The plan, in full

What it is: dispatch, ticket-to-invoice and compliance software for operated-equipment rental fleets: hydrovac, boom trucks, concrete pumps and, later, cranes. The working concept name was LiftTicket. Prepared for: the founding team. As of: 2026-11-13. Version: 2. This replaces v1 after three red-team reviews: a bootstrapped vertical-SaaS operator, an owner-operator who has bought this kind of software, and a CTO. Section 19 lists every critique and my response. Status: pre-build concept. There are no customers, LOIs, partners or pilots. Every customer number below comes from a model.

How to read this plan. E marks a fact found by web research, with its source URL. A marks a modeled number or a judgment, followed by what it rests on. U marks something I tried to verify and could not. Probabilities are subjective estimates, given as ranges and labeled as such. They are not actuarial figures. The research limits matter: no reviewer and no draft of this plan found a count of hydrovac or boom-truck firms, a CreteSuite or RapidWorks price, or the share of target fleets on QuickBooks Desktop.

1. Executive summary

The case. Operated-equipment rental companies rent machines by the hour with an operator attached. They bill from a job ticket that records portal-to-portal time, travel, overtime, minimums, washouts and a customer signature. When that ticket is on paper, money leaks. Tickets get lost, overtime goes unbilled and invoices go out days late. In a vendor case study, one hydrovac operator says it lost $154,000 in a year to lost paper tickets E https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/how-hydro-vac-inc-eliminated-lost-revenue-and-streamlined-dispatching. That figure is self-reported and vendor-selected. Tallyboom would put an offline native operator e-ticket, a rate-sheet pricing engine and same-day invoice sync in one product. It would sell through an on-site reconciliation audit that compares jobs dispatched with jobs invoiced. The audit is a photo-based sample, not "send us 90 days of tickets."

What the red team changed (all three reviewers agreed on the core point). The v1 arithmetic was correct, but its assumptions were not. v1 treated engineering and founder time as nearly free. It left out on-call, SOC 2, seasonality and accounting-integration costs. It over-realized onboarding fees, used optimistic churn and ARPA, and valued the bull case on a 4.8x figure that is a modeled prediction, not a deal comparable E https://www.saas-capital.com/blog-posts/saas-valuation-multiples/. Putting those back in shrinks the base case sharply.

Headline numbers (all A, revised base case; see sections 12 and 14):

• Bear: 57 fleets and $0.42M ARR in Y5, still losing money. The Gate 2 kill (section 13) should stop it at about $150k spent.
• Bull: 249 fleets at about $875 including a payments take-rate. That is $2.8M ARR and $1.1M hands-off profit, about $9.9M at 3.5x ARR, cross-checked at $4.6–6.8M on 4–6x EBITDA. The bull case needs roughly 320 cumulative wins, which is 26–39% of an open pool that has not been verified.

Plain-English verdict

Does it meet the criteria? No. As planned, it does not meet either target without a full-time job, and the $10M target is out of reach in every modeled case on these niches.

• $500k–1M/yr profit, on $100–200k, without a full-time job: not met in the base case. To make $500k a year hands-off, Tallyboom would need about 246 fleets at $700/month, or about 186 at $875, by year 5. That means 260–350 cumulative wins against a funded consolidator and a pumping incumbent that claims more than 20% of US pumping revenue E https://www.cretesuite.com/. If one founder works full time as the engineer, unpaid, the bar drops to about 145–190 fleets. That founder has a full-time job, though, and a buyer would subtract their market salary. Subjective estimate if Gate 0 passes, roughly 5–10% for $500k+/yr hands-off by Y5, and 10–20% with a founder full time. Basis: my reasoning that the hands-off target needs bull-case volume and pricing at the same time, in a small, partly captured market. No cited base rate exists.
• $10M value in 3–5 years: not met. Even the bull case lands just under $10M at 3.5x ARR and at about half that on EBITDA. Aventis finds SaaS deals under $50M "priced at about 3x revenue in every size band" E https://aventis-advisors.com/saas-valuation-multiples-how-much-is-my-saas-business-worth/. So $10M needs about $3M+ ARR, which is roughly 300–400 fleets. Subjective estimate under 5% in these niches within 5 years. Basis: the bull case falls short of the target even with every lever pulled. Getting there would take a third and fourth vertical or a payments business, and that is a different, larger plan.
• What it plausibly is: a $1–1.5M ARR business generating $150–400k a year of owner cash, with one founder full time as CTO/GM, likely sold to RapidWorks or CreteSuite for about $2–4M. That is a decent outcome. It is not the one the criteria describe.

What has to be true for this to work at all: 1. At least 1,000 fleets in the 5–80 unit band are on paper, spreadsheets or unhappy with their current software. That count must be made, not assumed, and it must hold per niche. 2. The median fleet in that list has at least 7 units, so blended ARPA reaches $650–700+. 3. Real, owner-acknowledged revenue loss of at least 0.5–1% of billings shows up in on-site audits. That means true misses, not deliberate waivers. 4. Owners pay a deposit, not just say yes, at about $600+/month. 5. One founder is willing to be the full-time engineer for at least three years.

The three cheapest tests (all inside the 90-day plan in section 17; about $10–15k and founder time): 1. Count and tag the list (days 1–20, ~$2–4k). Tag every firm as paper, CreteSuite, RapidWorks or other, with unit count. Include Canada for hydrovac. Pass: at least 1,000 open fleets, a median of 7+ units, and no lead niche where more than half the fleets are already on software. 2. Three on-site, 2-week photo reconciliation audits (days 30–75, ~$3–5k travel), including one pure-paper shop. Pass: at least 2 of 3 show true loss of at least 0.5% of billings that the owner agrees was a real miss. 3. Refundable $500 deposits (by day 90, about mid-February 2027). Pass: at least 3 deposits or signed pilot orders from about 20 calls. Stated willingness to pay does not count.

Recommendation: start the 90-day validation immediately. The northern buying window runs roughly December to March A owner-operator reviewer; unverified, and missing it costs a year. Build only if all three tests pass. Before building, the founding team should also decide openly whether one of them will be the full-time engineer. If no one will, stop here: the hands-off version does not make money at realistic scale.

2. Problem and customer

Who exactly

• Buyer: the owner-operator of a fleet with 5–80 operated units, who usually dispatches or used to. The owner signs, but three people can veto A owner-operator reviewer's experience; verify in calls:
• The bookkeeper, often the owner's spouse. If accounting sync breaks at month-end, the system is gone.
• The lead operators, who may quietly refuse GPS-stamped timesheets.
• A large GC or utility customer that mandates its own e-ticket format or AP portal.
• Niche order: now decided by the list, not assumed. v1 led with concrete pumping. Pumping is the hardest niche to break into: CreteSuite claims "20%+" of US concrete-pumping revenue and "1000s" of daily users E https://www.cretesuite.com/; a vendor claim, unverified, and RapidWorks covers pumping and hydrovac E https://rapidworks.com/pricing. The default order is now hydrovac (US + Canada), then boom trucks, then pumping. That order is provisional, because the hydrovac and boom-truck counts are U and hydrovac also has incumbents (RapidWorks, Aimsio E https://aimsio.com/industries/hydrovac). The lead niche will be whichever niche has the lowest software penetration in the counted list.
• Users: the dispatcher, field operators (phones; English/Spanish) and the bookkeeper. The accounting system mix (QuickBooks Online vs Desktop vs Sage) is U and is now the first qualifying question on every call.

How they buy (A, to be confirmed)

• They learn about software through peers, equipment dealers and service shops (pump, vac-truck and boom-truck dealers), regional owner groups and associations. Cold email reaches them poorly. Phone calls work before 6am or after 4pm A owner-operator reviewer.
• Triggers include outgrowing the whiteboard, a new office manager, a lost-ticket incident, or a customer demanding e-tickets.
• Seasonality A: in the northern US and Canada, owners rarely switch systems during pour or dig season (roughly April–November). Closes and go-lives cluster from December to March, and the model now reflects that (section 12).
• Sales cycle A: 2–8 weeks to signature once a demo happens, then 30–60 days to the first live invoice. For a switch made mid-season, add a winter wait.

Evidence of pain

All of the direct evidence is vendor marketing, so it is self-reported and selected by the vendor. I found no independent user complaints. That is still the main weakness in the evidence. - A hydrovac firm reports $154,000 a year lost to lost tickets, and 4–8 hours a week keying tickets into payment portals E https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/how-hydro-vac-inc-eliminated-lost-revenue-and-streamlined-dispatching. The portal-keying detail matters: customer AP portals are now in scope (section 10). - "Some operators … did not turn in their job tickets and they were lost" E https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/see-how-the-texan-pumpers-company-eliminated-lost-job-tickets-with-rapidworks. - One pumping company ran on paper tickets stapled to a whiteboard E https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/see-how-georges-concrete-pumping-saved-time-on-paperwork-with-rapidworks. Other paper-to-tablet stories are at E https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/how-jensens-concrete-pumping-eliminated-paper-job-tickets-with-rapidworks. - Pumping services benchmark at about $235/hour E https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/procurement/concrete-pumping-services/47592020. - Removed from the pitch: v1's "$85k/year" illustration. Every reviewer pointed out that much of the apparent leakage is deliberate (waived minimums to keep a GC that sends 200 pours a year), and that a lost ticket leaves no record to audit. The audit now separates "waived on purpose" from "never captured" and claims only the second (section 9).

What users say about incumbent software

• RapidWorks has 0 Capterra reviews and claims 350+ customers E https://www.capterra.com/p/10029530/RapidWorks/. Visual Dispatch has 0 reviews and one directory calls it on-premise E https://www.capterra.com/p/29114/Visual-Dispatch/ ; https://softwarereview.com/s/visual-dispatch.
• Fleet Cost & Care rates 4.4/5 across 34 reviews, with complaints that changes are "cumbersome" and the product "clunky" E https://capterra.com/p/77670/Fleet-Cost-Care/reviews/.
• A Point of Rental reviewer reports it depends on Remote Desktop E https://www.softwareadvice.com/retail/rental-essentials-profile/.
• Implication: public reviews are too thin to show dissatisfaction either way. The calls must measure it.

3. Solution and product

v1 scope is cut to four things, following the CTO review:

1. Operator e-ticket: native app (React Native/Expo or Capacitor with native SQLite), offline-first, English/Spanish. It covers clock in/out, portal-to-portal, standby vs working time, washout, photos and customer signature by text link. Tickets go through a server-acknowledged outbox with an "unsynced tickets" badge that the dispatcher can see. A PWA is out because iOS can evict web storage and does not support Background Sync A CTO reviewer's knowledge, not re-verified. A ticket stranded on an operator's phone would recreate the lost-ticket problem. - The GPS stamp is optional per fleet and visible to the owner only, so operators do not see it as surveillance. - Printable paper fallback tickets cover outages.
2. Rate engine as a declarative rule model. Rate cards plus versioned rule objects with effective dates, so old tickets reprice the way they were originally priced. It covers: - hourly charges, minimums, and OT after N hours or after a set clock time - travel, washout and fuel surcharge - per-yard pumping charges, boom-size classes and line/hose footage - standby time, jobs that cross midnight and split POs - per-load hydrovac charges with disposal pass-through and markup - customer overrides It is backed by golden-file tests built from 10 or more real rate sheets and 200 or more real tickets collected during validation. Onboarding starts each fleet on 3–5 default rate classes and adds overrides as real invoices show them. - Sales tax is not built in-house. It is pushed to QuickBooks Online Automated Sales Tax or Avalara. The MSA says taxability is the customer's determination. Whether equipment rented with an operator is taxed as a service or a rental varies by state A CTO reviewer; not compiled.
3. Invoice PDF and accounting push. It must be idempotent and reconcilable. No invoice syncs without customer approval. - QuickBooks Online via API. - QuickBooks Desktop via IIF/CSV import at launch. A Web Connector sync, or a unified-API vendor (Codat/Rutter/Apideck class), comes before customer #10 if the calls show Desktop is common. - A payroll CSV export (QBO Payroll, ADP, Paychex) with WH-347 certified-payroll fields.
4. Audit log of every ticket edit made after signature.

After customer #10: a drag-assign dispatch board (v1 is a sortable list with drag-assign), AI order intake (a commodity feature, not a differentiator), credential tracking, a customer portal, Sage/Acumatica connectors, and 1–2 AP-portal integrations sold as paid add-ons once the calls show which portals dominate.

Credential checks are a soft block, not a hard block. The system warns, and the owner can override with a logged, attributed entry. A typo in an expiry date must never stop a 5am pour, and the vendor should not sit inside the customer's OSHA 1926.1427 evaluation chain. Expiry dates and credential numbers are stored. Medical-card images are off by default and encrypted if enabled.

Prototype: a seeded, clearly fictional "Demo Hydrovac & Boom Co." with a demo-data banner on every screen.

4. Why now (and why it may not be enough)

• Consolidation. RapidWorks is backed by Wavecrest Growth Partners and MassMutual Ventures E https://www.rapidworks.com/about/news/rapid-applications-group-raises-significant-growth-equity-financing. It acquired Visual Dispatch in July 2024 E https://rapidworks.com/blog/rapidworks-acquires-visual-dispatch-the-market-leader-in-crane-services-operations-software, FleetCommand E https://mergr.com/transaction/rapidworks-acquires-fleetcommand and CRO Software E https://rapidworks.com/about/news/rapidworks-acquires-cro-software-to-expand-into-waste-management, and now lists 11 industries E https://rapidworks.com/pricing. Customers unhappy about forced migrations could be prospects A a general pattern, not verified for RapidWorks.
• Credentials. OSHA 1926.1427 requires certified crane operators, boom trucks included E https://nccco.org/general/oshas-crane-rule/oshas-rule-faqs. NCCCO has added concrete-pump operator certification E https://nccco.org/nccco/certifications/concrete-pump-operator/recertification and boom-truck certification E https://www.liftandaccess.com/news/nccco-launches-boom-truck-operator-certification-construction-news.
• LLM order parsing and AI-assisted development lower build cost.
• The honest counterweight: none of this is defensible. CreteSuite already ships offline Spanish crew tickets, text-link e-sign, two-way QuickBooks sync, "your price list applies itself" and a diesel-index fuel surcharge E https://www.cretesuite.com/. Incumbents already hold the ticket and invoice data that a leakage report needs, and could ship one within a quarter. The real advantages available to a new entrant are distribution, service and niche focus, not product.

5. Market size (bottom-up)

Share required (revised model): - Base case: 186 cumulative wins over 5 years, which is 15–22% of the open pool. - $500k hands-off: 260–350 wins, which is 21–42%. - Bull: about 320 wins, which is 26–39%.

Against a funded consolidator and a pumping incumbent, anything above about 20% of the open pool is a stretch. That is why the Gate 0 count decides the whole venture.

Revenue pool A: 1,000 open fleets × $700 × 12 ≈ $8.4M/year serviceable. That pool alone is too small to support a $10M company in these niches.

6. Competition

The real competitor for a paper shop is $0 plus the bookkeeper, not another vendor A owner-operator reviewer. Positioning: - per-unit pricing, so operators ride free - an on-site reconciliation audit - a native offline ticket that cannot get lost - accounting that matches whatever the bookkeeper actually runs, Desktop included - hydrovac and boom-truck focus, where incumbent depth looks thinner A

7. Defensibility and switching costs

• Switching costs (rate sheets, history, accounting mapping, operator habit) are real once a fleet is live. They also protect incumbents, so the first 30 fleets should be paper and spreadsheet shops only. Switchers need multi-year ticket history kept for disputes and lien deadlines. For them, offer a fixed-fee read-only archive import, never a live-history promise.
• Product moat: none. Every claimed differentiator can be copied in about a quarter (CTO reviewer). I agree.
• Moats worth building: 1. a paid industry advisor and dealer referral network 2. rate-sheet onboarding as a craft 3. payments on invoice flow, which is sticky and scales with customer billings (modeled in the bull case; section 12) 4. contract terms that turn a roll-up acquisition into an upsell to the acquirer's other branches instead of a cancellation
• Honest assessment: a keep-or-sell-to-the-consolidator business, not a fortress.

8. Business model and pricing

List price: $395 base + $40 per registered unit, $595 minimum, on an annual contract. It is billed on registered units, not "active" ones, so revenue does not collapse in winter or a downturn. Fleets that pause get an automatic winter floor: the minimum only, December–February.

Realized ARPA in the model: $640 rising to $700 (base), down from v1's $650→$750. A $750 average would need about 9 units per fleet. The evidenced 7 is a mean, and the median is probably lower A, so many accounts will sit at or near the $595 minimum. I am not cutting further, because the target band starts at 5 units and the minimum already sets the floor.

Value test: - Sizing A: a 7-unit fleet billing about $1.5M a year (7 × ~1,000 hours × ~$235) that recovers 0.5% of true loss gets about $7.5k a year back. That roughly equals the subscription. - Implication: the ROI story is thin unless audits find 1%+, or the owner values month-end close in one day. Plan for the pitch to lean on faster cash and less bookkeeper time at least as much as on leakage.

Other revenue A: - Onboarding: list $1,500–3,000, realized $1,000 on average (v1 used $2,000). Paper shops resist setup fees, and competitors waive them for switchers. - Reconciliation audit: $500, credited against onboarding, so it is net zero in the model. - Early-start / weekend SLA add-on: about $100/month. It is not in the model. If 20% of fleets bought it, it would cover about half of on-call cost. - Payments take-rate on invoices: modeled in bull only, and shown as a sensitivity on base. It adds about $0.11M ARR in base Y5, which does not change the verdict.

Accounting API costs: Intuit's App Partner Program has a free Builder tier with metered "CorePlus" calls and paid tiers above it E https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/get-started/partner-faq ; https://www.apideck.com/blog/quickbooks-api-pricing-and-the-intuit-app-partner-program. One reviewer got an empty page from the partner FAQ, so the current tiers are U. Reconciliation reads are metered, so the model now carries a $6–24k/yr accounting and unified-API line A.

9. Go-to-market and customer acquisition

Channels (revised order): 1. A paid industry advisor. Sign a retired hydrovac or pump owner, or an ex-dispatcher, before the calls start. Pay a small retainer plus 15% of first-year subscription on sourced deals (modeled). "You've never run a pump" ends calls. An advisor fixes that. 2. Dealer and service-shop referrals for vac-truck, pump and boom-truck equipment, set up before any trade shows. 3. Founder phone calls at 5–6am or after 4pm, then on-site ride-alongs as the sales motion. 4. Regional owner peer groups and Facebook groups. Owner-to-owner referral credits. 5. Trade shows, scaled back: the marketing budget is $15k→$85k, down from v1's $30k→$130k.

Reconciliation audit (replaces "send us 90 days of tickets"): - On site, photograph 2 weeks of tickets (about 150). Pull whatever dispatch record exists (whiteboard photos, calendar, texts to operators, fuel or GPS logs) and QuickBooks invoices. - Report "jobs dispatched with no invoice" first, then recomputed OT and minimums on a sample. - Split the findings into "waived on purpose (your call)" and "never captured (true loss)", and claim only the second. - Transcription uses OCR plus an LLM, with a human checking every row. - Budget 10–25 founder-hours per audit, at $500 credited.

CAC A: - First 30 fleets: about $8–12k each once founder time, travel and ride-alongs are counted. That is the owner-operator reviewer's estimate, and I accept it. - Later: about $4–5k in cash (sales + marketing + advisor ÷ adds), plus founder time. v1's $3–4k was a residual, not a measured figure.

Onboarding A: - First 20 fleets: 30–40 founder-hours each, including a 2-week dual run against paper. - After that: about 20 staff-hours per fleet. - Support hire: at about fleet 20, not fleets 30–40.

10. Product and build plan

Months 0–6 (5–6 months to the first live invoice, not 4) A: - Native offline e-ticket with outbox. - Declarative rate engine with golden files. - Invoice PDF plus QuickBooks Online push, with Desktop IIF/CSV. - Payroll CSV with WH-347 fields. - Audit log. - Reconciliation-audit tooling (OCR + LLM + human check). Build it first, because it is also the sales tool. - Intuit security review in months 3–4. - Dispatch as a sortable list with drag-assign.

Before customer #20: - Credential soft-block and alerts. - Customer portal. - Hydrovac load and disposal tickets. - An admin tool so support staff (not founders) can configure rate sheets. - Uptime monitoring and a status page. - Backups and restore drills. - A paper-fallback runbook.

Year 2–3: a unified accounting API for Desktop and Sage, 1–2 AP-portal add-ons, card/ACH payments, and SOC 2 Type I (about $15–30k with a Vanta- or Drata-class tool). Type I is scheduled for Y3, or earlier if a large fleet or GC requires it. Y2 carries only control documentation.

Later: telematics auto-fill, crane lift-plan workflows.

11. Operating model: this is a full-time job

v1's founder-hours table did not match its own workload. Revised A:

Two operating modes, shown side by side throughout: - Founder-CTO: one founder is the full-time engineer, on call and acting GM, unpaid. Engineering cash is contract/QA of $35k rising to $120k. Owner cash profit is higher only because that labor is free. A buyer imputes about $175k A for it. - Hands-off: same path through Y3. Then 1–1.5 engineers ($210k in Y4, $250k in Y5, about 15–25% of revenue) and a GM/ops lead at about $140–145k loaded from mid-Y4. Founder hours drop to 10–15 a week only after that named GM hire. This is the only mode that meets "not a full-time job", and in the base case it loses money in Y4–Y5.

Gate on founder hours: do not plan on founders dropping to part time until (a) the GM is hired and (b) support staff configure rate sheets without founder help.

12. Financial plan (all figures A; full rows in the v2 model)

Key assumptions (each with its basis in the model): - Timing: model month 1 = March 2027, after a mid-February 2027 Gate 0. Months 1–6 are build, with no paying fleets. - Go-lives: weighted to December–March. - Downturn: Y3 is a construction-downturn year (churn ×1.5, effective ARPA ×0.93). - Churn: base 1.75%/month, about 19% a year; bear 2.25%; bull 1.25%. - Onboarding: $1,000 realized. - COGS: - $45 per fleet per month, plus $600/month fixed, plus 3% processing. - Support at 1 FTE per 60 live fleets plus 20 hours per new fleet, at $75k loaded. - On-call contractor and accounting-API lines. - Opex: E&O insurance inside G&A, a SOC 2 line, and the advisor. - Founder salary: $0 in both modes. The hands-off mode pays a GM instead.

Base case, founder-CTO mode:

• Hands-off mode, same revenue: opex is $575k in Y4 and $718k in Y5. Profit is −$182k (Y4) and −$99k (Y5). Cumulative cash need reaches about $500k.
• Y5 opex in founder-CTO mode: engineering $120k, sales $100k, marketing $85k, G&A $60k, SOC 2 $20k, travel $30k, advisor $28k.
• Gross margin of 57–63% is low for SaaS. It reflects a service-heavy product (onboarding, dual runs, 4–6am on-call), and a buyer will notice it.
• Funding: the founder-CTO base needs about $220k total, which is above the $150k plan. It fits inside $200k only if the sales hire slips a year or the first winter window converts above plan.

Scenarios, Y5:

Payments sensitivity (base): ARR becomes $1.21M. Profit is +$265k founder-CTO and −$10k hands-off. Payments help but do not rescue the base case. Bull without payments comes to $2.61M ARR and $0.97M hands-off profit.

Unit economics (Y5 base) A: - About $6.4k of contribution per fleet per year after hosting, processing and support ($8.4k subscription − ~$0.8k variable − ~$1.25k support share). - CAC of $8–12k for the first 30 fleets, then about $4–5k in cash. - A 19%/yr churn means an implied life of about 5 years, so LTV is about $32k. - LTV:CAC is about 6–7:1 on cash CAC later, or about 3–4:1 once founder time is counted, down from v1's 14:1, which every reviewer flagged as too generous. - Logo churn and revenue churn should be tracked separately from day 1.

What has to be true (Y5, base churn; from the model):

Calculator: the formula now uses average fleets for revenue, takes COGS out explicitly (support, on-call, API) and has separate inputs for engineering and for founder/GM cost. v1's "ARR × 0.80 − opex" overstated profit by roughly 10–15% of ARR in growth years.

13. Capital plan

What the funding buys A:

Milestone gates (dated to the selling season): 1. Gate 0, mid-February 2027, ≤$15k spent: all three tests in section 17 pass. 2. Gate 1, after the first winter window (model month 13, about March 2028), ≤$110k spent: at least 8 paying fleets live, invoices syncing, zero billing-accuracy incidents, and at least 80% of tickets submitted in-app. 3. Gate 2, after the second winter window (about March 2029), ≤$200k spent: at least 25 paying fleets, monthly logo churn below 2%, and a support hire configuring rate sheets without founder help. The bear case fails here, at about 17 fleets. If it does, stop: don't raise. Sell the code and customer list, or wind down. 4. Gate 3, about month 42: cash-flow positive. Decide whether to hire the GM (hands-off) or open acquirer talks.

Outside money: none in the base case if the founders stretch to about $220k. The hands-off path is not fundable from cash flow before Y5 in the base case.

14. Owner outcomes

Comparables E: Aventis EV/Revenue medians, pooled since 2015 across 543 deals: - under $5M: 3.3x (IQR 1.8–5.7x) - $5–20M: 3.2x - $20–50M: 3.0x

Aventis also says "Up to $50M, SaaS deals were priced at about 3x revenue in every size band." The 2025 median was 3.8x and Q1 2026 was 3.1x [https://aventis-advisors.com/saas-valuation-multiples-how-much-is-my-saas-business-worth/]. SaaS Capital's 4.8x is "a predicted private SaaS company valuation multiple" built from bootstrapped-company data, not a deal comparable [https://www.saas-capital.com/blog-posts/saas-valuation-multiples/]. It is no longer used. Deals with a disclosed multiple likely skew toward better assets A. A small business with 19%/yr churn, one founder holding it up and a short buyer list belongs at or below the median.

Reading the base case: - The $3.3M ARR-method value assumes a strategic buyer (RapidWorks or CreteSuite) paying for logos. - A financial buyer would pay on earnings: well under $1M at base-case profit. - A realistic base exit range is about $1.5–3.3M, and it depends on having a strategic buyer in the room.

Plain answer: see the verdict in section 1. In short, the $500k–1M target is met only at roughly bull-case volume, or with a founder working full time for free, and $10M is not met in any modeled case.

15. Risks and mitigations

16. Legal and regulatory checklist (factual; not legal advice)

• OSHA 29 CFR 1926 Subpart CC / 1926.1427: construction crane operators, boom trucks included, must be certified or qualified, and the employer must evaluate each operator separately E https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1926/1926.1427 ; https://nccco.org/general/oshas-crane-rule/oshas-rule-faqs. The product records credentials and warns. It does not make the employer compliant. The soft-block override stays with the owner.
• Concrete pump operator certification exists (CCO, 5-year validity; ACPA) E https://nccco.org/nccco/certifications/concrete-pump-operator/recertification. Whether it is legally mandated is U.
• DOT medical certificates: CMV drivers are re-examined at least every 24 months E https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/391.45. Whether a given vehicle is a CMV must be checked per fleet U.
• State and city crane licensing: not compiled U. Model credential types as data, by jurisdiction.
• Sales tax on operated rentals: varies by state and by how the invoice is itemized A not compiled. Delegate it to a tax engine; the customer determines taxability.
• Certified payroll (WH-347) for public work: export the required fields A CTO reviewer; confirm the field list.
• E-signatures: ESIGN Act and UETA. Capture intent, consent and an audit trail A confirm with counsel.
• Privacy: operator GPS, photos and medical data. Keep fields minimal and encrypted, with images off by default. Canada (PIPEDA and provincial law) is in scope from day 1 if hydrovac leads A.
• Contracts: an MSA disclaiming safety, compliance and tax determinations, with a liability cap; a DPA; customer approval before any invoice is sent.
• Insurance: tech E&O and cyber, about $10–20k/yr at scale A.
• Intuit App Partner Program security review before production access E https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/get-started/partner-faq.
• AI: disclose AI-drafted job cards, require human confirmation, and use no model providers that train on customer data.

17. 90-day plan and kill criteria (start now; finish by mid-February 2027)

Before day 1: sign the paid industry advisor.

Days 1–20: count and tag the market (test 1). - Sources: association directories, state crane-licensing rolls, Google Maps categories, dealer lists, and Canadian hydrovac sources. - Tag each firm with unit count, region, and current system (paper / CreteSuite / RapidWorks / Aimsio / other). - The share already on software in each niche is the first number reported.

Days 1–60: about 20 owner calls, at least 8 of them hydrovac, Canada included. Every call covers: - the ticket process, and how often tickets are lost or late - how they bill minimums and OT, and whether they ever waive them deliberately - the accounting system and version - which customers mandate ticket formats or AP portals - union or prevailing-wage share, and payroll provider - current software, its price, and what they dislike about it

Collect 10 or more real rate sheets and 200 or more real tickets (photos are fine) under NDA as the test corpus.

Days 30–75: three on-site, 2-week photo reconciliation audits (test 2). - At least one at a pure-paper shop. - Split findings into waived vs true loss, and record the owner's own verdict.

By day 90: deposits (test 3). Ask for a refundable $500 deposit or a signed pilot order. Show only the bannered fictional prototype.

Kill if any of these happen: 1. Fewer than 1,000 open fleets (paper, spreadsheet or unhappy) in the 5–80 band across all niches, or a median fleet size under 7. 2. Per niche: more than 50% of reachable fleets already on software. That niche is dropped as lead; if every niche fails this, kill. 3. Fewer than 2 of 3 audits show true loss of ≥0.5% of billings that the owner agrees was a real miss, and owners do not value one-day month-end close on its own. 4. Fewer than 3 refundable deposits or signed pilot orders. 5. More than 40% of qualified fleets are QuickBooks-Desktop-only or AP-portal-bound for most of their revenue, and no unified-API route costs less than $25k/yr. In that case re-scope or kill. 6. No founder commits to being the full-time engineer for at least 3 years.

Pivot options if killed: sell the reconciliation audit as a paid service (a test of whether anyone pays for the insight), or license it to an incumbent.

18. Brand

Chosen name: Tallyboom. "Tally" means the ticket count and the billing. "Boom" covers pumps, boom trucks and cranes. The name is short, sayable over a radio and not crane-only. LiftTicket was dropped because it collides with ski lift tickets. Tagline: "Every hour on the ticket. Every ticket on the invoice." .com candidates (availability not checked): tallyboom.com, rigtally.com, pourtally.com, boomticket.com, portalbill.com, liftledger.com. The palette, fonts and voice are in the brand sheet.

19. Red team and response

Three reviewers critiqued v1: a bootstrapped vertical-SaaS operator (R1), an owner-operator who has bought this kind of software (R2), and a CTO (R3). All three ran out of web-search budget and relied on direct fetches plus judgment, and they labeled which was which. For this revision I re-fetched cretesuite.com, the Aventis page and the SaaS Capital page myself. All three supported the reviewers' readings.

19.1 Where the red team was right, and what changed

19.2 Where I push back, or where the red team overstated

1. "Lead with hydrovac" (R1, R2) is a hypothesis, not a finding. No count of hydrovac firms exists in any reviewer's or my research. RapidWorks markets hydrovac as a core vertical E https://rapidworks.com/pricing, and Aimsio serves it too E https://aimsio.com/industries/hydrovac. The CreteSuite "20%+" figure is the vendor's own marketing claim E https://www.cretesuite.com/. I moved pumping to third as a default, but the lead niche is whatever the tagged list shows is least penetrated. I am not committing to hydrovac before counting it.
2. Churn of 2–2.5%/month as the base (R2) is too harsh once the contract terms change. A large part of the churn R2 describes is the winter cancellation ("we're not running, why pay?"). Annual contracts with a winter floor address that directly. I used 1.75% base, plus a downturn year with 1.5x churn, and kept 2.25% as the bear case. I could not find a cited churn base rate for SMB construction software, so this is judgment either way.
3. R3's "engineer from fleet 60 leaves about $550k of profit, still in the band" does not survive the other fixes. Combined with lower ARPA, realized onboarding, on-call, SOC 2, seasonality and higher churn, the hands-off base Y5 is −$0.10M, not +$0.55M. R1's estimate (about $100k hands-off, about $350k founder-as-engineer) was closer. My figures come out lower than R1's (−$0.10M and +$0.18M) mainly because of the 6-month build with no revenue, seasonality, and explicit SOC 2, accounting-API and advisor lines.
4. Support ratio (R1: 1 per 50 fleets). I model 1 per 60 live fleets plus 20 hours per new fleet, as separate terms. At Y5 that comes to 2.5 FTE for about 110 average fleets, roughly 1 per 44. That is slightly more conservative than R1.
5. "Median likely 3–5 pumps" (R1) is speculation. The 2018 figure is a mean, and the median is probably lower. But the target band starts at 5 units, so the $595 minimum floors ARPA. I cut ARPA to $640–700 rather than lower. Test 1 measures the actual median.
6. SOC 2 Type I in Y2 (R3): moved to Y3 with control documentation in Y2. Early customers are 5–40 unit fleets, which rarely ask for it A, and Y2 is the cash trough. The trigger is the first large-fleet or GC request, whichever comes first.
7. Payments "pull forward to Y2" (R3): accepted as a bull lever. In the base case it adds about $0.11M ARR by Y5, which is meaningful but not transformative. Payments only change the outcome if adoption and billings per fleet are well above my assumption, which is itself unsupported. It should not be treated as the rescue.
8. "Exit to RapidWorks is unlikely" (R2): partly agree. A consolidator may prefer to win on price. That is why the base exit range is now $1.5–3.3M and conditional on a strategic buyer being in the room. CreteSuite, or a buyer from an adjacent vertical, are alternatives A.

19.3 Net effect

Source list

• https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001751809/000114420418060935/tv506818-424b3.htm
• https://rapidworks.com/blog/rapidworks-acquires-visual-dispatch-the-market-leader-in-crane-services-operations-software
• https://rapidworks.com/pricing
• https://www.capterra.com/p/10029530/RapidWorks/
• https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/how-hydro-vac-inc-eliminated-lost-revenue-and-streamlined-dispatching
• https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/see-how-the-texan-pumpers-company-eliminated-lost-job-tickets-with-rapidworks
• https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/see-how-georges-concrete-pumping-saved-time-on-paperwork-with-rapidworks
• https://www.rapidworks.com/resources/customer-stories/how-jensens-concrete-pumping-eliminated-paper-job-tickets-with-rapidworks
• https://www.rapidworks.com/about/news/rapid-applications-group-raises-significant-growth-equity-financing
• https://mergr.com/transaction/rapidworks-acquires-fleetcommand
• https://rapidworks.com/about/news/rapidworks-acquires-cro-software-to-expand-into-waste-management
• https://www.cretesuite.com/ (re-fetched 2026-11-13: "20%+" pumping-revenue claim, "~1 FTE" cost, feature list)
• https://capterra.com/p/77670/Fleet-Cost-Care/
• https://capterra.com/p/77670/Fleet-Cost-Care/reviews/
• https://www.capterra.com/p/29114/Visual-Dispatch/
• https://softwarereview.com/s/visual-dispatch
• https://www.softwareadvice.com/retail/rental-essentials-profile/
• https://www.capterra.co.uk/software/1107307/C-Ment-Dispatch
• https://www.capterra.com/p/139893/Dispatch/pricing/
• https://www.forconstructionpros.com/concrete/equipment-products/product/10078068/dispatchthis-inc-dispatchthis-version-30
• https://aimsio.com/industries/hydrovac
• https://gitnux.org/best/concrete-pumping-software/ (low quality)
• https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/procurement/concrete-pumping-services/47592020
• https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-businesses/excavation-contractors-united-states/
• https://scranet.org/
• https://nccco.org/general/oshas-crane-rule/oshas-rule-faqs
• https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1926/1926.1427
• https://nccco.org/nccco/certifications/concrete-pump-operator/recertification
• https://www.liftandaccess.com/news/nccco-launches-boom-truck-operator-certification-construction-news
• https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/391.45
• https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/get-started/partner-faq
• https://www.apideck.com/blog/quickbooks-api-pricing-and-the-intuit-app-partner-program
• https://aventis-advisors.com/saas-valuation-multiples-how-much-is-my-saas-business-worth/ (re-fetched 2026-11-13)
• https://www.saas-capital.com/blog-posts/saas-valuation-multiples/ (re-fetched 2026-11-13)