What the assessment actually delivers.
A written sovereignty-posture document organized the way a careful acquirer's diligence checklist or a thoughtful succession plan would organize it. Three to six pages on the short cycle, six to twelve pages on the long cycle. Named observations, sourced to your shop's actual vendor stack and service mix, with a remediation order written for a small electrical shop's reality: the owner who reads ServiceTitan release notes between dispatch calls, the office manager who actually books the panel-check follow-ups, the senior tech who knows which customers will refer business and which ones will leave a Google review at the first opportunity.
Lens 1: The quote-follow-up sequence and the customer list as business equity.
Who owns the quote-follow-up workflow data inside your dispatch platform's terms of service? Who owns the panel-check recurring cadence and the historical service records that make recurring customers reachable? Can you export cleanly to a different vendor, to an acquirer's diligence team, or to a successor's transition team, with the performance data and the workflow history attached? What does the platform retain even after export, and what does that mean for the customer list's value at the moment of sale? The assessment names the gaps with specificity and the remediation paths with proportion for the size of your shop.
Lens 2: AI feature activation on inbound calls, customer messaging, and dispatch optimization.
Which AI features has ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, or Jobber activated on your account since you signed up? What is the model, retention, and processing posture of the inbound-call summarization feature, if it is on? What did the most recent terms-of-service amendment authorize on customer-messaging drafting and lead-scoring? What does the homeowner who calls the shop understand is happening, and what is actually happening? For shops using consumer-tier AI tools outside any enterprise contract (the ChatGPT or Claude tab open on the office computer to draft a marketing email or summarize a tech's day-end notes), the assessment names that as the exposure it is.
The deliverable is yours. Keep it, share it with your accountant ahead of a succession conversation, use it in a renewal negotiation with ServiceTitan or FieldEdge, or work the remediation in-house. There is no obligation to engage Sterling for any work beyond the assessment. If we can help, you will know. If you do the work in-house from the assessment alone, that is also a good outcome.
The threat surface, named for electrical.
Four exposures sized specifically for licensed electrical contractors in the $500K to $20M revenue band. None of these are hypothetical. All of them are showing up in current vendor terms of service, state attorney general advisories, Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions, and the electrical trade press.
Threat 1: ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, and Housecall Pro claim broad rights to your quote-follow-up data, your panel-check history, and your customer cadence.
Read the terms of service carefully. Most dispatch platforms distinguish "Customer Data" (what you put in directly) from "Usage Data," "Performance Data," and "Aggregated Data" (what the platform derives from your operation). The latter categories are typically broadly licensed to the vendor under the standard terms. For an electrical shop, the performance data is exactly the long-tail recurring-customer cadence that makes the customer list valuable. The quote-follow-up sequence, the panel-check schedule, the service-call patterns by neighborhood, the pricing curve by job type, the technician-by-technician productivity, the referral-source attribution: the platform's terms typically license all of that to the vendor for derivative analysis, for training, and for the platform's own product development. Migration costs are real and growing. A serious acquirer's diligence team will ask for it. The vendor knows it; the renewal letter reflects it.
Sources: ServiceTitan (NASDAQ: TTAN), FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, and Jobber published terms of service 2024 to 2025 (verify current language at assessment time); ServiceTitan SEC filings on data and AI strategy 2024 to 2026; Gartner SaaS Spend Management research 2025; Sterling's anti-lock-in doctrine (REFERENCE_anti-lock-in-doctrine.md).
Threat 2: The dispatch platform activated AI call summarization, AI dispatch optimization, and AI customer messaging across 2024. You may not have noticed.
ServiceTitan launched AI call summarization and AI dispatch optimization features through 2024, with continued rollout through 2025. FieldEdge and Housecall Pro shipped parallel capabilities. Jobber introduced AI features in its home-services configurations. Most shops had these features activated by default on existing accounts, with the existing terms of service treated as covering them. The shop owner did not get a separate consent prompt before customer call audio was first processed by the AI summarizer. The homeowner who calls the shop today does not know that the call is being summarized, by what model, with what retention, under what terms. The amendment that authorized it came in the same kind of email as every other vendor update that month. The state attorney general's office in several jurisdictions has begun signaling interest in undisclosed AI processing of consumer communications.
Sources: ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, and Jobber product release notes and terms-of-service amendments 2024 to 2025 (verify current activation state at assessment time); OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise terms 2026; state attorney general advisories on undisclosed AI processing of consumer communications (varies by jurisdiction, verify current case posture at assessment time).
Threat 3: State privacy law convergence applies to your residential customer records, your panel-check history, and your service-call notes. Even though you are not a healthcare or finance business.
Maryland MODPA, California CPRA, New York SHIELD Act, and roughly seventeen other state privacy laws apply to most electrical shops in the $500K to $20M revenue band. The definitions of "personal information" and, in some states, "sensitive personal information," pull in customer addresses, service histories, payment data, and in some cases the kind of access-relevant data an electrical shop routinely collects (panel access details, alarm-system integration notes, smart-home or EV-charger installation information that reveals usage patterns and household routine). Penalty exposure under state laws is real and growing. Most shops have never reviewed compliance. The state attorney general is the enforcer. Trades firms are not on the highest-priority enforcement list yet, but the floor keeps rising, and a single customer complaint can move an enforcement action up the queue.
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 customer data set on every quote you write.
Angi (Angi Inc, publicly traded, IAC-spun, HomeAdvisor under the same parent) 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. For an electrical shop, the BNPL exposure is particularly sharp: a panel upgrade or an EV charger install is exactly the kind of $3K-to-$15K residential job that gets financed through one of these platforms. The financing partner holds the customer's credit application, the income data, the employment data, and the platform's behavioral profile of the shopper. The shop's relationship with these platforms is structurally extractive: the platform's interest is owning the customer relationship for the next financed job, not preserving the shop's. Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions against lead-generation marketplaces 2023 to 2025 are the strongest sourced material.
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 hybrid cycle, sized to the shop.
The general success.build/risk evaluation runs a two-hour cycle. Most licensed electrical shops in the 5-to- 25-employee range fit that shape. Larger shops, shops preparing for a sale or a succession event, and shops in active dispute or renewal negotiation with a major dispatch vendor often want more depth and the longer cycle.
The electrical-shop assessment is scope-selectable on the discovery call. Both options are free. We help you size the cycle to the shop's actual surface area.
- Short cycle (about two hours of your time, roughly one week elapsed). Thirty-minute discovery call. Homework on your side: vendor list, a quick description of the AI features you have noticed (or have not noticed) activating across your stack, and a rough sense of your customer-list size and recurring-service mix. One sixty- minute evaluation session. A three-to-six page written sovereignty-posture document delivered within five business days. Best fit for shops with one dispatch platform, a single payment processor, a clear single-state operating footprint, and an owner who has read at least one vendor amendment email in the last twelve months.
- Long cycle (about ten business days, acquirer-diligence-shaped deliverable). Forty-five-minute discovery call. One week of homework on our side: we pull the current public terms of service for every named vendor, check for AI feature activation defaults across the stack, structure the evaluation around the customer-list-equity question and the state privacy law overlay for your jurisdiction. One ninety-minute evaluation session with the owner, the office manager who handles vendor relationships, and the senior tech or service manager who actually runs the dispatch workflow. A six-to-twelve page written deliverable within five business days of the evaluation session. Best fit for shops with multiple dispatch vendors or a recent migration, shops with 25 or more employees, shops preparing for a sale or succession event in the next 24 months, shops in active renewal negotiation, and shops operating across multiple states or municipalities with distinct licensing layers.
The choice is made on the discovery call, not before. Bring the question, we will help size the cycle. Either option is free. Either option produces a written deliverable that is yours to keep, share, or file.
Who this is for.
The fit is clearest for licensed electrical contractors in the $500K to $20M annual revenue band with 5 to 75 employees including owner-operators, where the practitioners themselves are the people reading vendor contracts, choosing AI tools, and making the decisions about dispatch platforms, payment processors, and lead-generation relationships.
- Owner-operator and small electrical shops (5-15 employees) with a single dispatch platform, a clear residential or light-commercial focus, and an owner who is still the head dispatcher and salesperson.
- Established second-generation electrical shops (15-40 employees) with mature panel-check and service-reminder workflows, an office manager separate from the owner, and a customer list that has been built over fifteen-plus years.
- Growing electrical shops (40-75 employees) with multiple service-truck routes, an active expansion into adjacent service lines (EV chargers, generators, solar, smart-home integration), and a vendor stack that has grown faster than vendor governance.
- Shops preparing for succession or sale where the customer list, the panel-check recurring history, and the service-call cadence are the assets that determine the multiple.
- Shops in active renewal negotiation with ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, or Jobber where the terms-of-service amendments from the last two cycles have not been read carefully.
- Shops that just got the AI feature activation email and are unsure whether to opt in, opt out, or ask harder questions.
Adjacent electrical practices we also work with
- Electrical contractors crossing into adjacent licensed work (low-voltage, fire alarm, telecommunications, security-system installation) where the licensing stack diverges and the data sensitivity goes up.
- Commercial and industrial electrical contractors with B2B-heavy customer bases, longer contract cycles, and project-management overlay on top of dispatch (may also fit the general /risk assessment or a future commercial-trades type page).
- Electrical service divisions of larger general-contracting firms where the electrical work runs on its own dispatch platform but the parent operates on Procore or Buildertrend.
- Solar and EV-charger installers with electrical licensing layered on top of a distinct vendor stack and a different lead-gen pattern.
- Single-truck owner-operator electricians under $500K revenue for whom the general success.build/risk assessment is sized correctly.
Why us.
Sterling Solutions is a Westchester-based family-owned small firm. 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. We do not have a commission structure with ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, Jobber, or any of the lead-gen marketplaces. The assessment is not a stalking horse for a ServiceTitan-to-X migration engagement. If the conclusion is "your stack is defensible with three documentation gaps closed," that is the conclusion. If the conclusion is "your dispatch platform's contract is much worse than you realized and the remediation path is renegotiation at the next renewal," that is the conclusion.
The customer list is the business equity. The crews build the work, the trucks carry the work, and the master's license authorizes the work, but the customer list and the service-call history are the assets that determine what the shop is worth at the moment of sale, succession, or rebuild. The vendor stack a shop operates should reflect that hierarchy, not invert it. Sterling takes this seriously because we are a family-owned small firm working with the same structural question that mutual carriers and credit unions are working in different industries: who owns the operational asset, and who claims rights to the derivative data underneath it.
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-FieldEdge or a Housecall-Pro-to- anything-else conversion. We identify gaps and route. If you choose to migrate based on what we find, 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, BNPL financing relationships) 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 pull the current public terms of service for every vendor you name. We check the most recent product release notes and amendments. We come to the evaluation session prepared. We ask the same of you: bring the owner 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.
Forty-five minutes for the long cycle, thirty for the short cycle. The dispatch platform, the payment processor, and the lead-generation marketplace your shop relies on today are 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. For the short cycle, thirty minutes is the right length. For the long cycle, once you pick a time we will extend it to forty-five minutes on our end, provided the fifteen minutes before or after your selected slot are open on our calendar. If the adjustment does not work for you, email [email protected] and we will find a slot that fits.
success.build/risk/trades/electrical · [email protected] · scope-selectable on the discovery call