From a pile of spreadsheets
to the system that ran the company.

The situation

At DGS Energy we touched a lot of hotels, and many of them more than once: air conditioning cleanings, AC installs, thermostat installs. Every job started the same way: building a room list from scratch, making a new tracker, and digging up the same contact info again.

We worked in 49 states, so keeping track of which installer was where, doing what, for how long, was a job of its own.

What we built

In 2018, back in the early days of no-code tools, Tim started pulling it all into Airtable, one piece at a time:

• Properties: every hotel, with its details and contacts, entered once.
• Jobs: every job, by type (install, cleaning, thermostats and so on), tied to its property.
• Installers: who we had, where they were, and what they were assigned to.
• Expenses: every company expense, categorized by department and by job.

It started small and kept growing until it ran the whole business.

What it made possible

• Runs. We could string jobs together into "runs," so Kate, Tim's sister, who ran the PTAC Installation Department, could schedule crews and print run sheets telling each installer which hotel, in which city, for how long, and doing what.
• Real costs. Millions of dollars in company expenses went through it, each tied to a department and a job. For the first time we could see what each job actually cost. Operations reconciled everything there, then fed it to accounting.
• No more starting over. The second visit to a hotel started with everything we learned on the first.

How it turned out

By the time DGS was bought in 2019, it was the core of the business. The new owners liked it enough to keep it, and it was still running when Tim left in the fall of 2020.