Introduction

 You could say I was bred to be a plumber.  My grandfather started Grabill Plumbing & Heating, Inc in 1965.  My father became president in 1980, a position he still holds.  I have been in the trade since I was young, digging ditches and being a gopher(slang for go for this and go for that).  Before I graduated high school, I was running a truck and managing job sites.  In 2008, I came in to manage the scheduling for our company and in 2014 I became Vice-President.  

One of my responsibilities as Vice-President was running the Residential side of our company handling the estimating and management of new homes.  I quickly saw that our systems for quoting, job management, and fixture selections were inadequate and there had to be a better solution. 

When I took over in 2014, Word and Excel were our best friend.  While they have their place, we were entering the same information into multiple files and it consumed too much time.  I wanted to find a solution that would allow us to enter the information only once.  A solution that would allow us to quickly and efficiently provide a detailed, professional, and consistent quote to our customers.  A solution that would allow us to access all data for a job in one location and from anywhere.  I dreamed of being on a beach and still being able to do my work.  

Another pain point was the whole fixture selection process.  Pricing selections were frustrating and time consuming.  Owner's expectations often were not met and we were eating product because they thought they were getting something other than the model numbers that they had signed off on.  

In 2016, I began to search for a software that could solve these pain points.  There were many solutions for the service plumber, but nothing that was designed for the New Construction Plumber.  We decided that we needed to create our own software.  

Trade Fusion was created to meet these needs.  In this blog, we will discuss how Grabill Plumbing has taken these tools created in Trade Fusion to allow them to be more efficient while providing valuable tools to their customers.  How it has allowed Grabill Plumbing to freed up time, manage from anywhere, and stand out from the competition.