We Tried Everything. Then We Built CrewHero.

The Journey Through Chaos and the Simplicity We Were All Waiting For

By Dave Fairburn, Co-Founder of CrewHero & North Point Outdoors

We didn’t just wake up one day and build CrewHero.

We earned every line of code through years of field frustration.

We’ve used — or tried — almost everything out there:

• QuickBooks: Great at reminding us we were working ourselves into the ground and not making any money.

• Service Autopilot. LMN. Aspire. Jobber: Strong CRMs, solid routing and scheduling… but they didn’t touch the crew experience.

• Slack. Teams. Zoom: Felt like overkill. Our people don’t sit at desks.

• Group texts. Post-it notes. Clipboards. Phone trees. The palm of our hands.

• At one point, I think we joked about using morse code. That wasn’t far off.

Whiteboards got cluttered.

Clipboards started smelling like fast food wrappers.

Group texts became chaos — 13 guys getting notifications for jobs they weren’t on anymore.

Passwords got forgotten.

Apps got ignored.

Company email? Forget it.

We Looked Like Amateurs — And We Were Working Our Tails Off

We had millions in revenue.

We had great trucks.

We had good people.

But it felt like we were duct taping our operation together with half-solutions and hope.

The owners were exhausted.

The managers were juggling fire.

And the frontline was left guessing every single morning.

We Weren’t Trying to Be Fancy — We Just Wanted Things to Work

What we needed didn’t exist:

• Something that wasn’t a CRM

• Something frontline workers could actually use

• Something that didn’t require training, logins, or corporate emails

• Something that connected people, equipment, repairs, schedules, and communication — all in one place

We needed a tool that was as simple to use as a clipboard, but powerful enough to end the chaos.

So We Built CrewHero

We didn’t build it for VCs.

We didn’t build it for tech press.

We built it for us — and for everyone like us.

And here’s what we hear from teams using it now:

“This changed our mornings.”

We didn’t need more tech.

We needed better tech — focused on the frontline.

Final Thought

If you’ve ever walked your shop at 6:30 AM feeling like a human game of Tetris, juggling crews, trucks, repairs, and requests…

If you’ve ever thought, “we’re too good to be this disorganized…”

Then I know exactly how you feel.

We’ve lived it.

CrewHero is how we fixed it.

Not with noise.

Not with fluff.

But with clarity. Simplicity. And respect for the people who make this thing move.

And it works.

Because this time, we didn’t build for the boss.

We built it for the crew.

— Dave