"I'm saving well over half the time I was spending on write ups. I have a hell of a lot more time. I've even joined a gym!"
"I'm having a hell of a lot more time for myself"
How Gary Mitchell at SMS Alba cut his report write-up time by well over 50% — without giving up a word of his own judgement
Gary Mitchell has been writing fire risk assessments for fifteen years. He's 65, describes himself as a workaholic, and in his own words, he was sceptical about AI. Here's what changed his mind.
At a glance
Customer: Gary Mitchell, SMS Alba — fire risk assessment and construction health and safety, Scotland
Previous system: Microsoft Word
Report write-up time: Reduced by 65%+
How he found us: Word of mouth
Headline outcome: More professional reports, fewer missed findings, and a lot of his own time back
A career spent looking after people
It's worth starting with who Gary is, because it explains a lot about how he works.
He began in the Merchant Navy. When he married and had a child, he came ashore and took a job with his shipping company at BP Grangemouth — focused on fire, and health and safety. That's where the qualifications and the training came from.
Then his career took a turn that most fire risk assessors' don't. He went to university at 35, and went on to work in the Northern Ireland peace process for the government.
My job was working with community groups, bringing Catholics and Protestants together for the first time. And also running workshops and things like that. Working with the under 18s. It was a very challenging time.
After that he came home to Scotland and worked as a consultant psychologist for Dundee City Council, and later for another Scottish local authority. Eventually he decided to return to the discipline he'd trained in, and set up his own company: SMS Alba. That was about fifteen years ago.
There's a thread running through all of it: work where the point is other people's wellbeing. It shows in how he talks about his reports. Gary is not a man looking for a shortcut. He's a man who wants the document to be right.
The problem: a business that works, and an owner who never stops
The business was going well. That was the problem.
The thing I was finding is that I wasn't having much time for myself. I'm extremely busy. I'm a workaholic. I'm working all the time and most of it is writing up reports.
A story we hear a lot
Gary's situation is the most common one we encounter. An experienced assessor, good reputation, plenty of demand, working flat out — and the thing limiting the business isn't the market at all. It's the number of hours the owner can physically stay at a desk.
Interestingly, despite software companies making systems for risk assessors for 10+ years, lots of experienced assessors like Gary still take pen and paper notes and write up repots in Microsoft Word. Gary is the first to admit, tech isn't his strong suit. So some people might dismiss experienced assessors like Gary working out of Word documents as just being a bit old fashioned. But as professionals like Gary are signing up to FireCheckr in droves, often, like Gary, after hearing about it from someone he trusts, it's clear that something else is going on.
You see, most experienced assessors have tried software at some point in their career. If they're still using Word, it's because that software didn't speed things up for them. Or if it did, that speed came at a cost to quality. Experienced assessors like Gary have built their own way of writing reports over decades, and it works. Most FRA platforms require you to make a trade-off between quality and efficiency: a tick-box form that flattens their judgement into drop-downs with generic wording. Declining that trade-off isn't stubbornness. It's about taking pride in your work. And when you've had a career like Gary's, of putting the wellbeing of others front and centre, you can see why he's not willing to compromise on quality.
The turning point: a conversation at a five-star hotel
Gary wasn't looking for software. He was working at a hotel in Pitlochry and got talking to health and safety manager there, who knew about FireCheckr.
He got talking to me about my life. He says, you've got a really good business there, but you're not having any time for yourself. Have you thought about AI?
Gary's initial reaction was not enthusiastic.
I said I wasn't sure of it, for all the obvious reasons.
That's an honest starting position, and a fair one. Fire risk assessment is a safety-critical, legally exposed profession. An assessor signs their name to a document that a Responsible Person will rely on and that could be read out in an inquiry. Scepticism isn't technophobia — it's professional instinct, and it's the right one.
What moved him wasn't a sales pitch. It was that the recommendation came from friend.
About two weeks later he sent me a text with your details and I got in touch with you.
Setting up: a new template, not a standard one
Most assessors arrive with a template they already use, or they're happy to take one of ours off the shelf. Gary was in a different position. He was at a transition point in his work — the Scottish competency regime is changing, his client mix was shifting, and the document he'd carried for years was ready for a rethink.
So rather than porting his existing template across, we built a new one with him.
I'm 65, you know, and you designed a new template for me which is extremely professional and I'm using it now.
It took work on both sides, and Gary is candid that the early going wasn't frictionless.
What I really liked is the level of support you've given me. You get back to me quickly. You don't leave me hanging. And I think you've been very patient with me, because I made a few mistakes early on. But now I've got a good number of assessments behind me, I can fly through my new FireCheckr template and it's really coming together.
He also sees the new template as positioning him for what's coming.
I think this is going to go really well when the Scottish regulations change. This document is going to see me through to the level I need.
For the record, the collaboration was not one-directional. One of the features Gary uses most is there because he asked for it.
The one I like the most is the fire station question. I know not everyone does that but it's a detail I like to put in. But it can be a pain in the butt — having to go into a different app, put in the postcode, wait until it tells me where the nearest fire station is and how far away it is. FireCheckr does that all automatically for me.
That was Gary's idea. Not every assessor includes the nearest fire station in their report; he does, and he told us so, and we built it. It's in the product now for everyone.
Well, there you go. Learned from each other.
What changed: over 65% off the write-up time saved
The headline is simple. Gary's report write-up time has fallen by well over half.
My reports used to take me hours to write. Even a full day for some jobs. Now I'm getting them done in less than an hour. I'm finding I'm having a hell of a lot more time for myself, and it's really made a big difference to my diary.
How does AI change the work an assessor does?
This is the question that matters most in this industry, and Gary put it to the test with the wariness you'd want from someone who's been doing this for fifteen years.
His conclusion is that the tool assists and does not substitute.
It'll never take over what I do. It doesn't have my eyes.
He's clear-eyed about where the human stays in the loop, and treats proofreading as part of the job rather than an optional extra.
What I do know is I have to take time over the edit, take time over the proofread. Because it's not always perfect. But it's learning. And that's the thing I find really surprising — it's learning all the time from the way that I do things and the way I write. So I find it exciting.
It really does capture what I said on site. Sometimes it tidies it up a bit, but it's always the essence of what I described. I read it through and I can make little changes where I need to. We're talking little words, little bits and pieces. But in the main, what it writes for me, is ready to be signed off.
Where it caught something he didn't
The most striking moment in our conversation wasn't about speed at all.
One time, I took a picture, and I loaded it up, and it's reading that picture — and it found a non-compliance that I missed. It noticed the certificate was out of date. I hadn't spotted it. And I thought...wow. That's something else.
Worth sitting with that. A one-man band works without a second pair of eyes. There's no colleague reviewing the file, no QA pass before it goes to the client. On a long site visit at the end of a long week, the odd detail gets missed. That's just being human.
That for me was again really, really an advantage of using this type of app.
The document itself: clients noticed
Gary didn't have to go and ask for feedback on the new report. It arrived unprompted.
It's fantastic, the program itself. It's producing such a professional document. All my clients are saying, you've changed your template. And I said I have. And they said this is just fantastic. This is really professional, and we really like it, and it's easy to navigate.
For a one-man band competing against larger consultancies — and against the cheap, tick-box assessments that quality assessors resent — the look and feel of the report is not a minor detail. It leaves a lasting impression for your clients about the sort of business you run.
The part that isn't on the balance sheet
Ask Gary what's changed and the revenue isn't where he goes first.
I'm now finding I'm having a hell of a lot more time for myself. Go for walks. I've joined the gym. I'm just spending more time doing what I want to do. It's fantastic.
Time reclaimed is the most underrated return in this market, and among the self-employed assessors we talk to it's the outcome that matters most.
Before and after
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| System | Microsoft Word | FireCheckr, on a bespoke template |
| Report write-up | Multiple hours per report | Less than 1 hr |
| Template | A long-standing structure in need of revision | Professional design and a future-proofed question set created collaboratively |
| Quality control | One pair of eyes, no second reviewer | Photo interpretation caught a non-compliance he'd missed |
| Judgement of risk | His own | Still entirely his own |
| Impact | Working all hours, no time for himself | Walks, the gym, and a diary with room to take on more jobs |
If your capacity is capped by write-up rather than by demand, that's a solvable problem.
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