Waterproofing Integrity keeps out inefficiencies and enhances productivity with Zoho One

Unless you work in construction or have built a house recently, chances are you don't spend much time thinking about waterproofing. It is, however, an essential component in making buildings safe for human habitation. David Previte, the founder and director of Waterproofing Integrity, had worked in the field for over a decade before starting his own venture in 2019. Today, the company provides waterproofing design services, and onsite inspection and testing for compliance across New South Wales.

Growing from a one-page website to an operational business with staff and steady revenue is hard enough at the best of times. Throw in COVID-19 and the challenges multiply. While many businesses were scaling back, David was going in the opposite direction. To complicate things further, David was creating a novel business model. Before Waterproofing Integrity entered the market, builders had to work with independent consultants who'd charge an hourly fee for advisory services. David's business, however, operates like an agency: The team visits a site, conducts thorough inspections, and provides suggestions on a project basis. "We were essentially pioneering this new type of service and convincing people to find value in it even though they'd never heard of it before," David explained.

Throughout the pandemic, although construction projects slowed, they were still considered essential services, enabling Waterproofing Integrity to continue finding new business opportunities.

Waterproofing Integrity needed three core software systems: Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, and Zoho Books.As David explained, "The CRM is for the deal process, and then project management for delivery of service, and the accounting component for receiving payments and managing money. Everything else hovers around those three, so that was my initial logic—I needed to focus on getting these three systems in place and talking to each other."

In a previous job, David had heard about and worked with Zoho apps. And so when he was looking for effective business systems, Zoho was top of mind.

Determined to find a solution that would successfully scale with his business for the next 5–10 years, David considered multiple vendors. "I dabbled in HubSpot for its CRM capabilities but although it was good at what it did, it didn't have the connectivity I wanted," said David. He also evaluated various project management and accounting systems. "I actually used Xero for a while—it was good, too, but didn't connect well with other things I needed."

David worked with Aurelien Group, a Zoho Authorized Partner, to set up his Zoho system. The team started off with an integration between CRM, Projects, and Books. During the sales process, after explaining inclusions and exclusions, the representative sends out a proposal to the potential client. As soon as the client signs the document and the sale goes through to the deal stage, a corresponding project is automatically created in Zoho Projects as well as related folders in WorkDrive. "We'll then enter all the tasks we'll complete and use Zoho Projects to track our progress on those tasks. We then also generate invoices based on the billable hours for each of those tasks," explained David.

Having started off with Zoho CRM, Projects, and Books, the Waterproofing Integrity team now uses up to 22 apps in the Zoho One bundle, including Zoho Analytics, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Sign, Zoho Forms, custom Zoho Creator apps, as well as a range of Zoho's office apps including Mail, Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook, Meeting, and Vault.

Since implementing Zoho One, Waterproofing Integrity has seen significant benefits in terms of process efficiency. "Rather than it being a burden to make systems talk to each other, we've really been able to keep our administration quite lean and focus on delivery of service," explained David.

Another major benefit the company has gained from using Zoho is the ease of scaling staff members. "Zoho One makes it easy to bring people into the company and explain what's going on here. Onboarding would be a lot harder if I were using HubSpot and Basecamp and Xero because all of those required a lot more manual connections to people," he said.

Normally, a business that does any form of inspection, like Waterproofing Integrity does, needs to record data and write up extensive reports for clients. The most common way to do that is to take physical notes and then type it all up into a document afterwards. One of the biggest and most immediate benefits David and his team experienced with Zoho One was being able to automate a large portion of the report generating process by using Zoho Forms and document merge.

David is keen to achieve a lot more with Zoho. "Over time, we've discovered new features in Zoho, but we've also noticed significant improvements on existing features. Zoho has got to be a leader in all of the software vendors I've explored, and there's a constant updating of features. I can't say how much we notice and appreciate that," he said.

At the time of writing, the team was using 22 apps, with an intention to explore Zoho Connect and Zoho Lens. "We don't use Zoho Connect yet, but I want to in the future. I like that I can set up manuals in Connect so we can have consistent delivery of information to our team," said David.

Thanks for being such a great advocate for Zoho, David. We wish you and Waterproofing Integrity all the best!