501 cluster-stewardship questions across the operating-charity, the title-holding c2 entity, and the fraternal c8 or c10 or c19 entity route to the fraternal 501s assessment or the 501c19 veterans organizations assessment as applicable.
- Trades firms doing significant work for religious institutions, parishes, or faith-based property portfolios (the contractor with the parish-roof contract, the HVAC firm on the diocesan maintenance vendor list, the landscaping firm on the federation's facilities rotation) where the customer data includes congregation-adjacent records and the institutional buyer carries its own stewardship duty. The trades-side vendor and customer-list questions are held here; the institutional-buyer side is treated at the religious institutions and diaspora community organizations assessment.
- Franchise operators of any of the above (an additional layer of franchise terms that interact with the vendor stack in ways most franchisees have not reviewed).
- Single-truck owner-operators under $500K for whom the general success.build/risk assessment is sized correctly.
Why us.
Sterling Solutions is a Westchester-based small firm. Family-owned ourselves. We do not run on venture capital. We do not have a sales team pretending to be your friend. We do not have an exit horizon. We have published values (success.build/ethos) and a written anti-lock-in doctrine, and the architecture of our own platform proves it: every layer is swappable, every export is clean, your data is yours from day one and on the day you leave.
We are not a dispatch platform and we are not pitching one. The assessment is not a stalking horse for a ServiceTitan-to-something- else migration engagement. If the conclusion is "your stack is defensible with three documentation gaps closed," that is the conclusion. If the conclusion is "your vendor's contract is much worse than you realized and the remediation path is renegotiation at the next renewal," that is the conclusion. We have no commission structure with any of the vendors we evaluate.
The customer list is the business equity. The crews build the work, the trucks carry the work, and the license authorizes the work, but the customer list is the asset that determines what the business is worth at the moment of sale, succession, or rebuild. The vendor stack a shop operates should reflect that hierarchy, not invert it. The same logic applies to our own work: the people we serve are not products, and the data we hold is in trust. We take the analogy seriously because it is not an analogy. The same family-business reality at scale is what mutual carriers and cooperatives and credit unions are also working to defend, in different industries with different regulators but the same structural question.
The frame composes in two other directions worth naming. A Knights of Columbus council or an American Legion post that owns its hall and runs the building maintenance, the lawncare, and the small-mechanical work as a fraternal operating function is a trades operation AND a fraternal cluster simultaneously; the trades-vendor questions belong here, the multi-501 cluster stewardship questions across the operating charity, the c2 title-holding entity, and the fraternal c8/c10/c19 entity belong at the fraternal 501s assessment or the 501c19 veterans organizations assessment. A trades firm with significant parish-property maintenance work or a diocesan vendor-list relationship sits on the trades side of an institutional buyer whose own stewardship duty is held at the religious institutions and diaspora community organizations assessment. Same customer-list equity, different buyer-side moral frame on the other end of the transaction.
What this page is not.
This is not a pitch for a six-figure modernization engagement disguised as a free assessment. The assessment is the deliverable. If you read it, file it, do the work in-house, and never speak to us again, that is a good outcome and we are not chasing you for a sales call.
This is not a CRM migration consulting engagement. We are not pitching a ServiceTitan-to-X conversion. We identify gaps and route. If you do choose to migrate, we are happy to coordinate with whoever runs the implementation. If you do not, the assessment still serves.
This is not legal advice. Sterling Solutions is a technology firm, not a law firm. The written deliverable identifies sovereignty and vendor-posture gaps and names the regulatory categories they sit under. Decisions about specific actions with legal consequence (vendor contract renegotiation, state attorney general inquiries, employment matters, sale or succession structuring) should run through your own attorney, accountant, or trusted advisor. We are happy to coordinate.
Tire-kickers, briefly.
The evaluation is honest work. We do the homework on our end. We read the current public terms of service for the vendors you name. We pull the most recent product release notes and amendments. We come to the evaluation session prepared. We ask the same of you: bring the owner or operating principal who actually makes the vendor decisions, and bring a real intent to read what we deliver. Curiosity is fine. Performative curiosity is not what this offer is for.
One discovery call.
Thirty minutes. Pick the trade-specific page first if you can (electrical, plumbing and HVAC, lawncare) and book from there; the cycle is sized to the shop on the call. The vendor stack a shop relies on today is going to be the subject of a renewal conversation, a state attorney general inquiry, a sale negotiation, or a succession question whether or not you have a written posture document on the shelf. The asymmetry between "having a written assessment ready before the question comes" and "scrambling once it does" is large, and it is not in your favor by default. Sterling is happy to help close it.
Heads-up on the booking page: the booking widget currently shows 30-minute slots. That is the right length for the hub-level discovery call. The trade-specific pages explain the per-trade cycle. If the standard slot does not work for you, email [email protected] and we will find a slot that fits.
success.build/risk/trades · [email protected] · trade-specific pages route from here