D-Tools Cloud has made a "big believer" out of Bruce Reed, director of operations at Current Home Technologies in Vancouver, Wash. The result for the five-person company based north of Portand, Ore., is faster proposals, better educated customers and more profitable installations.
One of the first tasks Reed undertook when he joined Current Home Technologies in May 2022 was to update the company's sales and engineering processes.
"I’ve been in the industry for close to 20 years, so I knew what I wanted to do, and I was already aware of D-Tools SI and D-Tools Cloud," says Reed. "By August 2022, I had fully moved us into D-Tools Cloud for all new quoting. We’ve adopted most of the other features in Cloud at this point."
Current Home Technologies, which was started by Tony Curtis in 2008, currently a does roughly $1.5 million a year in revenue, primarily from the installation of audio, video, security, lighting, home theater, and golf simulators.
For Reed, the Visual Quoting tool in D-Tools Cloud is his favorite aspect of the software.
"I’m a big believer in educating clients with visuals instead of handing them a list of parts. We bring in our clients on just about every estimate to meet in person, and we bring up the floorplan in Visual Quote, and show them what is possible and at what budget. Budgets and scope get adjusted on the fly, they leave with a much better understanding of what they are getting into and a feeling of empowerment over the decision making. It helps educate clients, which in turn, helps close projects faster," he notes.
Reed is also a big fan of the ability to combine the labor costs with individual products in D-Tools Cloud.
"The pairing of labor to products, and the different subsystems and location tags for each product, has a fantastic impact on organizing quotes, and then keeping track of projects downstream. It takes effort to build out all your useful information, but it organizes the chaos really well," he explains.
Lastly, the option to quote a project by subsystem or by location is a big benefit, according to Reed.
"There’s a lot of flexibility in that you can find tune depending on scope of work. For example, on a large project that we have a huge amount of subsystems, I might subtotal the quote based on system type. But other jobs may be smaller and just have an AV or lighting scope, so I’ll subtotal the quote based on locations. This gives the client digestible chunks of information instead of a laundry list of products they don’t understand, " he adds.
