The Field Sees What the Office Can’t

Written by: Corey O'Donnell

Corey O'Donnell is Chief Brand & Strategy Officer at Simpro Group, leading platform strategy, brand, and market narrative for its AI-first platform. With over 20 years of experience scaling software companies, he specializes in turning complex technology into narratives that drive adoption and growth.

Corey O’Donnell, Simpro Group’s Chief Brand and Strategy Officer, opened the State of the Trades research session at Simprosium London with a question for the room. Does anyone here run a non-profit field service business? Intentionally, at least.

Nobody raised a hand. The research suggests plenty couldn’t be sure. In the 2026 survey Simpro Group commissioned from YouGov, 40.5% of UK respondents couldn’t state last year’s net margin. Some work in roles with no view of the full accounts. Many simply can’t measure it. Those who could averaged 9.5%, and they’re aiming for 14.8% within two years.

Corey put the cause in the respondents’ own terms:

There’s way too much chaos in the business. There are way too many variables and there are way too many struggles in the business for me to be able to effectively know how much money I’ve made.

• Corey O’Donnell

What chaos variables are

Chaos variables are the everyday disruptions that hit a trade business between the quote and the paid invoice. A flat tyre. A storm that wipes out the afternoon. A customer who isn’t home.

They come in two kinds. The loud ones are felt the moment they happen, out in the field. The quiet ones build up in the back office, like a supplier still billing for a service you cancelled months ago, and go unnoticed until they’ve cost real money.

Neither kind goes away. What the research shows is where each one lands, and why so few businesses can see the damage. It starts with the people who see the chaos first.

The field feels it

Corey describes every trade business as two businesses running at once, and the first one lives in the field. Out there, the job demands flexibility. Engineers expect the first part to fail and a second one to go in. They expect a subcontractor to leave the site unready. They adapt all day, mostly out of the office’s sight.

The field sees things that the office doesn’t see.

• Corey O’Donnell

The research shows what they’re seeing:

Some of it is plain goodwill. An engineer on site for one unit spends an extra 15 minutes checking a second, because it’s the right thing to do for the customer. Nobody bills for it.

Each of these is a change to the job, and every change has to travel back to an office that wasn’t there to see it.

The office pays for it

The second business sits in the office, and it needs the opposite: predictability. How much did we use? When did the job close? What did it actually cost? The quiet chaos variables build up here, as the field’s changes arrive late, incomplete or not at all.

That last one, in Corey’s words, is profitability itself:

I don’t know how much it costs me to deliver these services, but I know for sure that I’m not charging enough.

• Corey O’Donnell

The invoice tells the story

Asked how long it takes to invoice after a job is finished, the most common UK answer (26%) was “no consistent process.”

The only reason why you wouldn’t have a consistent process is because you don’t have a consistent system.

Growth makes it harder. Businesses with fewer than 250 staff are three times as likely to invoice on the day the job finishes (28%, against 9% of larger firms).

And most of what this costs is never measured.

The hours nobody measures

Scheduling is where the two businesses collide every day, and the research shows how little of the cost gets counted:

Confidence depends on where you sit. Among executives, 36% are very confident they can see job costs in real time. Among operational managers, it’s 18%. Corey asked the room whether anyone else could see the problem:

They say those closest to the problem have a better chance of being able to solve it and understanding it.

• Corey O’Donnell

The executives, he suspected, are a little further away from it.

When the system can’t see what’s happening, a person has to.

The person holding it together

Every change in the field has to land somewhere, and without a system to catch it, it lands on a person. Most businesses, Corey said, can point to “the one person in the back office who gets how it all works.” They know the best engineer for each job, the workaround for every quirk in the system, and the right contact on the vendor list. And they can leave.

When that happens, can your business sustain, or does that knowledge just leave the door with them?

• Corey O’Donnell

Sometimes that person is the owner, which matters most to anyone planning an exit:

If you are hoping to sell your business, but your business is you, then your business has no value without you.

The people carrying the load are already stretched. 27% of UK businesses struggle to retain experienced staff, and 23% report burnout in the field. Only 13% run on a single, fully integrated platform that could take some of the weight.

What no human can keep up with

Corey’s conclusion was that no amount of effort closes this gap:

No human being can possibly keep up with that, but AI can.

• Corey O’Donnell

The condition is the foundation underneath it. When every job runs through connected systems, an engineer closes a job on their phone and the business instantly knows the cost, sends the invoice and starts chasing payment. Layer AI on top of that, and decisions get made faster and better than any one person could manage.

Get that right, and Corey sees the industry’s own targets as too modest:

We should be targeting 20% profit margins for the business.

The chaos will keep coming. What changes is whether your business can see it.

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