I’ve been in the home services industry for over 30 years.

We’ve been servicing homeowners, buildings, and as a homeowner myself, taking care of mom’s home, I always had the struggle of knowing what the equipment was on site, when the person was going to get there, who was the one that serviced it, and which technician was there last time—did they have insurance?

All of those things to try to communicate, and I’d have to call my wife for phone numbers, find out who the pool guy was. It would wind up that the pool guy would come clean the pool in the morning, and the lawn guy would come in the afternoon and blow all the leaves back in the pool. I didn’t have the phone numbers to take care of it, and I had this big box in the office that had all the bills—some people would send a bill with a text, some with an email, and others would just send it through the mail.

And I wanted consistency. I wanted to know what was in my house, when it needed to be serviced, and how often it needed to be serviced. I wanted to make it so that the service pro coming out didn’t have to come twice: once to look at it, take the model and serial number, and then again to bring the parts and do the work, which would cost me extra money. So, I wanted to figure out how to put this all together.

I tried Google Docs, all kinds of different programs out there, and nobody had it where it was cross-platform—where you could do the whole thing.

So we developed Jack.

And Jack was developed so that I could control mom’s house and know what needed to be serviced, who the A/C guy was, and what needed to be explained to him—tell him what he had to do, knock on the back door, and don’t park in the driveway. All those things you end up speaking over and over, and you have to call him every day to find out when he’s coming—"Are you coming tomorrow?"

As opposed to, within the app, it would tell me right away, somebody’s coming or they’re on their way, and it’s scheduled for here. We can have the back-and-forth without having to use 6 different programs to figure it out.

And that was the goal of Jack: what we wanted was to make life easier, keep all of our documents together, and find out what our expenses were on the house.

We came up with Jack of All Homes because it was like "jack of all trades," we wanted to jack it. You want help, you want someone to do it for you faster, better, easier—so somebody that's good at what they do. So that’s where it came from.

And we looked and we tried to personify Jack. What is he? He’s a guy that’s helpful. He’s a guide to better home digital management. And that’s what he’s there for: to help you, set it up, and make sure that you can control the things that are going on in your house and know what has to be done; know if you have the material and not have to be at the hardware store trying to figure out the size of the room, so you need to know how much paint or what air filter do I use here and be able to reorder it, just send in the order, or what’s the model and serial number, and what’s the air pressure my car tires are supposed to be or what’s the plate number? All of those things that just become a hassle and get those pain points out of our life.

You put it in one time and your whole family has the insurance on the house and car, when it expires, it will tell you the month or so before, and you can show that to someone out on the road. Say you have an RV or a motorcycle or something like that, what’s the model number, I need to change this part, who do I want to use, well who did I use last time? All those things that we question, we’re trying to get all that in Jack and make life easier.

Uh, I am not. 

I defer it to programs and people to make sure that they keep me on track. And that’s kind of where we’re going with Jack — to get it to the point where we can let the program tell us when something needs to be done, and it’ll share with us, "Hey, clean the gutters before the big storm or they’ll fall off your house."

We want to get it to where it’s automatic, because once it tells you, then you’ll know it has to be done. When did I change the battery on my carbon monoxide detector? Or my fire alarm? Recurring stuff like that.

I guess knowing when things were done? A way to manage all of that stuff. We’ve had vehicles that were stolen and we didn’t know the plate number. I have to call my office for information. I try to keep notes and have to ask, "When’s the registration due?" When did I buy the house? And who was the realtor? What was the gentleman’s name who serviced it last time, so I know who was there and can ask for him next time because he did a great job?

And I want to be able to review him and say, “Hey, here’s what you can do next time,” or “You did such a great job this time, here’s a tip.” But I would never be home to give it to him. So it was a constant struggle to get that together. If we were all working out of one platform, it makes it so much easier.

I think most people will enter a few things, but I think they probably won’t enter items until they actually have something that needs to be done. But once they have it, the goal was to have the service provider or technician who comes to your house enter the information about your house and the different products that need service.

So, if he’s working on your air conditioner, he’ll have the model number and serial number, and you’ll know that next time. Jack gives control back to the homeowner, whereas, I, as your contractor, knew more about your house than you did. If I wasn’t very good at telling you that you need service this year, you might not even know, or you’d have to go through that file next to the desk to figure out, “When am I due to have you come back next time?”

So it took the contractor to be the one who was ahead. But if the app can do it, it will make it easier for the homeowner to know that everything was serviced well. As you do this over a period of time, we’re hoping you’ll know how old the roof is, so you can take care of it better, and it will be less expensive. Maybe we can even help you get insurance discounts.

There’s nobody out there that does organization AND communication with your service providers, technicians, and even your dog walker. You’re having to manage all of that with a hodgepodge of 3 or 4 different applications. You might have one app where you’re storing documents, QuickBooks for your expenses, Calendly for your appointments, and the app where your service provider is sending you information.

But if you could do it all in one app, where everything is organized and easily accessible, then it would be much easier to streamline and speed up the process. You’d know exactly where to look for things and where they came from.

I was always struggling, thinking, “Oh, where’s the bill?” One guy texted it, one guy emailed it, and then I’d think, “Oh, I sent you the bill!” But I couldn’t find it—what’s the email address it came from? But with this flow, hey, I sent you the job, they took care of it, they told me they did, they entered the invoice, and I paid the invoice. All inside the app, and then it would put it into the expenses, so I would know exactly how much my house costs me to live in.

As far as the home, a lot of people have rental properties they take care of or that they rent out for the weekend or have people stay over. We want to get it to the point where you can give them a couple of videos on how to do it. We all struggle with this—I think people called me every two to three days asking how to turn the hot tub on in this little pool we had. You had to turn some valve, and I had to make a video for them. But I always had to look for it—where was it?

Whereas within the app, you’ll be able to post rules and videos for each property. Don’t park on the lawn or in front of the driveway—you don’t want to repeat that every time. You had to tell everyone, and you could forget something important. So we’re going to have that in there: The house rules for friends/family and for the service providers, like how to turn the TV on.

I use a couple of different apps that some of my clients ask me to use that control our insurance and make sure it’s updated. I always wondered, how did somebody get into that industry? And I know that most of us don’t enjoy paying—I like a free app!

So, it’s like, what do I do as the homeowner? Where would we have someone come into the house? What some of these apps do is they put a small charge onto the service provider who’s coming to the house, or they do advertising in-app to make it free. But I wanted it to be free, because I think the homeowners deserve it, and I wanted to disrupt the market. There’s no barrier to entry, like having to pay $5.99 a month or anything like that.

Yes, the way we’re setting it up is you would actually have a way where you can do a hand-off. You send it to them, they get a link, they change the username and password, and then you’re no longer the owner. You could take out any of the information that you don’t want to share with the new owners, but it’s to make it so they can call the existing contractors and have the service history if you want to hand that over to them.

New owners are constantly having to call the realtors, ask around in the neighborhood, find someone on a local web search, and maybe they don’t find the right one. Why not give the opportunity to the same people who have been servicing the house all along? Most of us already have trusted people that we use, but the existing way that most home service apps work is by selling you a new guy every time.

So the other thing that we’re working on is Reviews. So you can not just review the company, but also the individual technicians. If we’ve learned anything from driving apps, when it’s the driver getting rated, suddenly, the driver provides a better service with more responsibility. I think this will raise the level of service throughout the industry if homeowners are asking companies to send a particular technician because he’s got a 5-star review across the board, as opposed to another one that might have a 3-star rating.

Well the first step is download the app on your iOS or Android. 

That Jack is protecting your information while making your life easier and in control of your home. You’ll have this great management tool that you can share with your family.