Onsite is partnering with The Blue Collar Success Group and joining Elite Buy, their vetted vendor program. Blue Collar has spent decades teaching plumbing, HVAC, and electrical contractors across the US, Canada, and Australia how to run a trades business: the Blue Collar Selling System for the people who face the customer, the Blue Collar Business System for the people who run the shop, and a vault of scripts, frameworks, and dialogues battle-tested in the field. Together we're capturing those best practices as skills inside Onsite, so what Blue Collar teaches in the classroom runs automatically on every call, every quote, and every job.

What a Shop Knows and What a Shop Does

Every owner who has been through a good academy knows the week that follows. Three days in a ballroom in Tampa. Notebook full, technicians lit up, a dispatch process that finally makes sense. It is the most optimistic anyone has felt about the business in a year. Then Monday comes, everyone opens the same software they opened the Monday before, and the software has opinions of its own.

Training tells a shop how it ought to run. Their operating systems decides how it actually runs. When the two disagree, the platform wins, quietly, in the middle of a Tuesday.

The academy teaches a technician to present options. The estimate screen gives him one line and a total. The clinic teaches a dispatcher that the board is an operating strategy and not a calendar, and then the board sorts by whoever is closest. Service agreement training teaches recurring revenue, and the system files the agreement like any other invoice and never mentions it again. None of this is dramatic. It is friction, applied daily, until a new process reverts to the old one and everybody in the building quietly blames themselves for it.

Contractors don't abandon the playbook because they forgot it. They abandon it because their software never learned it.

The industry's answer has been to make the contractor the bridge. A spreadsheet here, a workaround there, a coach's framework retyped into a field designed for something else, and eventually somebody's part-time job is keeping the gap closed by hand. Blue Collar has been direct about what that costs. Their own writing argues that teams don't need more motivation, they need better systems, and they are right. Motivation is a renewable resource that nobody can renew forever. A system you have to remember is a hope. A system the tool holds for you is a floor.

So we are running it in the other direction. For fifteen years the way to get a best practice into a shop was to train a person to compensate for the software. We would rather configure the software to the practice and let the training make people better at something the tool already supports. Dispatch logic that reflects what the Dispatch Champions Academy teaches instead of contradicting it. KPIs named and calculated the way Blue Collar defines them for its members, not the way some engineer guessed in 2014. An estimate flow that puts real options in front of a homeowner because that is the taught behavior, not because someone remembered to build the template.

We can't pretend to know the full shape of this yet. Some of what we ship into the program this year will be wrong, and the contractor is the one who carries that risk. Which is why we want coaches in the room while it gets built, people who will say plainly when a workflow we are proud of would embarrass a technician standing in a homeowner's kitchen. We have been on the vendor side of that conversation before. Being told the truth early is rarer than it should be, and worth more than any roadmap.

Chris Crew

President, The Blue Collar Success Group

“We can teach a team the right way to run a call, and then send them back to a system that makes the right way harder than the wrong one. That is the gap. Onsite is the first partner that has offered to close it from their side instead of asking our members to work around it.”

Chris Crew

President, The Blue Collar Success Group

“We can teach a team the right way to run a call, and then send them back to a system that makes the right way harder than the wrong one. That is the gap. Onsite is the first partner that has offered to close it from their side instead of asking our members to work around it.”

A trade gets passed down. Someone shows you how, you do it badly, they correct you, and one day you do it without thinking. That is what good training has always been, and it is the oldest technology in this industry. Software has mostly interrupted that chain by insisting a shop work its way instead. We would like it to do the opposite, to carry what the best coaches already know so that a new tech inherits it in his first week rather than his fifth year.

Onwards,
Jacob

Get Started

If you're a Blue Collar member and want to see what this looks like in your shop, we'd like to talk. Reach us at info@useonsite.com or get started here. To learn more about The Blue Collar Success Group, their academies, and Elite Buy, visit thebluecollarsuccessgroup.com.