Introduction
Dean Cane runs Brightserve Plumbing, a fast growing Plumbing business serving commercial and residential clients with offices in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Dean started his career in hospitality as a restaurant manager in 1995. His cousin was a plumber and used to come to the restaurant to work anything that needed repair and maintenance. Every time he came it looked like he was having the best time wearing shorts and laughing whilst Dean was stuck in the restaurant. When Dean shared he wasn’t loving his job - his cousin replied “come work for me” and that was it!
Dean learnt fast and put together his plumbing and management experience to help grow the business from a team of 4 to a large company he eventually sold in 2008 and exited in 2010. From there he started again, getting a job as an Operations Manager in a large plumbing business where he stayed up to 2018 before being retrenched.
Dean went back to basics and got back in the van after 15-20 years looking to get his hands dirty and find his way. He borrowed some tools, borrowed a van and found his first customer. Brightserve was born.
The problem
At the start of his experience in plumbing things were managed with paper and manual processes. A work order book was the centre of operations where paper job cards were attached to clipboards and handed out to teams for the day. Blue stickers were used to mark if the job had been assigned and when the job was done it would get a yellow sticker. Dean watched this and saw it wasn’t working.
Paper was everywhere. The process was slow and cumbersome. We had to go through four or five people to just get an invoice out. If you’re slow to get invoices out - you’re not getting paid. You wanted to pull your hair out.
In the 90s and at the time there was nothing off the shelf to solve their problem. So they built a solution for hundreds of thousands of Rands. Life changed - and Dean saw the power of technology on his business.
Why Brightserve chose ServCraft
When Dean started Brightserve he did some research and went with an Australian job management software. Unfortunately they only worked on Apple devices and he found many things on the system weren’t familiar or relevant to South Africa. On top of that he wasn’t able to have a direct line to a local support team he could talk to in real time to solve his problems.
Dean was introduced to ServCraft and was surprised to have not heard about it before. ServCraft was able to offer him all the the things he’d been using on the Aussie software - but at a much lower price and supported by a local team who really got the local challenges he was having to overcome on a daily basis.
ServCraft worked with Dean and his team to design the job card and ServCraft that worked for him and his business. ServCraft listened deeply to Deans suggestions and used them to build features that all ServCraft plumbing customers could benefit from.
ServCraft’s people and their passion to help him with the change made a big difference to the impact ServCraft was able to make.