Software solution for paperwork headaches

Dari Kennedy, who runs an automatic lawn-sprinkler business with her husband, Steve, credits David Crary with saving their marriage.

Crary is not a marriage counselor, mind you, but he apparently played a role in cementing her family relationships, according to Kennedy, co-owner of Dew Drop Lawn Sprinklers in West Long Beach, N.J.

He did it with a simple and affordable software system, aimed at small service companies, that allows workers in the field to record orders, billing information and other job data on a PDA or laptop for instant transfer to their corporate computer systems.

Crary, 51, is founder and CEO of the HindSite Solution, a St. Paul company that Kennedy said eliminated a mountain of handwritten, often illegible job data turned in by employees that kept her tied to the office long past what should have been quitting time.

"It left no time for the marriage or my two children," she said.

"I could handle the paperwork when we had a couple of trucks out, but when we had 12 or 14 it turned into hours and hours of work, and eventually became impossible. It seemed like I was at the office 24/7."

Crary can feel her pain: He also owns a lawn sprinkler business, LMS Irrigation Systems in Forest Lake, and encountered precisely the same headaches that Kennedy cited.

His latest entrepreneurial exertion is doing very well: HindSite revenue topped $500,000 in 2007 and exceeded that total in the first eight months of 2008 on the way to a projected $800,000-plus for the year. He has more than 240 clients in 48 states, Canada, Australia and Great Britain.

HindSite is designed -- and priced -- to serve what Crary calls "small service businesses that have no IT department beyond somebody's teenage son." It grew out of the frustrations and the economic impact of the handwritten paperwork he was dealing with at his lawn business.

"I had workers in the field who not only were turning in work orders that were hard to decipher, but most of them were filing them late and relying on their memories to account for their time," Crary said. The result was lost revenue because of improper billings and higher costs for office staff to transcribe the notes.

The solution presented itself in 1998 when Crary's clothes dryer broke down and he called for a repairman from the large retail chain that had sold him the machine.

"The guy was totally paperless, using a laptop computer to record the job data and transmit it back to his office," Crary said. "I thought, 'Aha, that's the answer to my problem.'"

So he drew up a list of applications he figured he needed -- job time, materials used, billing data, safety checks -- and went looking for a software developer to translate them into a low-cost system.

He found it in Vertical Systems, an Eden Prairie custom software developer, and its owner, Ron Dropik, who subsequently became an investor and partner in HindSite. The software costs $99 a month for one service worker followed by a sliding scale ranging from $49.50 to $29 a month as the number of users grows. The average approaches $300 a month per client, Crary said.

Initially, the software was aimed solely at solving Crary's paperwork problem, which it did in spades: He installed the system in 1999 and in three years LMS revenue doubled, thanks in part to more accurate billing. Yet, even with the growth, he was able to cut his office staff in half while also saving on the time and travel his field workers had spent to deliver the paperwork.

Encouraged by this performance, he started HindSite in 2002 -- with disheartening initial results: "Back then most small-business people had no idea what a PDA was," Crary said. "It took three years to educate the market."

The turnaround came in 2005, when sales rose 76 percent to $203,000. The business has been growing at better than a 40 percent clip since then.

But he figures that loss is offset by HindSite's sizable potential: "There are more than a million small service companies in the U.S. alone that might benefit from our service," he said.

Not to mention a whole passel of marriages that might need saving.