How FireCheckr helped Elite Fire Stop do 30% more jobs each week
"I'm in excess of 50 to 60% quicker, at least"
We spoke with Duane Smith at Elite Fire Stop about how he cut his report write-up time by more than half — and opened up room for 30% more jobs per month.
Every fire risk assessor knows the drill: the site visit ends, and the real work starts back at the desk. Clipboard notes to decipher, a camera roll of photos to sort by site, and everything to be typed up from scratch.
Duane Smith wanted to digitise that process. With FireCheckr, he now writes the same high quality reports in a fraction of the time.
Customer: Duane Smith, Elite Fire Stop
Previous approach: Pen & Paper on site, then Microsoft Word template
Report write-up time: 60% faster
Capacity: room for at least 30% more work per week
Also gained: confidence to take on short-notice jobs; a review workflow built for a growing team
The problem: doing the same thinking twice
Like many assessors, Duane worked from a Microsoft Word template. It gave him flexibility to write reports the way he liked but it was arduous work.
On site, I would write notes on a clipboard and take pictures on my phone. I might take photos from several jobs before writing things up, so it was a pain to separate which photos were from which sites later on. As you go through the questions in your template, you're looking at your notes to see what you recorded. It was very time consuming, trying to work out which sections needed what details put into them. And then the formatting was a pain as well. It took ages to get things looking right.
A story we hear a lot
Pen, paper and the phone camera on site, then a write up at your desk that evening. We hear some version of this from assessors constantly, including from assessors who already pay for digital systems.
Most assessors don't use pen and paper because they don't like technology. It's because the last generation of apps were awkward to use on site. When you're walking the building, you're talking to site managers, being interrupted. All the while you need to stay alert to all the hazards that might exist in the building. A clipboard never crashes, never loses signal, and never makes you tap through four screens to record one observation like you do with some older apps. Many people preferred to use pen and paper for a reason.
The cost of using pen and paper is that every note has to be read back, interpreted and re-entered; every photo has to be matched to the finding it evidences, from memory, hours or days later. That second pass is where the hours go, where important details can get lost, and where the risk of a weakly-evidenced finding creeps in. It is also entirely invisible on an invoice — the client pays for the assessment, not for the evening spent typing it up.
The turning point: an app built for truly easy on-sites
Duane looked at a range of systems before choosing one. What separated FireCheckr, in his account, wasn't the reporting — it was what happened during the visit.
When I was checking through the different options, yours jumped out at us for the automation side of things. So when I take photos, the software applies that photo to the relevant section in the report without you having to do anything. And being able to use your voice to record notes makes everything so easy — and the app puts my comments into the correct parts of the report as well, so that when you're back to your desktop, it all goes in the right places.
Duane was also clear that voice isn't the only mode he uses:
Both typing and talking options are really good. The text box is quick to use and easy — because sometimes when you've got a client with you, it's a bit awkward talking into the phone. But if you're left to your own devices, talking speeds the process up even more, just being able to talk through it as you're going and taking photos.
What that efficiency means for the business
I'm in excess of 50 to 60% quicker, at least. And that's only going to get quicker as I get more experience in the app.
Two things are worth pulling out of that.
The first is that this is a like-for-like comparison on the same reports — the same buildings, the same standards, the same evidence expectations. No quality was dropped to get the number.
The second is the direction of travel. Duane is early in his use of the system and is already north of 50%, and he expects to keep improving as the new way of working becomes second nature.
For an assessment business, the binding constraint is almost never the client side. It is the number of chargeable hours a qualified assessor has in a week — and how many of those hours go on work a client is not really paying for.
Write-up is the largest single block of non-chargeable time in most assessors' weeks. Halve it and you don't just get a nicer Thursday evening; you convert dead hours into billable capacity. Every hour recovered from admin hits the bottom line.
Duane's own estimate of what that unlocks:
I would say at least a 30% increase in workload availability. I could get that many more jobs done in a week.
Two distinct effects sit behind that figure.
Throughput. Write-ups taking 50–60% less time means more assessments can be completed in the same working week, with the same person, the same van and the same overheads.
Responsiveness. Faster turnaround also changes which enquiries are viable in the first place. Duane described a recent example:
I had one last week — a pre-opening assessment requested by a shopping centre manager for a premises they're about to open. The full fire risk assessment isn't complete yet, because the fixings aren't all in, so I did one for the contractors who were in there. They needed that before they could even contemplate opening and they needed it right away. If I hadn't been able to fit them in, they might have gone elsewhere. Because I was using FireCheckr, I was confident I could get a quick turnaround for them so I took the job.
Asked whether that means saying yes to more clients, particularly at short notice, his answer was direct: yes, definitely — especially short-notice ones.
Short-notice work is a real and recurring feature of this market. Assessments are frequently triggered by an external event: an enforcement visit, an insurer's question, a lease signature, a licensing condition, an opening date. The requester almost never wants the report in six weeks. They want it now, and they will call whoever can say yes. Being the assessor who can credibly commit to a fast turnaround isn't a nice-to-have; it is a route to work that never reaches the assessors who can't.
Room to grow: quality control that scales
Duane has been asked to produce a one, three and five year plan for the business, and expects to bring more assessors on over time.
With FireCheckr and the infrastructure it gives me, both in terms of the validation, quality control and bookings management side of it, it is going to make it a lot easier to manage more risk assessors within the business.
The part he was most animated about was review:
With the app, you've obviously got a great verification process, so the quality of the work going out is better. You've got more gateways for a check before it actually gets released to the client.
For a lot of teams, validation is quite a fiddly process. With FireCheckr, validators can redline suggested changes into a report and send it back to assessors with feedback. All smoothly managed with an audit log so every keystroke is tracked exactly.
Before and after
| Before | With FireCheckr | |
|---|---|---|
| System | Microsoft Word template | FireCheckr |
| On-site capture | Clipboard notes and photos in the phone's camera roll | Photos and voice notes filed to the right section as he works |
| Sorting and matching | Photos segregated by site manually after the visit | Done at the point of capture |
| Write-up | Working out which detail belonged in which section, twice | At least 50–60% faster, and expected to improve further |
| Short-notice work | — | Confident of a quick turnaround; pre-opening assessment delivered within the week |
| Business impact | Capacity capped by desk time | Room for at least 30% more work per week from the same cost base |
| Team growth | Single point of review | Verification gateways, senior review with notes, bookings and job planning |
If your reports are still being written twice — once on a clipboard and once at your desk — there's a faster way to do the same quality of work.
See how it works by booking a meeting here
