The maintenance plan
is your recurring revenue.
The platform owns it.

What the assessment actually delivers.

A written sovereignty-posture document organized the way an acquirer's diligence team or a careful 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 PHC or PHCC shop's reality: the owner who reads the ServiceTitan amendment between two emergency dispatches, the office manager who actually runs the maintenance-plan renewal cadence, the senior tech who knows which homeowner is going to need a new system in the next twenty-four months.

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.

The threat surface, named for plumbing and HVAC.

Four exposures sized specifically for licensed plumbing and HVAC 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 trade press.

The hybrid cycle, sized to the shop.

The general success.build/risk evaluation runs a two-hour cycle. Most PHC and PHCC shops in the 5-to-25- employee range fit that shape. Larger shops, shops with a multi-state operating footprint, shops preparing for a sale or succession event, and shops in active dispute or renewal negotiation with a major dispatch vendor often want more depth.

The plumbing and HVAC 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 activating across your stack, the rough size of your maintenance- plan book, and any state-specific compliance question you have been carrying. 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 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 maintenance-plan equity, refrigerant compliance, financing exposure, and the state privacy law overlay for your jurisdiction. One ninety- minute evaluation session with the owner, the office manager who handles vendor relationships, the senior tech who runs the maintenance-plan dispatch, and the CFO or accountant if a succession event is in scope. 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 with a heavy HVAC-replacement business that runs frequent BNPL financing, shops preparing for a sale or succession event in the next 24 months, 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.

Who this is for.

The fit is clearest for licensed plumbing and HVAC contractors in the $500K to $20M annual revenue band with 5 to 75 employees including owner-operators, where the practitioners themselves are reading vendor contracts and making the dispatch-platform and financing decisions.

• Owner-operator plumbing and HVAC shops (5-15 employees) with one dispatch platform, a residential or light-commercial focus, and an owner who is still the head dispatcher and salesperson.
• Established PHC and PHCC shops (15-40 employees) with mature maintenance-plan workflows, a separate office manager, an active replacement-system business, and a customer list built over fifteen-plus years.
• Growing plumbing and HVAC shops (40-75 employees) with multiple service-truck routes, separate residential and light-commercial divisions, an active expansion into adjacent service lines (heat pumps, water filtration, generators, indoor air quality), and a vendor stack that has grown faster than vendor governance.
• Shops preparing for succession or sale where the maintenance-plan book, the recurring-customer history, and the average customer tenure are the assets that determine the multiple.
• Shops with a heavy replacement-system business running frequent BNPL financing on furnaces, tankless heaters, HVAC systems, and heat-pump installs.
• Shops in active renewal negotiation with ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, ServiceFusion, or Jobber.

Adjacent plumbing and HVAC practices we also work with

• Combined PHC shops (plumbing-heating-cooling under one license stack) with bundled operations and a single owner.
• Pure-plumbing shops without HVAC work but with significant new-construction, re-pipe, or commercial-tenant-improvement work.
• Pure-HVAC shops with substantial commercial-refrigeration or specialty-commercial work that runs on different vendor stacks.
• Plumbing or HVAC service divisions of larger general-contracting firms where the trade work runs on its own dispatch platform but the parent operates on Procore or Buildertrend.
• Water-treatment and water-conditioning specialists with a recurring-service model similar to maintenance plans.
• Single-truck owner-operator plumbing or HVAC firms 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, ServiceFusion, Jobber, GreenSky, Synchrony, or any of the lead-gen marketplaces. The assessment is not a stalking horse for a 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 maintenance plan is the business equity. The crews handle the dispatch, the trucks run the routes, and the master plumber's or master mechanic's license authorizes the work, but the maintenance-plan book and the recurring-customer 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 and not a compliance audit. Sterling Solutions is a technology firm, not a law firm or a regulatory- compliance firm. The written deliverable identifies sovereignty and vendor-posture gaps and names the regulatory categories they sit under (including Section 608 refrigerant exposure and state privacy law overlay). Decisions about specific actions with legal or compliance consequence (vendor contract renegotiation, state attorney general inquiries, EPA inspections, state plumbing board matters, 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.