Nathan Eldridge is the CEO of Franchise Support Services (FSS), Nathan has leveraged his extensive background in technology and executive management to bring transformative solutions to the industry. His entrepreneurial journey began with the launch of two successful window treatment franchises in Dallas and Houston, where he quickly identified the industry’s need for more efficient and accurate measuring tools.

Nathan’s most notable contribution is the development of the FSS Window Pro™ app, a groundbreaking tool that has revolutionized the window treatment consultation process. By integrating Bluetooth laser and tape measure measuring technology with cloud-based data management, Nathan has addressed one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: measurement accuracy. The app has significantly reduced errors, saved costs, and improved the speed of consultations, directly impacting the bottom line of businesses in the sector. This innovation demonstrates Nathan’s commitment to not only his own success but to the advancement of the entire window coverings industry.

Beyond his technological contributions, Nathan’s launch of the Commercial Takeoff service further showcases his dedication to empowering small retailers to expand into larger commercial projects. By simplifying the complexities of project bidding, he is enabling more businesses to grow and thrive.

Nathan Eldridge is a visionary leader who is actively reshaping the window treatment industry.

Websites:
Franchise Support Services

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William Hanke (00:00)
Hey, welcome to another episode of Marketing Panes the podcast where we talk with real window treatment and awning professionals about what’s working in marketing, what’s changing in the industry, and how to grow smarter. Today, we’re joined by the founder of Franchise Support Services and a long-time leader in the window treatment space,

Nathan Eldridge. Nathan comes from a deep background in engineering and tech.

And after running successful franchises in Dallas and Houston, he shifted his focus to helping businesses improve accuracy, workflow and field operations. His work centers on solving real measurement and training challenges that every window treatment and awning company deals with.

Welcome to the show, Nathan.

Nathan Eldridge (00:47)
Thank you very much, Will. Glad to be here.

William Hanke (00:49)
Yeah, glad to

have you here today. know we’ve been friends for a while now, so ⁓ it’s exciting to have you on to kind of talk about what you’re up to.

Yeah. So for anyone who hasn’t met you, how did your career in window treatments begin and how hands-on were you with the measurements and installs early on?

Nathan Eldridge (01:11)
My journey into the window treatment world was very interesting. in 2018, 2019, I started to look at franchises. I knew I wanted to buy a franchise.

And I probably looked at, you know, probably 80 businesses. And when I came across the window treatment business, I looked at it and I realized like an epiphany, like window treatments is what my wife would love to do.

And it took us about 18 months of exploring and looking at FDBs, but we bought our first franchise in 2021. And that was with Gotcha covered. It was for my wife to run full time. I kept my corporate job in the backend and I was going to help with systems and processes because that’s what I’ve done for my career.

It took us about four months getting into the business and constantly telling our family about how exciting it was and talking with the window treatments and

my wife just gravitated to the design side and the fabrics and all those different types of products.

My sister looked at it and said, wow, this looks awesome. I want to do the same thing. so within about four or five months, I partnered with my sister. opened a second franchise. And then within one year we expanded to four territories. And so it was quick, fast and furious kind of growth into it. know, anyone that knows me, I don’t sit still very well. And so the growth and the explosion into it,

I was there building the systems, the processes, and kind of looking at what we were doing. measurements quickly rose to the top of my focus list for my sister and my wife about how to optimize. And ⁓ what started as just trying to fix something for my family turned into a new product for the industry.

William Hanke (02:52)
Very good, and that product is the FSS Window Pro, right?

Nathan Eldridge (02:58)
That’s it, yep. So

the FSS Window Pro is the app that we launched. When we first created it, it was really just something that was putting there for us. Being part of a franchise, we have 160 other best friends that are franchise owners

and we started to show it to some of them and they started to ask, well, how do we get this? We want this in our business. And so we kind of went down a path of just being something we were gonna use internally to, okay, let’s open it and try to get it to where other franchises can use it, our friends.

And then they would tell people and people started coming to us and saying, well, how do we get access to it? We’re not part of the franchise. so it just kind of bloomed in 2023 into something that we put open to the market. And it’s kind of grown word of mouth since then.

William Hanke (03:39)
I love it. ⁓

That’s awesome.

the FSS Window Pro was even an idea, what were some of those biggest frustrations that you were seeing out in the field?

Nathan Eldridge (03:50)
Man, so measurements were dependent on the person. So you could have one person that could do it really well, one person that did terrible at it.

Tape measures, they’re error-prone in real-world conditions, right? You’re at the end of the day, you’re tired, you’re having to bend over, or you’re on a ladder reaching up.

My wife is very short, so everything that was above her head was a challenge. You also, it’s independent on rounding decisions. So it’s very inconsistent from person to person, how they read it, what they round to. In our industry, doing inside mount.

and rounding down is very important. ⁓ Then that came down to writing the measurement. introducing the human error, was that a 5 8s or a 3 8s, reading the handwriting later, transcribing it ⁓ wrong, were the top pain points. Those five were top pain points for us.

William Hanke (04:38)
Yeah, and as a systems guy, human error is like the bane of your existence, right? You the whole reason you build these things.

Nathan Eldridge (04:45)
Yeah, yeah, you

know, a good system should have no human error. The process should be so robust that anyone can use it, right? You don’t need super humans to run your business.

William Hanke (04:55)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And you’ve mentioned before that those processes and not the people are often the root of the mistakes. So can you unpack that a little bit more?

Nathan Eldridge (05:08)
Yeah. So coming from my corporate background, you know, at multiple degrees in engineering, lean is embedded in everything that I’ve done my whole career. And, you know, errors when they do happen, it’s not human. The human nature is we go, why did you make that mistake? And you focus on the person, you know, a really basic tool that, you know, people learn early on in lean is five Y’s, right? So when you ask why five times, so if you took a measurement that’s wrong and you asked, why was it wrong? It’s wrong because someone wrote it down incorrectly.

Why do they get written down incorrectly? Because the rep was rushing, relying on their memory. Why were they rushing? Because there wasn’t a standard workflow, no validation. Why was there no validation? Because the process was never designed to catch errors. And by time you get down to the fifth, you’re no longer talking about the installer, the sales rep, you’re talking about what’s missing in the standards or a lack of a tool. And so it’s really just about bringing that into a workflow and trying to make it where it’s optimized, where everyone can succeed at the same level.

William Hanke (05:57)
Right? Yeah.

Yeah. And so that’s awesome. You took that kind of you drilled down into what the real issue was, tried to start solving for that, which would obviously then work its way back up the chain. What was

what kind of surprised you the most on the tech side training gap, even resistance to change?

Nathan Eldridge (06:27)
So the first stage was with my sister and my wife and their adaption to new technology was good. I brought them the solution and they were eager to remove problems and so the adaption was easy. When we went to the next step, we kind of expanded it to franchises. I found that people really had a hard time of, this is how I’ve always done it. I’ve always used tape measures. I’ve always done a notepad with a pen and paper. ⁓

Somewhere in the journey into launching it into the full market, I heard enough customer feedback that people maybe didn’t trust lasers. They bought a laser 10 years ago and they tried it and they had accuracy problems. And a lot of the times if you, fly, why did they have accuracy problems on a laser? They treated it like it was a hammer. They threw it in a tool bag. You got thrown in the back of the truck when most of these lasers need to be treated like a cell phone, right? You don’t just throw it in a bag and throw it somewhere. You put it in your pocket. It’s taken care of.

⁓

But one of the things that we’ve looked at is that adoption of the tech side and the resistance to change is the Reekon T1 That’s a nice middle ground. So if you have someone that’s not ready to fully go into a laser, but they want to go digital, they want to remove some human error,

they can go into a Reekon T1, which is a Bluetooth tape measure. And that product’s unique because it has no calibration. So if you drop it, as long as it powers on, it doesn’t have to get recalibrated. So it really helps the trust factor.

to get them into new tech and the resistance to change. It’s not the ideal product. Laser is definitely the ideal product as a place for both of them, but it is a really nice stepping stone for people to at least engage in a digital way to change their process.

William Hanke (08:09)
Yeah.

What measuring tool do you prefer people to use or recommend?

Nathan Eldridge (08:15)
Everyone that I do a demo for, I recommend that they buy both.

So to me, a laser is like a Phillips screwdriver and the T1 is like a flathead.

So everything that’s an inside mount product, you should run the laser for. Everything that’s an outside mount product in draperies, you should run the T1 for.

And so my recommendation is that you build your processes around that. I tell a lot of people a story that a lady finished measuring a job.

with her X3 on a Friday and she had changed the reference point from the back of the device to the front of the device to measure some depth of some windows.

And then she put it in her bag and forgot to change it back. And the next Monday she showed up at a client’s house and she measured an entire $37,000 job with the reference point from the front of the device instead of the back. Cost her $37,000 to remake the whole house because everything inside Mount was three and a half inches short, which was a terrible thing to experience.

If she had bought that one tool, $260 to have the T1 and use the T1 for that measurement, she would have never, ever changed her settings. And so like the idea of this again, lean, right?

$260, the right tool for the right thing. And she would have never touched her settings ever. And that mistake could never happen in the business.

And so I try to convince everyone to think about it that way. There’s two tools, one for inside mount, one for outside mount, and you build it into your process.

William Hanke (09:42)
⁓ very good. ⁓ Is that a pretty common measurement mistake that people make or do you see some other ones that are pretty consistent?

Nathan Eldridge (09:54)
⁓ I think that a lot of people wouldn’t try to use the laser to measure the depth of a window. They probably would just pull out their tape measure and do it manually. ⁓ So I don’t think that’s a common mistake, but it’s definitely available. Anyone that messes with the settings, you could happen into that as a mistake.

William Hanke (10:12)
Yeah.

Do you see any mistakes that repeat themselves over and over again?

Nathan Eldridge (10:17)
rushing, being tired, frustrated. One of my favorite examples is helicopter customers. And the helicopter customer, you’re in their home,

they want to follow you around and watch you as you’re going through their house. But the helicopter customer is the person that is following you six inches off your side and wanting to talk to you the entire time.

And you’re trying to focus on measuring. And you could go up on a step ladder, you get the top measurements, you come back down the ladder,

William Hanke (10:38)
yeah.

Nathan Eldridge (10:44)
you go to ride at the notepad.

And you don’t remember what the dimension was because you just lost it because you stopped for a second to answer a question to her. so,

you know, between the human fatigue of being rushed or tired and the helicopter customers, those definitely set the pace for the largest repeating mistakes.

William Hanke (11:00)
I feel like we should be able to create like a Seinfeld episode out of this, right? Similar to the close talker, guess, right?

Nathan Eldridge (11:05)
Yes, for sure.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, exactly.

William Hanke (11:12)
Yeah.

So are there any hidden costs that business owners don’t always calculate beyond just the remake that you explained in the one example?

Nathan Eldridge (11:22)
Yeah, remakes are the top and we can see that directly on our P &L as owners and operators.

But, you know, one of the hidden things that are cost is return trips.

So you were in the home and you think that they’re going to do only inside mount products. So you only measured inside mount. Then you get home and, know, I don’t know what other people experienced in our two businesses. We probably average about two and a half quotes per person. So we’re between two and three iterations of quotes. And a lot of times

they’re going to move from an inside mount to an outside mount. Maybe they went to a friend’s house that night and they had beautiful outside mount. They’re like, you know what, we’re inspired. We want to change. And if you didn’t capture those measurements, guess what? You’re doing a new trip and you’re going back out there and re-measuring for outside mount. These add up. They chip away at your margins. They take away your capacity, your team to schedule, you know, more consults and installs. And so I think that’s probably one of the worst things that we do. And we have a

solution for that. You’re standing at the window, you capture all the measurements at one time. You measure inside and outside and in know 15 seconds of that window you can iterate your quote 10 times. It doesn’t matter. You have all the dimensions you need as the customer changes their mind on products and so yeah.

William Hanke (12:34)
Interesting.

So it’s a good habit for somebody that’s doing the measuring to have that kind of muscle memory to do that.

Are there any other habits or field routines that you see that really separate the pros from the noobs, the starters?

Nathan Eldridge (12:54)
Measuring the same way every time.

So having a process and you know, the pros definitely want to capture the inside mount, the outside mount dimensions all at one time. They never want to have to come back. We modeled the app around how we measure and that’s just how we do it. But we built in a template feature so anyone can take it and mold it to match their measurement processes.

And then they save it. So every time they walk up to the window, it’s in the exact order. They can add custom measurements and it makes it their sheet and they do the same thing every single time. That repetition really helps get people in the flow. When they’re measuring every window different based on where they’re standing or, you know, right handed, left handed and, you know, measuring left to right or right to left, top down, it really makes a big difference in the repeatability. So ⁓

William Hanke (13:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Can you walk us through the day of, you know, day in the life of someone using the FSS Window Pro app?

Nathan Eldridge (13:54)
Yeah. So today you start, you know, first thing in morning, you’re going to create the clients that you’re going to go measure that day. So you’d look at your calendar, you’d be creating whatever clients you’re going to be measuring. ⁓ When you show up to their house, you go in and you start measuring. In the app we organized today by rooms. Most residential are organized, you know, by the living room, the kitchen, bedroom one, primary bedroom, things like that. Inside of them, we have auto naming in the app that kind of goes through window AA through ZZ.

which lets you put about 271 windows per room. And then for every single window, you’re going to capture all the dimensions. We have a section for product notes, installation notes, and job site pictures. And one of the really key things that we try to teach people in the demo phase, that job site pictures, you should take two pictures per window. You should be taking a picture during the tech measure so you can see that that drywall damage was already there. Your team didn’t do it. And then after you do the install,

you can take another picture of it. And then that really serves as kind of your warranty claim when they call you back and say, hey, this slats broken. You’ve got that picture as your crew went to leave the house of it perfectly installed. You send it back to the customer and they go, ⁓ you know what my nephew was playing in there last night. Maybe he broke it. Maybe it wasn’t y’all.

So the before and after really is powerful.

And then you access all of that data from our portal. You can pull all the measurements out in an Excel file or in a PDF report.

William Hanke (15:14)
Okay.

Nathan Eldridge (15:14)
Both of

those come with all the notes and then you can also pull down the zip files of all the high resolution pictures. And so it really lets you just have a complete data set of that pulled out. lot of our customers want those files moved into their own cloud or customer storage. So they’re pulling them out of our portal and loading it into their SharePoint or Google Drive or wherever they use.

William Hanke (15:38)
Yeah, very good. I know we’ve got it in lead boomerang. We’ve got a section specifically for documents and pictures. And a lot of our clients will do that exact thing. They’ll take before and afters and save them in there. It’s tied to that contact record so that they have that when they call back a couple of months later and said, you broke this.

Nathan Eldridge (15:56)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, it’s so important. People that are doing notepads, you’re not gonna ever come back and find those. And a lot of our customers, you ask them, how many jobs did you do last month? Oh, we did 30 jobs. Okay, how many pictures on your camera roll from that job? 1,400. How are you gonna find the one picture to that one window that you need for the warranty claim? So having it organized with an easy button is really, really good.

William Hanke (16:22)
Yeah, yeah, having all that data tied to something that’s easy, easily searchable.

What data do you think people often forget or miss, especially when they’re measuring by hand?

Nathan Eldridge (16:32)
Definitely obstructions or the installation side of things. And so they’ll maybe note down the dimensions for the product. They might sketch down something for the product, but maybe for that one window, they’re drilling into tile. And so they need to have a note before they come to install that they need to bring the right bits to build a drill into tile or concrete. So really the installation side, the obstructions. One of the things that we found, a lot of our customers are using 1099.

you know, installers that are not their own employees. And so to be able to capture that, especially if your product’s lead time is 10, 12 weeks, you’re not going to remember that job’s nuances when it comes time to do the install. So our installation notes let them quickly look at that, see what they noted, and then communicate the day before with their 1099 crew, hey, we have something special. We’re doing this, this, and this. Make sure you bring the tools. So it’s definitely…

that side of the business, think, people miss capturing data and they just hope they cover it.

If you look at your installer’s bags, they’re full of shims and drywall repair and washers and all this stuff that they’ve learned because they weren’t told what they needed, so they just carry a bunch of stuff.

William Hanke (17:41)
Yeah, back to systems and processes, right? You have something in place that you have a way to remember that thing 12 weeks later, or at least something to remind you about it. I love that.

Nathan Eldridge (17:44)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

William Hanke (17:52)
So I wanted to talk a little bit more about training new reps and installers. Hiring is one thing, but training is another. What makes training in this industry so challenging?

Nathan Eldridge (18:03)
This industry, especially in the US is very interesting. So in the US we have about 10,000 retailers and most of them are small businesses, which means unfortunately that they probably don’t have established processes. So as they go to scale, they’re bringing someone in and their processes are in their head. And, you know, there’s things you can do to do that, but we, we hope to solve at least the little tiny segment that we’re in, which is the measuring side. And, know, we,

When we launched the app, we made a full suite. have about 30 videos on our YouTube channel. This next like two weeks, we’re going to be launching a new in-app tutorial that people can walk through and teach themselves the in-depth application, how to use it and how to apply it to measuring. So we hope that we can help solve the training of new staff, at least in the measuring portion. But definitely, you know, when it’s a single owner operator and they’re bringing on their first person, there’s challenges there.

William Hanke (18:56)
That’s really helpful. When somebody is brand new, what skills or fundamentals should companies really focus on first?

Nathan Eldridge (19:03)
product knowledge. Definitely, you know, this industry can be really overwhelming for a sales rep. There’s so many things to sell.

You know, one of the things that we did when we started our businesses without any prior experience, focus on one element at a time.

And so we picked one vendor and we partnered with that one vendor and we sold those products for, you know, four or five, six weeks until we were comfortable. And then we added the next vendor. So really building it on one piece at a time without trying to boil the entire ocean at one shot.

William Hanke (19:33)
Right, that makes sense.

What are some of the most common pitfalls when you’re onboarding like a new salesperson or a new installer?

Nathan Eldridge (19:40)
If it’s your first person, you’re so busy, you don’t have time to train them, which means they have to learn on the job, which usually translates directly to mistakes being made in the expenses hitting the P and L. And so, you know, the pitfalls would be having them have six to eight weeks where they don’t have to work on their own and allowing them to shadow you for six to eight weeks. And then the on the job training is actually training and it’s not on the job.

William Hanke (20:02)
Right. Yep.

Nathan Eldridge (20:07)
Learning which is different because you’re out there learning how to swim or sink so

William Hanke (20:09)
Thanks

Yeah. Yeah. Are there any new, are there any tools or approaches that help these new reps avoid kind of freezing up on the job?

Nathan Eldridge (20:21)
I think back to really the selling one brand at a time would probably be the same answer. Along with this, I think that you ensure that whoever they go out and sell, you partner them with the vendor that has the best retailer support. So everyone knows that you’ve got one vendor with an awesome rep, one vendor with a terrible rep, put them with the one that’s the awesome rep. That rep is gonna be your largest resource to help train them.

that’s not taking your bandwidth so they can come down that product learning curve without always having to rely on you. ⁓ So I would evaluate which vendors give you the best support in your area.

William Hanke (20:57)
Yeah. And obviously bringing somebody on that’s new is a step towards scaling your business, right? ⁓ As your team grows, communication sometimes becomes the thing that breaks. Where do you see those cracks typically show up?

Nathan Eldridge (21:15)
So you kind of look at the life cycle of a job. You have the measure, the quote, the order, the install. And if it’s one person that’s doing all four steps and they’re organized, it’s okay. You have one person doing all four steps and they’re disorganized, you start to have problems. But the larger cracks are when you have multiple people having to do a handoff. And so you did the measure. And if today you’re doing measurements on a napkin, on a notepad, and you just take a picture, you send it to them.

And that person’s supposed to read your handwriting to work on the quote. Or then they’re supposed to look at that and then do the order. So that communication and the handoff between the technical measure, the products, the measurements into the quote and order phase definitely is an area for cracks. communication really gets it.

William Hanke (21:46)
you

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, as an owner, how can how can an owner kind of, you know, keep quality consistent when they can’t be in all the different places, especially again, as they are scaling their business?

Nathan Eldridge (22:17)
I’m gonna be a broken record here, but processes, right? So giving them the same thing to follow every time. ⁓ Doesn’t matter if it’s something super sophisticated or if it’s a one note with three things already filled in, but they fill in the same three things for every job. So it could be something simple. It doesn’t have to be this giant AI driven tax deck that everyone gets like, they don’t even know what that is. have to Google it. It could just be a note file that you organize and the team collaborates on.

William Hanke (22:19)
You

Nathan Eldridge (22:46)
As long as it’s there and it’s trainable and repeatable and people use it.

William Hanke (22:52)
Yeah, yeah. And I’m with you on the process thing. It’s a hugely different world when you start getting into building systems and writing SOPs and having things that are standard, you know, that you know it’s going to start at step A and it’s going to end at step Z. And if everything’s followed, you’re going to be in a good spot.

Nathan Eldridge (23:06)
Yeah.

William Hanke (23:15)
That’s great. ⁓ For businesses that are juggling installs, measurements, orders, what leadership habits ⁓ help kind of keep everything coordinated?

Nathan Eldridge (23:27)
If there’s multiple staff having clear accountabilities for each step in that process, so knowing who’s doing the tech measures, who’s doing the coding, who’s doing the ordering, who’s managing the schedules, the communication with the installers and the customer. If it’s a single owner operator, it’s back to the system and repeatable process. They’ve got to know what they’re doing. Over communication is just a critical step. ⁓ When you start to have multiple team members and kind of a project management software is really…

really critical to manage those handoffs between accountabilities. In our business, we use Asana. There’s a handful. You can Google it. There’s like 30 options out there. But having something that’s the standard place that you go to, it’s where you communicate, it’s how you hand things off together, really, really helps when you’re juggling, especially between the installs require scheduled with multiple people’s calendars, measurements have many data sets.

William Hanke (24:04)
Okay.

Yeah.

Nathan Eldridge (24:25)
And then ordering has all its own things, right? You got to make sure you don’t miss one key attribute that ruins the order and ends in a remake.

William Hanke (24:32)
Yeah, yeah, Asana is a great tool. And that’s a project management tool, not necessarily a CRM. They’re typically different tools.

Nathan Eldridge (24:38)
Yeah,

it’s really just project management and it gives you the views. can look at it like a Gantt view or Kanban board. But again, it’s not about the software. It’s about putting a tool in place and using it. So you can do something really simple in Excel or something fancy like Asana.

William Hanke (24:57)
Right, yeah. As the business gets bigger, it’s better probably not to use the Excel sheets, right? But it’s a great place to start.

Nathan Eldridge (25:04)
yeah,

the Excel sheet in the SharePoint that someone accidentally deletes or corrupts, yeah, yeah, it’s terrible.

William Hanke (25:12)
Yeah, yeah,

for us, we use ClickUp, but we’ve used Teamwork in the past and a couple others, you know, but any like you said, any of them are good. They’re going to get the job done, right? Very good.

Nathan Eldridge (25:21)
Yep.

William Hanke (25:24)
What technology trends do you think are going to change how window companies measure, sell and install over the next couple of years?

Nathan Eldridge (25:33)
So LIDAR is going to change the world. Today, you can’t measure LIDAR with something at the level of accuracy that we need in our business. But it’s only a matter of time. It’s coming down its innovation curve right now. There are a few LIDAR scanners that are on the market that can scan even beyond the accuracy that we require. But they average $80,000 to $100,000 right now.

But they’re also those outputs are super configurated for like engineering firms. So they’re heavy and other software. They’re not dumbed down where you can just get the output usable to what we need. But I do think in the next five to eight years, it will advance enough that people can be using their phone with a LiDAR scanner and scan windows.

William Hanke (26:21)
Yeah. Pretty much all of the robo vacuums that come out now are lighter.

Nathan Eldridge (26:26)
Yeah, yeah. If you can work in half inches today for your job, LIDAR is ready to change the world. But if you need something that’s under a half inch accuracy, there’s a little left to desire there.

William Hanke (26:34)
Right. ⁓

Yeah,

yeah, but I totally agree about that. As I watch these innovations and like I said, all the RoboVacs have them now, have LIDAR. It’s just like common, where two years ago that was, ooh, this one has LIDAR, we should get that one.

Nathan Eldridge (26:58)
Absolutely.

William Hanke (27:01)
Why is field data and documentation becoming more important than ever?

Nathan Eldridge (27:07)
Our products are far more complex. ⁓ If you went back and looked at window treatments 15 years ago and window treatments today, we’re adding motorization, you’re adding controls, you’re adding what WiFi connector you’re gonna have. They’re just getting more complex. And so when you look at that field data and the documentation, the more complex the products come, the more important it is that we drive efficiencies and how we grow that process, how those standardizations and.

⁓ keeping the data organized is super important from the technical measure to the ordering.

William Hanke (27:40)
Yeah. Yeah. What about somebody who’s maybe a little bit intimidated by a lot of the tech? Where do you think they should begin? Like what’s an easy entry point into this world?

Nathan Eldridge (27:52)
So when it comes to digital measurements, the first step, we’d have a couple of customers, like the first baby step if they want to try it is they can use the app and still measure with a tape measure. And so they’re still using the tape. They’re making that decision of what the dimension is that they want, and they manually input it in. Once they’re comfortable with that, we try to get them to look at the Recon T1.

go to a digital solution, so it’s transferring it for them. It’s now removing the human error out of the rounding process. And then once we get them comfortable with that, we try to step them into the X3, the laser, and then they’re able to use the full digital ecosystem. ⁓ So if they’re intimidated by it, that’s typically the path that we get them to go down.

William Hanke (28:37)
Nice. Okay. ⁓ How do you see automation, AI, some of these digital measurement tools influencing the industry long-term? I know you and I are both huge fans of chat GPT and using AI both in our own businesses and for our customers as well.

Nathan Eldridge (28:49)
Thank you.

Yeah, I use chat GPT and perplexity probably three, 400 times a day. It’s open on everything that I have. AI is coming and how it can be applied. You know, it’s man, the universe is the limitation. I think that the first place it’s going to come into is how we do visualizations of products for our customers along with configurations. And so I know that there’s a few of the CPQ companies that are already looking at how they’re applying AI to their configurators and then applying the visualizations. I’ve

I’ve got a whole sample set with ChatGPT. I’ve built a whole agent for visualization of window treatment products. It’s quite good of what I could do in about five days of training it. ⁓ So I definitely think that’s coming. When it comes to the measurement data plus the product configuration, I think that the AI is going to add extra intelligence where you come in and you do what I tell you, where you do the inside and the outside amount measurements.

And then you do the product configuration and then AI will make the decisions of what products, what deductions and what like gaps. So I think that the future state there will be the application that we feed at the raw data. It looks at the product you’re doing. It has the product knowledge. You know, today we only have that kind of product knowledge, maybe in one of the CPQ vendors. But then you apply that and let the AI choose what the dimensions and deductions are to order the product. I think that’s going to be a really good logical step for our industry.

William Hanke (30:22)
Yeah, yeah. On the other side of that, what tech do you think is really overhyped right now and what’s kind of, you know, maybe underappreciated as well?

Nathan Eldridge (30:31)
I don’t know if I can think of any tech that’s overhyped. Too many people are calling things AI when it’s really not AI. I could go down a whole list of stories about this, but everyone’s throwing the word AI on things that they wanna say it’s AI when it’s really not. It’s just, you program it. So it’s not learning, it’s not machine learning, it’s not large language models. it’s…

William Hanke (30:41)
Yeah.

Nathan Eldridge (30:54)
I think that’s probably the over-hive. Everyone just thinks they can throw that word, those two letters on the end of something and, it’s a new product, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

William Hanke (31:03)
Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. ⁓ There’s not a day go by that somebody doesn’t say, that’s probably AI. Wait a minute, hold on. Yeah. I wanted to talk real quick about some industry pain points for owners.

Nathan Eldridge (31:11)
Yeah, yeah.

William Hanke (31:18)
How do you think, or how should owners think about measurement, communication, accountability, all kind of as a connected system?

Nathan Eldridge (31:28)
Easy, one word, Zapier. So, I mean, especially for these small companies, right? So if you don’t have a full ecosystem built and you’re not sure how to do it, Zapier. And if you’re listening to this and you don’t know what Zapier is, go to YouTube, type in Zapier demo and explore it. One of the things that I tell my customers a lot is when they ask me, how do I connect this data into my ecosystem? What should I use? I tell them, go to Zapier.

William Hanke (31:31)
you

Nathan Eldridge (31:57)
and go look at what apps are already pre-programmed and integrated and make your decisions off the list that’s already done. So then you have to do no programming integration or anything. ⁓ We have a version of our Excel sheet that is made for Zapier that if someone wants they can get it and you can map all the data fields into anything else. so mean, Zapier I think is at

the cutting edge. think that there’s a competitor now, make.com, think, that’s cheaper, but their number of integrations are less. And so you just have to look at what apps you want to use. But when it comes to an owner thinking about how to make a connected system between measurements, communication, accountability, I think that Zapier should be their starting point. And then they look at the ecosystem of apps that are already there.

William Hanke (32:47)
So I’m assuming that means FSS has a Zapier connection.

Nathan Eldridge (32:51)
So we have the CRM file that you can zap directly into what you want it to go to. So we don’t integrate directly with the app itself. You get the file and then map the file into wherever you want it to go with the data. Yeah.

William Hanke (32:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Right, yeah, nice.

I remember when I learned about Zapier and it must have been 10 years ago at this point, ⁓ but it’s wild how many people still don’t know that there’s that system out there that makes it able to talk from one to another easily.

Nathan Eldridge (33:21)
And,

you know, if you went back 18 months ago, you had to be someone that was tech savvy to really use it, right? So it still required you to be tech savvy. Today, you can go to chat GPT and tell it, I want to connect this and this with a Zapier. Give me the 10 steps to do it. And it will literally tell you like, click here, do that. so you add chat GPT to have a connect with Zapier and it’s done. Everyone’s a tech genius.

William Hanke (33:45)
Yeah. Yeah,

right. In your view, what separates companies that keep growing from those that kind of stay stale or stuck where they’re at?

Nathan Eldridge (33:57)
So probably first starting with people. So someone that is able to build staff and then empower them. That means, when I say empower them, probably three elements to empowering them. They gotta have the tools, they gotta have the training, and then you’ve gotta trust them without micromanaging them. And so definitely if you’re stuck and that’s the side that you have to look at. Once you have that fundamental piece, then it’s back to the systems. Are they repeatable? Are they scalable? ⁓ And then…

You know, honestly, in our industry today, most of my customers, most of the retailers are, small, you know, privately owned companies. It’s about providing work-life balance. They chose to come work for you as a small business over a large corporation for that value of that. And if you bring someone on and you want them to work 65 hours, like, you know, the same as you as the owner is an expectation. You as the owner have a vested interest different than just an employee. so giving them that.

kind of work-life balance there. think those three things would help companies that are stuck.

William Hanke (34:56)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think I’ve mentioned this before on a podcast, but I still remember the saying we as owners, you you’ll work 80 hours to avoid working 40. know. So yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. All right. Couple bonus questions for you. I appreciate you taking some time today.

Nathan Eldridge (35:06)
Absolutely true.

William Hanke (35:17)
What’s something you wish more designers or window treatment businesses owners understood about custom drapery?

Nathan Eldridge (35:24)
The number one thing is that I would not order Custom Drapery from any of the big names. Find a local workroom

and make them your best friend. Buy them a wonderful steak dinner once a quarter, tell them thank you, let them become integrated into your business, build your processes around how you’re gonna communicate with them, and really take your service in the Custom Draper world to the next level. ⁓ That I think is a great foundation part.

If you can build that as a workroom in your area and an installer that builds the relationship together with the drapery workroom in solving problems, it’s extremely, extremely beneficial.

William Hanke (36:06)
Yeah, that’s a great tip. like that. ⁓ What’s a tool or trick that you swear by that more people should be using?

Nathan Eldridge (36:15)
If you’re using our app, I show everyone using a wrist holder for the phone. And so if you have the laser on a lanyard, I’m right-handed, so the laser goes in my right hand, and then the wrist holder holds the phone, you’re completely hands-free. And if you’re walking around the house with an extension pole or a ladder, you’re going up and down, up and down and doing stuff. I mean, your ability, your speed is just unbelievable. It might not look like it’s the coolest thing in the world, but man.

It’s the feedback that I’ve had from customers that have tried it. Usually, the first response back to me is, my god, why have I never tried this before? This is amazing. ⁓

William Hanke (36:57)
That’s great. ⁓ I know we talked a little bit about AI and some of the long-term changes we think are coming in the industry. Any trends that you think are going to reshape the industry maybe in the next two to three years?

Nathan Eldridge (37:10)
So I mean, definitely LIDAR and the technology side, but trends, this is probably like a confrontational point, but I’ll say vendor consolidation, right? With what’s happening with Hunter Douglas and everything else going on in the background, you know, I think that the industry has a great potential to look different 10 years from now based on vendor consolidation. That could mean a positive thing. We’re sitting here talking about processes and getting lean. If there is vendor consolidation, there’s a chance that you’re

being able to use one ordering system in the future and get to more products and more portfolio. So that could be a trend that we see. But time will tell.

William Hanke (37:48)
Yeah,

especially with back to chat GPT, I think as more people use that somebody’s going to come up with a really easy way to get a lot of that done. Or maybe not easy, but easy for the end user. Yeah, yeah. For somebody that’s listening, maybe who’s early on in their business, what’s a piece of advice that you would give to them?

Nathan Eldridge (37:57)
Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, yeah. The journey to get there won’t be easy.

Metrics so understanding your business your business should be run by numbers and if you can’t quantify everything in your business You know, you should understand your marketing funnel where you’re getting return on ad spend and investments from the marketing side ⁓ Making the decisions of where to spend that money on marketing based on data Then getting into the business looking at your consults, you know how many consoles you’re doing how many consoles are turning into close rate? Understanding the close rate based on product

You know, a lot of times in really good metrics, you could come back and correlate what products you’re selling to a close rate. And you see when I sell Ulta, my close rate is 85%. I sell this product and my close rate is 30%. Maybe you start to make decisions of how you structure your product, what you want to push. So metrics are that you can’t be over or under done on metrics. It has to be just right. And you should make your business decisions based on those. A lot of times, you know,

William Hanke (39:12)
Love

Nathan Eldridge (39:14)
an early, someone just starting out in this industry, they either bought a franchise like I did, ⁓ or they maybe worked for someone, they saw it and they just wanted to do their own thing and they broke out and started a shop. Back to, I hate to say chat GPT again, but if you don’t know where to start, go to chat GPT. And one of the things that I’ve seen, I’ve told other people to ask chat GPT to ask you 35 questions about your business so that it can define all the metrics you want. That one prompt.

William Hanke (39:27)
you

Nathan Eldridge (39:41)
It’s just going to ask you a bunch of questions and you answer it. And at the end, you will have an entire data set of the metrics that you should track. And if you don’t know how to track them, you then could ask ChatGPT to build you a plan of how you could put something in place to track it. ChatGPT can solve this for so many people.

William Hanke (39:54)
Right, yeah.

Yeah. And from that, you can build KPIs so that you can then scale, which is what we were talking about earlier, right? That’s awesome. I want to get information from you on how people can learn more about your business. first, I want to know what else are you working on?

Nathan Eldridge (40:01)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

So the app’s the primary thing. second, we have a service behind it. So focusing on measuring, we have a commercial takeoff side of the business. So we have a group of engineers and architects that work for us that do commercial takeoffs. And so if you get a bid, an ITB, an invitation to bid, lands in your lap and it’s for a thousand windows for this huge high rise. And you have no idea where to start. Cause you tried to download it and it was a zip file and you opened it. There was 285 files with like,

4,000 pages, you don’t know what to do. We turnkey that so you can send us all of those files and then we will do the commercial takeoff. And what comes back to you, you know, is a consolidated spreadsheet that you can then take and bid and do that. And so we’ve been doing that for about two years. We’ve got some really, really good customers that are just crushing the commercial space that send us like, you know, 10 to 15 jobs a month. We have…

William Hanke (41:00)
Wow.

Nathan Eldridge (41:11)
a connected service that will be coming this year in 2026. So if we do the commercial takeoff and let’s say you have a thousand windows, we’re going to be having a new module in the app that we will load those 1000 windows for you into the app with the commercial takeoff dimensions. And then when you go and you do the technical measure, you’re actually seeing the progress through the job. Everything’s made for you. You know, if everything’s already named, you know, office 102, office 103, we can save you.

five hours of organization work in a job that size of organizing the windows and it’ll just be turnkey easy button. So that’s the biggest thing that we’re working on along with this right now.

William Hanke (41:50)
Wow, that’s a heck of a shortcut, right? That’s amazing.

Nathan Eldridge (41:53)
Yeah. It,

and it’s really an enabler. A lot of, a lot of our customers, ⁓ it’s their first time to ever do a commercial takeoff and that can be really intimidating, right? You know, even looking at the division 12 specifications, if it’s 400 pages, how do you find and make sure you didn’t miss something for window treatments? And so we, we do the entire review and provide you a consolidated report that make you feel really confident in it. So it’s a, it’s a nice service.

William Hanke (42:21)
Wow,

I love that. So tell me more about how people can learn about your company and your app.

Nathan Eldridge (42:28)
We have a YouTube channel, FSS app, so youtube.com/@fssapp You can go to our website, which is also fssapp.com and you can email me directly, which is [email protected]. pretty straightforward and simple.

William Hanke (42:44)
Awesome. And tell me about your integrations. I know you guys integrate with Solatech

Nathan Eldridge (42:50)
We have been integrated with Solatech for about a year. And so if you measure with our app in the field, you can then select the final dimensions that you want to order the product to. You could have a window that you take 15, 20 measurements on, but at the end of the day, you’re only going to use two dimensions to order the product, right? One with one height. ⁓ And so our integration with Solatech today, you take all the field measurements and then you can iterate through the quote process and we export

that data directly into Solatech. So it is live. Once you save that window, take something like two and a half milliseconds and it’s loaded there live. So if you’re trying to measure a window and building the quote simultaneously by the time that you switch on your tablet application over to Solatech, it’s already there in your measure sheet. ⁓ We’re in conversations with quite a few of the other CPQ companies. One of our goals as a company is that we want our measurement data to connect with everything.

And so it’s, you know, we’re really focused only in our niche. We want to solve all of the industry’s problems in measuring. And then we just want to help make that final step where our data will go to wherever it’s going to be ordered from. And so in a perfect end world for us, we would integrate with all of the manufacturers websites and everybody. So the last human error now is to take stuff from our measure sheet and to order the product with it. And so if we can make that a digital handshake for the customers.

we’re helping them remove all human error from the process.

William Hanke (44:21)
That’s great. And I know our developers are working on a connection with you with the lead boomerang system as well. So.

Nathan Eldridge (44:25)
Yep, absolutely. And that’ll

be great because then they get their CRMs and once they know that they’re going to be going to do a technical measure, everything comes over from the CRM just helping them save time so they’re not sitting there having to put in their client’s details. Everything’s there.

William Hanke (44:40)
Yeah,

yeah, it’s gonna be great. Well, listen, Nathan, thank you so much for being on today. I appreciate you explaining a little bit about what you guys do and what you’re up to.

Nathan Eldridge (44:48)
I appreciate it. Well, thanks for having me on.

William Hanke (44:50)
Yeah. So thanks so much for joining us, Nathan Eldridge.

If this episode got you rethinking how you measure, train or scale your team, that’s the point. Better data leads to better decisions. Share it with a friend in the

trade and make sure to follow us on YouTube, Spotify and wherever you listen. We’ve got more expert conversations just like this coming soon. Thanks everybody.

William Hanke (00:00)
Hey, welcome to another episode of Marketing Panes the podcast where we talk with real window treatment and awning professionals about what’s working in marketing, what’s changing in the industry, and how to grow smarter. Today, we’re joined by the founder of Franchise Support Services and a long-time leader in the window treatment space,

Nathan Eldridge. Nathan comes from a deep background in engineering and tech.

And after running successful franchises in Dallas and Houston, he shifted his focus to helping businesses improve accuracy, workflow and field operations. His work centers on solving real measurement and training challenges that every window treatment and awning company deals with.

Welcome to the show, Nathan.

Nathan Eldridge (00:47)
Thank you very much, Will. Glad to be here.

William Hanke (00:49)
Yeah, glad to

have you here today. know we’ve been friends for a while now, so ⁓ it’s exciting to have you on to kind of talk about what you’re up to.

Yeah. So for anyone who hasn’t met you, how did your career in window treatments begin and how hands-on were you with the measurements and installs early on?

Nathan Eldridge (01:11)
My journey into the window treatment world was very interesting. in 2018, 2019, I started to look at franchises. I knew I wanted to buy a franchise.

And I probably looked at, you know, probably 80 businesses. And when I came across the window treatment business, I looked at it and I realized like an epiphany, like window treatments is what my wife would love to do.

And it took us about 18 months of exploring and looking at FDBs, but we bought our first franchise in 2021. And that was with Gotcha covered. It was for my wife to run full time. I kept my corporate job in the backend and I was going to help with systems and processes because that’s what I’ve done for my career.

It took us about four months getting into the business and constantly telling our family about how exciting it was and talking with the window treatments and

my wife just gravitated to the design side and the fabrics and all those different types of products.

My sister looked at it and said, wow, this looks awesome. I want to do the same thing. so within about four or five months, I partnered with my sister. opened a second franchise. And then within one year we expanded to four territories. And so it was quick, fast and furious kind of growth into it. know, anyone that knows me, I don’t sit still very well. And so the growth and the explosion into it,

I was there building the systems, the processes, and kind of looking at what we were doing. measurements quickly rose to the top of my focus list for my sister and my wife about how to optimize. And ⁓ what started as just trying to fix something for my family turned into a new product for the industry.

William Hanke (02:52)
Very good, and that product is the FSS Window Pro, right?

Nathan Eldridge (02:58)
That’s it, yep. So

the FSS Window Pro is the app that we launched. When we first created it, it was really just something that was putting there for us. Being part of a franchise, we have 160 other best friends that are franchise owners

and we started to show it to some of them and they started to ask, well, how do we get this? We want this in our business. And so we kind of went down a path of just being something we were gonna use internally to, okay, let’s open it and try to get it to where other franchises can use it, our friends.

And then they would tell people and people started coming to us and saying, well, how do we get access to it? We’re not part of the franchise. so it just kind of bloomed in 2023 into something that we put open to the market. And it’s kind of grown word of mouth since then.

William Hanke (03:39)
I love it. ⁓

That’s awesome.

the FSS Window Pro was even an idea, what were some of those biggest frustrations that you were seeing out in the field?

Nathan Eldridge (03:50)
Man, so measurements were dependent on the person. So you could have one person that could do it really well, one person that did terrible at it.

Tape measures, they’re error-prone in real-world conditions, right? You’re at the end of the day, you’re tired, you’re having to bend over, or you’re on a ladder reaching up.

My wife is very short, so everything that was above her head was a challenge. You also, it’s independent on rounding decisions. So it’s very inconsistent from person to person, how they read it, what they round to. In our industry, doing inside mount.

and rounding down is very important. ⁓ Then that came down to writing the measurement. introducing the human error, was that a 5 8s or a 3 8s, reading the handwriting later, transcribing it ⁓ wrong, were the top pain points. Those five were top pain points for us.

William Hanke (04:38)
Yeah, and as a systems guy, human error is like the bane of your existence, right? You the whole reason you build these things.

Nathan Eldridge (04:45)
Yeah, yeah, you

know, a good system should have no human error. The process should be so robust that anyone can use it, right? You don’t need super humans to run your business.

William Hanke (04:55)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And you’ve mentioned before that those processes and not the people are often the root of the mistakes. So can you unpack that a little bit more?

Nathan Eldridge (05:08)
Yeah. So coming from my corporate background, you know, at multiple degrees in engineering, lean is embedded in everything that I’ve done my whole career. And, you know, errors when they do happen, it’s not human. The human nature is we go, why did you make that mistake? And you focus on the person, you know, a really basic tool that, you know, people learn early on in lean is five Y’s, right? So when you ask why five times, so if you took a measurement that’s wrong and you asked, why was it wrong? It’s wrong because someone wrote it down incorrectly.

Why do they get written down incorrectly? Because the rep was rushing, relying on their memory. Why were they rushing? Because there wasn’t a standard workflow, no validation. Why was there no validation? Because the process was never designed to catch errors. And by time you get down to the fifth, you’re no longer talking about the installer, the sales rep, you’re talking about what’s missing in the standards or a lack of a tool. And so it’s really just about bringing that into a workflow and trying to make it where it’s optimized, where everyone can succeed at the same level.

William Hanke (05:57)
Right? Yeah.

Yeah. And so that’s awesome. You took that kind of you drilled down into what the real issue was, tried to start solving for that, which would obviously then work its way back up the chain. What was

what kind of surprised you the most on the tech side training gap, even resistance to change?

Nathan Eldridge (06:27)
So the first stage was with my sister and my wife and their adaption to new technology was good. I brought them the solution and they were eager to remove problems and so the adaption was easy. When we went to the next step, we kind of expanded it to franchises. I found that people really had a hard time of, this is how I’ve always done it. I’ve always used tape measures. I’ve always done a notepad with a pen and paper. ⁓

Somewhere in the journey into launching it into the full market, I heard enough customer feedback that people maybe didn’t trust lasers. They bought a laser 10 years ago and they tried it and they had accuracy problems. And a lot of the times if you, fly, why did they have accuracy problems on a laser? They treated it like it was a hammer. They threw it in a tool bag. You got thrown in the back of the truck when most of these lasers need to be treated like a cell phone, right? You don’t just throw it in a bag and throw it somewhere. You put it in your pocket. It’s taken care of.

⁓

But one of the things that we’ve looked at is that adoption of the tech side and the resistance to change is the Reekon T1 That’s a nice middle ground. So if you have someone that’s not ready to fully go into a laser, but they want to go digital, they want to remove some human error,

they can go into a Reekon T1, which is a Bluetooth tape measure. And that product’s unique because it has no calibration. So if you drop it, as long as it powers on, it doesn’t have to get recalibrated. So it really helps the trust factor.

to get them into new tech and the resistance to change. It’s not the ideal product. Laser is definitely the ideal product as a place for both of them, but it is a really nice stepping stone for people to at least engage in a digital way to change their process.

William Hanke (08:09)
Yeah.

What measuring tool do you prefer people to use or recommend?

Nathan Eldridge (08:15)
Everyone that I do a demo for, I recommend that they buy both.

So to me, a laser is like a Phillips screwdriver and the T1 is like a flathead.

So everything that’s an inside mount product, you should run the laser for. Everything that’s an outside mount product in draperies, you should run the T1 for.

And so my recommendation is that you build your processes around that. I tell a lot of people a story that a lady finished measuring a job.

with her X3 on a Friday and she had changed the reference point from the back of the device to the front of the device to measure some depth of some windows.

And then she put it in her bag and forgot to change it back. And the next Monday she showed up at a client’s house and she measured an entire $37,000 job with the reference point from the front of the device instead of the back. Cost her $37,000 to remake the whole house because everything inside Mount was three and a half inches short, which was a terrible thing to experience.

If she had bought that one tool, $260 to have the T1 and use the T1 for that measurement, she would have never, ever changed her settings. And so like the idea of this again, lean, right?

$260, the right tool for the right thing. And she would have never touched her settings ever. And that mistake could never happen in the business.

And so I try to convince everyone to think about it that way. There’s two tools, one for inside mount, one for outside mount, and you build it into your process.

William Hanke (09:42)
⁓ very good. ⁓ Is that a pretty common measurement mistake that people make or do you see some other ones that are pretty consistent?

Nathan Eldridge (09:54)
⁓ I think that a lot of people wouldn’t try to use the laser to measure the depth of a window. They probably would just pull out their tape measure and do it manually. ⁓ So I don’t think that’s a common mistake, but it’s definitely available. Anyone that messes with the settings, you could happen into that as a mistake.

William Hanke (10:12)
Yeah.

Do you see any mistakes that repeat themselves over and over again?

Nathan Eldridge (10:17)
rushing, being tired, frustrated. One of my favorite examples is helicopter customers. And the helicopter customer, you’re in their home,

they want to follow you around and watch you as you’re going through their house. But the helicopter customer is the person that is following you six inches off your side and wanting to talk to you the entire time.

And you’re trying to focus on measuring. And you could go up on a step ladder, you get the top measurements, you come back down the ladder,

William Hanke (10:38)
yeah.

Nathan Eldridge (10:44)
you go to ride at the notepad.

And you don’t remember what the dimension was because you just lost it because you stopped for a second to answer a question to her. so,

you know, between the human fatigue of being rushed or tired and the helicopter customers, those definitely set the pace for the largest repeating mistakes.

William Hanke (11:00)
I feel like we should be able to create like a Seinfeld episode out of this, right? Similar to the close talker, guess, right?

Nathan Eldridge (11:05)
Yes, for sure.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, exactly.

William Hanke (11:12)
Yeah.

So are there any hidden costs that business owners don’t always calculate beyond just the remake that you explained in the one example?

Nathan Eldridge (11:22)
Yeah, remakes are the top and we can see that directly on our P &L as owners and operators.

But, you know, one of the hidden things that are cost is return trips.

So you were in the home and you think that they’re going to do only inside mount products. So you only measured inside mount. Then you get home and, know, I don’t know what other people experienced in our two businesses. We probably average about two and a half quotes per person. So we’re between two and three iterations of quotes. And a lot of times

they’re going to move from an inside mount to an outside mount. Maybe they went to a friend’s house that night and they had beautiful outside mount. They’re like, you know what, we’re inspired. We want to change. And if you didn’t capture those measurements, guess what? You’re doing a new trip and you’re going back out there and re-measuring for outside mount. These add up. They chip away at your margins. They take away your capacity, your team to schedule, you know, more consults and installs. And so I think that’s probably one of the worst things that we do. And we have a

solution for that. You’re standing at the window, you capture all the measurements at one time. You measure inside and outside and in know 15 seconds of that window you can iterate your quote 10 times. It doesn’t matter. You have all the dimensions you need as the customer changes their mind on products and so yeah.

William Hanke (12:34)
Interesting.

So it’s a good habit for somebody that’s doing the measuring to have that kind of muscle memory to do that.

Are there any other habits or field routines that you see that really separate the pros from the noobs, the starters?

Nathan Eldridge (12:54)
Measuring the same way every time.

So having a process and you know, the pros definitely want to capture the inside mount, the outside mount dimensions all at one time. They never want to have to come back. We modeled the app around how we measure and that’s just how we do it. But we built in a template feature so anyone can take it and mold it to match their measurement processes.

And then they save it. So every time they walk up to the window, it’s in the exact order. They can add custom measurements and it makes it their sheet and they do the same thing every single time. That repetition really helps get people in the flow. When they’re measuring every window different based on where they’re standing or, you know, right handed, left handed and, you know, measuring left to right or right to left, top down, it really makes a big difference in the repeatability. So ⁓

William Hanke (13:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Can you walk us through the day of, you know, day in the life of someone using the FSS Window Pro app?

Nathan Eldridge (13:54)
Yeah. So today you start, you know, first thing in morning, you’re going to create the clients that you’re going to go measure that day. So you’d look at your calendar, you’d be creating whatever clients you’re going to be measuring. ⁓ When you show up to their house, you go in and you start measuring. In the app we organized today by rooms. Most residential are organized, you know, by the living room, the kitchen, bedroom one, primary bedroom, things like that. Inside of them, we have auto naming in the app that kind of goes through window AA through ZZ.

which lets you put about 271 windows per room. And then for every single window, you’re going to capture all the dimensions. We have a section for product notes, installation notes, and job site pictures. And one of the really key things that we try to teach people in the demo phase, that job site pictures, you should take two pictures per window. You should be taking a picture during the tech measure so you can see that that drywall damage was already there. Your team didn’t do it. And then after you do the install,

you can take another picture of it. And then that really serves as kind of your warranty claim when they call you back and say, hey, this slats broken. You’ve got that picture as your crew went to leave the house of it perfectly installed. You send it back to the customer and they go, ⁓ you know what my nephew was playing in there last night. Maybe he broke it. Maybe it wasn’t y’all.

So the before and after really is powerful.

And then you access all of that data from our portal. You can pull all the measurements out in an Excel file or in a PDF report.

William Hanke (15:14)
Okay.

Nathan Eldridge (15:14)
Both of

those come with all the notes and then you can also pull down the zip files of all the high resolution pictures. And so it really lets you just have a complete data set of that pulled out. lot of our customers want those files moved into their own cloud or customer storage. So they’re pulling them out of our portal and loading it into their SharePoint or Google Drive or wherever they use.

William Hanke (15:38)
Yeah, very good. I know we’ve got it in lead boomerang. We’ve got a section specifically for documents and pictures. And a lot of our clients will do that exact thing. They’ll take before and afters and save them in there. It’s tied to that contact record so that they have that when they call back a couple of months later and said, you broke this.

Nathan Eldridge (15:56)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, it’s so important. People that are doing notepads, you’re not gonna ever come back and find those. And a lot of our customers, you ask them, how many jobs did you do last month? Oh, we did 30 jobs. Okay, how many pictures on your camera roll from that job? 1,400. How are you gonna find the one picture to that one window that you need for the warranty claim? So having it organized with an easy button is really, really good.

William Hanke (16:22)
Yeah, yeah, having all that data tied to something that’s easy, easily searchable.

What data do you think people often forget or miss, especially when they’re measuring by hand?

Nathan Eldridge (16:32)
Definitely obstructions or the installation side of things. And so they’ll maybe note down the dimensions for the product. They might sketch down something for the product, but maybe for that one window, they’re drilling into tile. And so they need to have a note before they come to install that they need to bring the right bits to build a drill into tile or concrete. So really the installation side, the obstructions. One of the things that we found, a lot of our customers are using 1099.

you know, installers that are not their own employees. And so to be able to capture that, especially if your product’s lead time is 10, 12 weeks, you’re not going to remember that job’s nuances when it comes time to do the install. So our installation notes let them quickly look at that, see what they noted, and then communicate the day before with their 1099 crew, hey, we have something special. We’re doing this, this, and this. Make sure you bring the tools. So it’s definitely…

that side of the business, think, people miss capturing data and they just hope they cover it.

If you look at your installer’s bags, they’re full of shims and drywall repair and washers and all this stuff that they’ve learned because they weren’t told what they needed, so they just carry a bunch of stuff.

William Hanke (17:41)
Yeah, back to systems and processes, right? You have something in place that you have a way to remember that thing 12 weeks later, or at least something to remind you about it. I love that.

Nathan Eldridge (17:44)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

William Hanke (17:52)
So I wanted to talk a little bit more about training new reps and installers. Hiring is one thing, but training is another. What makes training in this industry so challenging?

Nathan Eldridge (18:03)
This industry, especially in the US is very interesting. So in the US we have about 10,000 retailers and most of them are small businesses, which means unfortunately that they probably don’t have established processes. So as they go to scale, they’re bringing someone in and their processes are in their head. And, you know, there’s things you can do to do that, but we, we hope to solve at least the little tiny segment that we’re in, which is the measuring side. And, know, we,

When we launched the app, we made a full suite. have about 30 videos on our YouTube channel. This next like two weeks, we’re going to be launching a new in-app tutorial that people can walk through and teach themselves the in-depth application, how to use it and how to apply it to measuring. So we hope that we can help solve the training of new staff, at least in the measuring portion. But definitely, you know, when it’s a single owner operator and they’re bringing on their first person, there’s challenges there.

William Hanke (18:56)
That’s really helpful. When somebody is brand new, what skills or fundamentals should companies really focus on first?

Nathan Eldridge (19:03)
product knowledge. Definitely, you know, this industry can be really overwhelming for a sales rep. There’s so many things to sell.

You know, one of the things that we did when we started our businesses without any prior experience, focus on one element at a time.

And so we picked one vendor and we partnered with that one vendor and we sold those products for, you know, four or five, six weeks until we were comfortable. And then we added the next vendor. So really building it on one piece at a time without trying to boil the entire ocean at one shot.

William Hanke (19:33)
Right, that makes sense.

What are some of the most common pitfalls when you’re onboarding like a new salesperson or a new installer?

Nathan Eldridge (19:40)
If it’s your first person, you’re so busy, you don’t have time to train them, which means they have to learn on the job, which usually translates directly to mistakes being made in the expenses hitting the P and L. And so, you know, the pitfalls would be having them have six to eight weeks where they don’t have to work on their own and allowing them to shadow you for six to eight weeks. And then the on the job training is actually training and it’s not on the job.

William Hanke (20:02)
Right. Yep.

Nathan Eldridge (20:07)
Learning which is different because you’re out there learning how to swim or sink so

William Hanke (20:09)
Thanks

Yeah. Yeah. Are there any new, are there any tools or approaches that help these new reps avoid kind of freezing up on the job?

Nathan Eldridge (20:21)
I think back to really the selling one brand at a time would probably be the same answer. Along with this, I think that you ensure that whoever they go out and sell, you partner them with the vendor that has the best retailer support. So everyone knows that you’ve got one vendor with an awesome rep, one vendor with a terrible rep, put them with the one that’s the awesome rep. That rep is gonna be your largest resource to help train them.

that’s not taking your bandwidth so they can come down that product learning curve without always having to rely on you. ⁓ So I would evaluate which vendors give you the best support in your area.

William Hanke (20:57)
Yeah. And obviously bringing somebody on that’s new is a step towards scaling your business, right? ⁓ As your team grows, communication sometimes becomes the thing that breaks. Where do you see those cracks typically show up?

Nathan Eldridge (21:15)
So you kind of look at the life cycle of a job. You have the measure, the quote, the order, the install. And if it’s one person that’s doing all four steps and they’re organized, it’s okay. You have one person doing all four steps and they’re disorganized, you start to have problems. But the larger cracks are when you have multiple people having to do a handoff. And so you did the measure. And if today you’re doing measurements on a napkin, on a notepad, and you just take a picture, you send it to them.

And that person’s supposed to read your handwriting to work on the quote. Or then they’re supposed to look at that and then do the order. So that communication and the handoff between the technical measure, the products, the measurements into the quote and order phase definitely is an area for cracks. communication really gets it.

William Hanke (21:46)
you

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, as an owner, how can how can an owner kind of, you know, keep quality consistent when they can’t be in all the different places, especially again, as they are scaling their business?

Nathan Eldridge (22:17)
I’m gonna be a broken record here, but processes, right? So giving them the same thing to follow every time. ⁓ Doesn’t matter if it’s something super sophisticated or if it’s a one note with three things already filled in, but they fill in the same three things for every job. So it could be something simple. It doesn’t have to be this giant AI driven tax deck that everyone gets like, they don’t even know what that is. have to Google it. It could just be a note file that you organize and the team collaborates on.

William Hanke (22:19)
You

Nathan Eldridge (22:46)
As long as it’s there and it’s trainable and repeatable and people use it.

William Hanke (22:52)
Yeah, yeah. And I’m with you on the process thing. It’s a hugely different world when you start getting into building systems and writing SOPs and having things that are standard, you know, that you know it’s going to start at step A and it’s going to end at step Z. And if everything’s followed, you’re going to be in a good spot.

Nathan Eldridge (23:06)
Yeah.

William Hanke (23:15)
That’s great. ⁓ For businesses that are juggling installs, measurements, orders, what leadership habits ⁓ help kind of keep everything coordinated?

Nathan Eldridge (23:27)
If there’s multiple staff having clear accountabilities for each step in that process, so knowing who’s doing the tech measures, who’s doing the coding, who’s doing the ordering, who’s managing the schedules, the communication with the installers and the customer. If it’s a single owner operator, it’s back to the system and repeatable process. They’ve got to know what they’re doing. Over communication is just a critical step. ⁓ When you start to have multiple team members and kind of a project management software is really…

really critical to manage those handoffs between accountabilities. In our business, we use Asana. There’s a handful. You can Google it. There’s like 30 options out there. But having something that’s the standard place that you go to, it’s where you communicate, it’s how you hand things off together, really, really helps when you’re juggling, especially between the installs require scheduled with multiple people’s calendars, measurements have many data sets.

William Hanke (24:04)
Okay.

Yeah.

Nathan Eldridge (24:25)
And then ordering has all its own things, right? You got to make sure you don’t miss one key attribute that ruins the order and ends in a remake.

William Hanke (24:32)
Yeah, yeah, Asana is a great tool. And that’s a project management tool, not necessarily a CRM. They’re typically different tools.

Nathan Eldridge (24:38)
Yeah,

it’s really just project management and it gives you the views. can look at it like a Gantt view or Kanban board. But again, it’s not about the software. It’s about putting a tool in place and using it. So you can do something really simple in Excel or something fancy like Asana.

William Hanke (24:57)
Right, yeah. As the business gets bigger, it’s better probably not to use the Excel sheets, right? But it’s a great place to start.

Nathan Eldridge (25:04)
yeah,

the Excel sheet in the SharePoint that someone accidentally deletes or corrupts, yeah, yeah, it’s terrible.

William Hanke (25:12)
Yeah, yeah,

for us, we use ClickUp, but we’ve used Teamwork in the past and a couple others, you know, but any like you said, any of them are good. They’re going to get the job done, right? Very good.

Nathan Eldridge (25:21)
Yep.

William Hanke (25:24)
What technology trends do you think are going to change how window companies measure, sell and install over the next couple of years?

Nathan Eldridge (25:33)
So LIDAR is going to change the world. Today, you can’t measure LIDAR with something at the level of accuracy that we need in our business. But it’s only a matter of time. It’s coming down its innovation curve right now. There are a few LIDAR scanners that are on the market that can scan even beyond the accuracy that we require. But they average $80,000 to $100,000 right now.

But they’re also those outputs are super configurated for like engineering firms. So they’re heavy and other software. They’re not dumbed down where you can just get the output usable to what we need. But I do think in the next five to eight years, it will advance enough that people can be using their phone with a LiDAR scanner and scan windows.

William Hanke (26:21)
Yeah. Pretty much all of the robo vacuums that come out now are lighter.

Nathan Eldridge (26:26)
Yeah, yeah. If you can work in half inches today for your job, LIDAR is ready to change the world. But if you need something that’s under a half inch accuracy, there’s a little left to desire there.

William Hanke (26:34)
Right. ⁓

Yeah,

yeah, but I totally agree about that. As I watch these innovations and like I said, all the RoboVacs have them now, have LIDAR. It’s just like common, where two years ago that was, ooh, this one has LIDAR, we should get that one.

Nathan Eldridge (26:58)
Absolutely.

William Hanke (27:01)
Why is field data and documentation becoming more important than ever?

Nathan Eldridge (27:07)
Our products are far more complex. ⁓ If you went back and looked at window treatments 15 years ago and window treatments today, we’re adding motorization, you’re adding controls, you’re adding what WiFi connector you’re gonna have. They’re just getting more complex. And so when you look at that field data and the documentation, the more complex the products come, the more important it is that we drive efficiencies and how we grow that process, how those standardizations and.

⁓ keeping the data organized is super important from the technical measure to the ordering.

William Hanke (27:40)
Yeah. Yeah. What about somebody who’s maybe a little bit intimidated by a lot of the tech? Where do you think they should begin? Like what’s an easy entry point into this world?

Nathan Eldridge (27:52)
So when it comes to digital measurements, the first step, we’d have a couple of customers, like the first baby step if they want to try it is they can use the app and still measure with a tape measure. And so they’re still using the tape. They’re making that decision of what the dimension is that they want, and they manually input it in. Once they’re comfortable with that, we try to get them to look at the Recon T1.

go to a digital solution, so it’s transferring it for them. It’s now removing the human error out of the rounding process. And then once we get them comfortable with that, we try to step them into the X3, the laser, and then they’re able to use the full digital ecosystem. ⁓ So if they’re intimidated by it, that’s typically the path that we get them to go down.

William Hanke (28:37)
Nice. Okay. ⁓ How do you see automation, AI, some of these digital measurement tools influencing the industry long-term? I know you and I are both huge fans of chat GPT and using AI both in our own businesses and for our customers as well.

Nathan Eldridge (28:49)
Thank you.

Yeah, I use chat GPT and perplexity probably three, 400 times a day. It’s open on everything that I have. AI is coming and how it can be applied. You know, it’s man, the universe is the limitation. I think that the first place it’s going to come into is how we do visualizations of products for our customers along with configurations. And so I know that there’s a few of the CPQ companies that are already looking at how they’re applying AI to their configurators and then applying the visualizations. I’ve

I’ve got a whole sample set with ChatGPT. I’ve built a whole agent for visualization of window treatment products. It’s quite good of what I could do in about five days of training it. ⁓ So I definitely think that’s coming. When it comes to the measurement data plus the product configuration, I think that the AI is going to add extra intelligence where you come in and you do what I tell you, where you do the inside and the outside amount measurements.

And then you do the product configuration and then AI will make the decisions of what products, what deductions and what like gaps. So I think that the future state there will be the application that we feed at the raw data. It looks at the product you’re doing. It has the product knowledge. You know, today we only have that kind of product knowledge, maybe in one of the CPQ vendors. But then you apply that and let the AI choose what the dimensions and deductions are to order the product. I think that’s going to be a really good logical step for our industry.

William Hanke (30:22)
Yeah, yeah. On the other side of that, what tech do you think is really overhyped right now and what’s kind of, you know, maybe underappreciated as well?

Nathan Eldridge (30:31)
I don’t know if I can think of any tech that’s overhyped. Too many people are calling things AI when it’s really not AI. I could go down a whole list of stories about this, but everyone’s throwing the word AI on things that they wanna say it’s AI when it’s really not. It’s just, you program it. So it’s not learning, it’s not machine learning, it’s not large language models. it’s…

William Hanke (30:41)
Yeah.

Nathan Eldridge (30:54)
I think that’s probably the over-hive. Everyone just thinks they can throw that word, those two letters on the end of something and, it’s a new product, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

William Hanke (31:03)
Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. ⁓ There’s not a day go by that somebody doesn’t say, that’s probably AI. Wait a minute, hold on. Yeah. I wanted to talk real quick about some industry pain points for owners.

Nathan Eldridge (31:11)
Yeah, yeah.

William Hanke (31:18)
How do you think, or how should owners think about measurement, communication, accountability, all kind of as a connected system?

Nathan Eldridge (31:28)
Easy, one word, Zapier. So, I mean, especially for these small companies, right? So if you don’t have a full ecosystem built and you’re not sure how to do it, Zapier. And if you’re listening to this and you don’t know what Zapier is, go to YouTube, type in Zapier demo and explore it. One of the things that I tell my customers a lot is when they ask me, how do I connect this data into my ecosystem? What should I use? I tell them, go to Zapier.

William Hanke (31:31)
you

Nathan Eldridge (31:57)
and go look at what apps are already pre-programmed and integrated and make your decisions off the list that’s already done. So then you have to do no programming integration or anything. ⁓ We have a version of our Excel sheet that is made for Zapier that if someone wants they can get it and you can map all the data fields into anything else. so mean, Zapier I think is at

the cutting edge. think that there’s a competitor now, make.com, think, that’s cheaper, but their number of integrations are less. And so you just have to look at what apps you want to use. But when it comes to an owner thinking about how to make a connected system between measurements, communication, accountability, I think that Zapier should be their starting point. And then they look at the ecosystem of apps that are already there.

William Hanke (32:47)
So I’m assuming that means FSS has a Zapier connection.

Nathan Eldridge (32:51)
So we have the CRM file that you can zap directly into what you want it to go to. So we don’t integrate directly with the app itself. You get the file and then map the file into wherever you want it to go with the data. Yeah.

William Hanke (32:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Right, yeah, nice.

I remember when I learned about Zapier and it must have been 10 years ago at this point, ⁓ but it’s wild how many people still don’t know that there’s that system out there that makes it able to talk from one to another easily.

Nathan Eldridge (33:21)
And,

you know, if you went back 18 months ago, you had to be someone that was tech savvy to really use it, right? So it still required you to be tech savvy. Today, you can go to chat GPT and tell it, I want to connect this and this with a Zapier. Give me the 10 steps to do it. And it will literally tell you like, click here, do that. so you add chat GPT to have a connect with Zapier and it’s done. Everyone’s a tech genius.

William Hanke (33:45)
Yeah. Yeah,

right. In your view, what separates companies that keep growing from those that kind of stay stale or stuck where they’re at?

Nathan Eldridge (33:57)
So probably first starting with people. So someone that is able to build staff and then empower them. That means, when I say empower them, probably three elements to empowering them. They gotta have the tools, they gotta have the training, and then you’ve gotta trust them without micromanaging them. And so definitely if you’re stuck and that’s the side that you have to look at. Once you have that fundamental piece, then it’s back to the systems. Are they repeatable? Are they scalable? ⁓ And then…

You know, honestly, in our industry today, most of my customers, most of the retailers are, small, you know, privately owned companies. It’s about providing work-life balance. They chose to come work for you as a small business over a large corporation for that value of that. And if you bring someone on and you want them to work 65 hours, like, you know, the same as you as the owner is an expectation. You as the owner have a vested interest different than just an employee. so giving them that.

kind of work-life balance there. think those three things would help companies that are stuck.

William Hanke (34:56)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think I’ve mentioned this before on a podcast, but I still remember the saying we as owners, you you’ll work 80 hours to avoid working 40. know. So yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. All right. Couple bonus questions for you. I appreciate you taking some time today.

Nathan Eldridge (35:06)
Absolutely true.

William Hanke (35:17)
What’s something you wish more designers or window treatment businesses owners understood about custom drapery?

Nathan Eldridge (35:24)
The number one thing is that I would not order Custom Drapery from any of the big names. Find a local workroom

and make them your best friend. Buy them a wonderful steak dinner once a quarter, tell them thank you, let them become integrated into your business, build your processes around how you’re gonna communicate with them, and really take your service in the Custom Draper world to the next level. ⁓ That I think is a great foundation part.

If you can build that as a workroom in your area and an installer that builds the relationship together with the drapery workroom in solving problems, it’s extremely, extremely beneficial.

William Hanke (36:06)
Yeah, that’s a great tip. like that. ⁓ What’s a tool or trick that you swear by that more people should be using?

Nathan Eldridge (36:15)
If you’re using our app, I show everyone using a wrist holder for the phone. And so if you have the laser on a lanyard, I’m right-handed, so the laser goes in my right hand, and then the wrist holder holds the phone, you’re completely hands-free. And if you’re walking around the house with an extension pole or a ladder, you’re going up and down, up and down and doing stuff. I mean, your ability, your speed is just unbelievable. It might not look like it’s the coolest thing in the world, but man.

It’s the feedback that I’ve had from customers that have tried it. Usually, the first response back to me is, my god, why have I never tried this before? This is amazing. ⁓

William Hanke (36:57)
That’s great. ⁓ I know we talked a little bit about AI and some of the long-term changes we think are coming in the industry. Any trends that you think are going to reshape the industry maybe in the next two to three years?

Nathan Eldridge (37:10)
So I mean, definitely LIDAR and the technology side, but trends, this is probably like a confrontational point, but I’ll say vendor consolidation, right? With what’s happening with Hunter Douglas and everything else going on in the background, you know, I think that the industry has a great potential to look different 10 years from now based on vendor consolidation. That could mean a positive thing. We’re sitting here talking about processes and getting lean. If there is vendor consolidation, there’s a chance that you’re

being able to use one ordering system in the future and get to more products and more portfolio. So that could be a trend that we see. But time will tell.

William Hanke (37:48)
Yeah,

especially with back to chat GPT, I think as more people use that somebody’s going to come up with a really easy way to get a lot of that done. Or maybe not easy, but easy for the end user. Yeah, yeah. For somebody that’s listening, maybe who’s early on in their business, what’s a piece of advice that you would give to them?

Nathan Eldridge (37:57)
Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, yeah. The journey to get there won’t be easy.

Metrics so understanding your business your business should be run by numbers and if you can’t quantify everything in your business You know, you should understand your marketing funnel where you’re getting return on ad spend and investments from the marketing side ⁓ Making the decisions of where to spend that money on marketing based on data Then getting into the business looking at your consults, you know how many consoles you’re doing how many consoles are turning into close rate? Understanding the close rate based on product

You know, a lot of times in really good metrics, you could come back and correlate what products you’re selling to a close rate. And you see when I sell Ulta, my close rate is 85%. I sell this product and my close rate is 30%. Maybe you start to make decisions of how you structure your product, what you want to push. So metrics are that you can’t be over or under done on metrics. It has to be just right. And you should make your business decisions based on those. A lot of times, you know,

William Hanke (39:12)
Love

Nathan Eldridge (39:14)
an early, someone just starting out in this industry, they either bought a franchise like I did, ⁓ or they maybe worked for someone, they saw it and they just wanted to do their own thing and they broke out and started a shop. Back to, I hate to say chat GPT again, but if you don’t know where to start, go to chat GPT. And one of the things that I’ve seen, I’ve told other people to ask chat GPT to ask you 35 questions about your business so that it can define all the metrics you want. That one prompt.

William Hanke (39:27)
you

Nathan Eldridge (39:41)
It’s just going to ask you a bunch of questions and you answer it. And at the end, you will have an entire data set of the metrics that you should track. And if you don’t know how to track them, you then could ask ChatGPT to build you a plan of how you could put something in place to track it. ChatGPT can solve this for so many people.

William Hanke (39:54)
Right, yeah.

Yeah. And from that, you can build KPIs so that you can then scale, which is what we were talking about earlier, right? That’s awesome. I want to get information from you on how people can learn more about your business. first, I want to know what else are you working on?

Nathan Eldridge (40:01)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

So the app’s the primary thing. second, we have a service behind it. So focusing on measuring, we have a commercial takeoff side of the business. So we have a group of engineers and architects that work for us that do commercial takeoffs. And so if you get a bid, an ITB, an invitation to bid, lands in your lap and it’s for a thousand windows for this huge high rise. And you have no idea where to start. Cause you tried to download it and it was a zip file and you opened it. There was 285 files with like,

4,000 pages, you don’t know what to do. We turnkey that so you can send us all of those files and then we will do the commercial takeoff. And what comes back to you, you know, is a consolidated spreadsheet that you can then take and bid and do that. And so we’ve been doing that for about two years. We’ve got some really, really good customers that are just crushing the commercial space that send us like, you know, 10 to 15 jobs a month. We have…

William Hanke (41:00)
Wow.

Nathan Eldridge (41:11)
a connected service that will be coming this year in 2026. So if we do the commercial takeoff and let’s say you have a thousand windows, we’re going to be having a new module in the app that we will load those 1000 windows for you into the app with the commercial takeoff dimensions. And then when you go and you do the technical measure, you’re actually seeing the progress through the job. Everything’s made for you. You know, if everything’s already named, you know, office 102, office 103, we can save you.

five hours of organization work in a job that size of organizing the windows and it’ll just be turnkey easy button. So that’s the biggest thing that we’re working on along with this right now.

William Hanke (41:50)
Wow, that’s a heck of a shortcut, right? That’s amazing.

Nathan Eldridge (41:53)
Yeah. It,

and it’s really an enabler. A lot of, a lot of our customers, ⁓ it’s their first time to ever do a commercial takeoff and that can be really intimidating, right? You know, even looking at the division 12 specifications, if it’s 400 pages, how do you find and make sure you didn’t miss something for window treatments? And so we, we do the entire review and provide you a consolidated report that make you feel really confident in it. So it’s a, it’s a nice service.

William Hanke (42:21)
Wow,

I love that. So tell me more about how people can learn about your company and your app.

Nathan Eldridge (42:28)
We have a YouTube channel, FSS app, so youtube.com/@fssapp You can go to our website, which is also fssapp.com and you can email me directly, which is [email protected]. pretty straightforward and simple.

William Hanke (42:44)
Awesome. And tell me about your integrations. I know you guys integrate with Solatech

Nathan Eldridge (42:50)
We have been integrated with Solatech for about a year. And so if you measure with our app in the field, you can then select the final dimensions that you want to order the product to. You could have a window that you take 15, 20 measurements on, but at the end of the day, you’re only going to use two dimensions to order the product, right? One with one height. ⁓ And so our integration with Solatech today, you take all the field measurements and then you can iterate through the quote process and we export

that data directly into Solatech. So it is live. Once you save that window, take something like two and a half milliseconds and it’s loaded there live. So if you’re trying to measure a window and building the quote simultaneously by the time that you switch on your tablet application over to Solatech, it’s already there in your measure sheet. ⁓ We’re in conversations with quite a few of the other CPQ companies. One of our goals as a company is that we want our measurement data to connect with everything.

And so it’s, you know, we’re really focused only in our niche. We want to solve all of the industry’s problems in measuring. And then we just want to help make that final step where our data will go to wherever it’s going to be ordered from. And so in a perfect end world for us, we would integrate with all of the manufacturers websites and everybody. So the last human error now is to take stuff from our measure sheet and to order the product with it. And so if we can make that a digital handshake for the customers.

we’re helping them remove all human error from the process.

William Hanke (44:21)
That’s great. And I know our developers are working on a connection with you with the lead boomerang system as well. So.

Nathan Eldridge (44:25)
Yep, absolutely. And that’ll

be great because then they get their CRMs and once they know that they’re going to be going to do a technical measure, everything comes over from the CRM just helping them save time so they’re not sitting there having to put in their client’s details. Everything’s there.

William Hanke (44:40)
Yeah,

yeah, it’s gonna be great. Well, listen, Nathan, thank you so much for being on today. I appreciate you explaining a little bit about what you guys do and what you’re up to.

Nathan Eldridge (44:48)
I appreciate it. Well, thanks for having me on.

William Hanke (44:50)
Yeah. So thanks so much for joining us, Nathan Eldridge.

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