Will Cauthen

80M active monthly Power Platform users is insane. Hardest part of these conferences (PPCC) is choosing the right session

Heading to Power Platform Vegas conference next week. Had Claude give me a top 10 session list based on our past 30 days of work. Some hidden gems that I wouldn't have picked otherwise

Pretty wild but I’ve capped out on what I can ship this year and the changes that teams can absorb. Agentic tools w/ power platform have 10-20xd our building output this year. Shifting over to building some fun prototypes that I haven’t seen in the roofing space 🤠

Has anyone in the home services space doing 10m+ dumped wordpress for a static site? GitHub + cloudflare pages for hosting, workers to forward lead submissions to my CRM webhook. Am I missing something obvious? Hard to ignore the extreme benefits of building with CC/Codex

Reminder to drive large & heavy family vehicles because people get this question wrong.

Azure functions are so sick. I built a niche pdf combining function for our digital estimates earlier this year. It costs me $0.36/mo to run lol

Reminder to buy more $AAPL

Tbh prioritizing low code over AI will benefit a small business more. I started building Fall ‘21 (Power Apps) and it changed my life and career path. Get your data structured and data relationships first then throw the boosters on. Background was Sysadmin/ Datacenter. Good troubleshooting skills and naturally curious. A little experience with SQL and knew a few dozen excel formulas. Fast forward to today; we just passed 20k estimates in our core estimating app. You can do some WILD stuff with low code and a sprinkle of pro code. I would put our estimating app up against any other roofing company’s in the industry. My only regret is not getting into coding/development earlier!

GM

The @Ubiquiti POE G5s are crazy great value for home security cameras. Ton of great features and the push notifications are legit. I would never buy a wireless one, for reliability and maintenance reasons. You can learn how to run and terminate a CAT6 with 10 mins on YouTube

Dropped my buck off at an Amish processor today. 45 min drive north of sunbury. All paper business, 2 day turn around time, crazy work ethic.

OpenAI’s advanced voice mode is really really good

MS Dynamics Field Service looks pretty awesome for a mid sized service business. Barely any Youtube / blog content on it. MS Partners say "mmm that's a six figure implementation". What am I missing?

We run a legacy ERP called ComputerEase (Deltek) No APIs, but you can import job files (usually 4-5 for a job, including purchase orders). CSVs and XMLs. Really tedious, a ton of clicks and movements. Last week, I automated it. I set up a @powerautomate @MSPowerPlat desktop flow (unattended RPA). It took about 15 hours to learn RPA basics, build the flow, build exception handling and test it. First live successful run = 🤯, wait.. that actually worked!? Now, when an estimator turns a job in (Microsoft Power App w/ Adobe Sign integration), it kicks off the desktop flow and handles job creation and PO creation, with all necessary material and labor items.

We had a 3hr+ outage the other day that took out power and fiber. We fired up a generator and deployed our backup Starlink unit. VoIP calls performed great between staff and customers. For the price point, it really is a modern marvel

Power Apps stack rolling into the roofing season

I recently wrote my 5th blog article about leveraging Power Automate (@MSPowerPlat) to use the APIs of @housecall and @dialpad to send reminder text messages for estimate appointments. It was pretty fun to figure out. Check it out cauthenit.com/housecallpro-d…