How FireCheckr helped TJM Fire Safety grow revenue by 80%
"I don't have to work evenings and weekends anymore"
How James at TJM Fire Safety grew revenue by 80% — and got his evenings back
Customer: TJM Fire Safety
Previous system: RiskBase
Headline results:
· ~80% increase in reporting output and revenue
· report write-up time cut by half
· evening and weekend working eliminated
James runs TJM Fire Safety, carrying out fire risk assessments across London and the surrounding area. Like most assessors, he wasn't short of work. He was short of hours.
He was using RiskBase to write up his reports. It helped him digitise the process but didn't actually make his life much easier.
My work was still very manual — everything from template building to the work I'd do on-site.
The specific gap was that his old software drew no distinction between capturing information on site and producing the finished document.
There was no meaningful difference between the on-site app and what you use on the computer. So you either were writing a whole report on site, or nothing at all. Normally I would just using pen and paper on-site and type up my notes later.
A story we hear a lot
That's a story we hear a lot from risk assessors. Many have a digital system to write up reports but still choose to use pen and paper on site. That's not because the assessors aren't tech-savvy. It's because pen and paper is flexible and practical — and assessors don't want to have to mess around with fiddly forms on an iPad when they should be concentrating on their surroundings.
However, pen and paper note taking creates a significant administrative burden. Paper notes have to be retained, stored and managed alongside the final reports.
For James, that burden had a hard legal edge to it.
From an admin point of view, and from the legal side of having to keep notes, it was just a logistical nightmare. They've got to be held — depending on the building, sometimes five years. So it made it very difficult in terms of having to store paper notes.
Every assessment therefore existed twice: as a paper record that had to be filed and retrievable for years, and as a report typed up separately from scratch. Two versions of the same job, and double the risk of something going missing.
The cost didn't match the value
Alongside the workflow problem, James had begun to question what he was actually paying for.
I didn't like the price of RiskBase for what you got. I felt for that price you didn't really get much value.
So he started looking around — and came across FireCheckr.
A more natural on-site process
The thing that caught James's attention was the part of the day no other system was helping with.
The thing that caught my eye was your on-site app.
FireCheckr treats the site visit as its own distinct stage, not a stripped-back version of the report editor. Assessors capture what they see, as they see it, in whatever way suits them, while they're still standing in front of it.
James has developed his own rhythm with it:
How I normally do it is I'll take photos and type notes. I know a lot of your customers like the voice capture but I prefer to type.
That choice isn't about preference alone. It's about discretion in occupied buildings:
I do a lot of work in blocks of flats and I don't always want to be talking about issues in front of residents. Because you find a lot of residents in certain parts of London, they'll then use that against their landlord to get something.
Where a finding is complex, he attaches context to the evidence itself:
If I'm taking a photo and it's something fairly complex, I will then write a description of that photo — so when FireCheckr generates the report, it writes up that detail for me and saves me the work.
That last point is the whole design principle behind FireCheckr. You don't have to click through lots of menus to put information into the right place in the report. You just type the note in the app when you're on site and the system is smart enough to know where to put it in your report later.
The write-up: half the time
Because the assessment arrives back at the desk already structured, evidenced and annotated, the report is largely assembled before James sits down.
It is so much faster. I would say 50% of the write up time is gone.
There's no deciphering handwriting from three sites ago, no rebuilding the narrative from memory. The desktop stage becomes review and refinement rather than writing it up from a blank page.
The business impact: 80% more revenue from the same week
Halving the write-up removed the bottleneck on the whole operation. James's throughput rose by roughly 80% — and because his capacity was the constraint on the business, his revenue rose with it.
Same working week. Same team size. Same quality of assessment. Substantially more of it delivered.
The personal impact: no more evenings and weekends
For James, the revenue is the second-best part.
It's more than the revenue. For me, that's more personal time I get back.
Before, I was working evenings and weekends and stuff like that. Whereas now I don't have to — because your system flows so much better. I don't need to do that anymore. So the revenue side, yeah, very important, very good. But from the personal side of things, it's great, because I get that time back.
Asked what he does with the time:
Well, I've got a three-year-old who keeps me busy.
Reclaimed evenings and weekends aren't a soft benefit for an owner-operator. They're the difference between a business that's sustainable and one that quietly consumes the person running it.
The AI question: "I was hesitant at first"
James was candid that our use of AI gave him pause.
I was hesitant at first — just because of the AI headline. Unfortunately in the fire industry there are a lot of people just using ChatGPT to write whole reports. So when I saw you use AI, I was a bit hesitant.
That's the right instinct. A fire risk assessment is a legal document. The judgements made within it should come from the competent person on site, not something created by a chatbot.
FireCheckr is built the other way round. The assessor records their observations in the app. AI helps by typing up the assessor's own words in the right section of the report. It doesn't make judgements of its own.
Once James saw how the product actually worked, he wasn't worried.
Onboarding: his own template, no setup burden
Template building had been another of the manual chores James wanted rid of. So rather than asking him to rebuild his document in our system, we built it for him from a report he'd already produced.
You created a custom template for me from a PDF of one of my reports. It was well easy. I mean, I just sent it to you. So it didn't take long at all and it was great.
He was up and running on his own document, in his own format, with none of the setup time he'd been braced for. On the software itself, he found the learning curve short:
It's a very straightforward system to use, really. Whether adding new buildings, writing reports or taking notes on site. I'm very happy with it.
Room to grow
The deciding factor, in the end, wasn't a single feature. It was where the platform was heading.
I feel like we're able to grow as a business with your system. For example, we've started with the reporting side of it — and I know you've got the CRM and the booking platform and everything like that, for when we get bigger.
That mattered because his previous platform didn't offer it:
There are a lot of software out there — like RiskBase — where I feel like we would outgrow it. And that's not what I want. I don't want to be looking for another software in two years' time. Whereas I don't feel that with FireCheckr.
In summary
| Before (RiskBase) | With FireCheckr | |
|---|---|---|
| On site | Taking paper notes as the on site app wasn't user friendly | No form filling. Just type or speak notes into the app |
| Records | Paper retained and stored for up to five years | Everything digital, in one place |
| Write-up | Report authored from scratch | Half the time — review FireCheckr's first draft, created using your on site notes |
| Output & revenue | Capped by admin time | ~80% increase |
| Evenings & weekends | Routinely working | Not anymore |
| Setup | Manual template building | His own template, built for him by our team |
| Future | "We would outgrow that" | CRM, booking and scheduling ready when he is |
Are you writing reports in the evenings so you can be on site during the day? That's the problem FireCheckr was built to solve. Book a demo
