the founder
01
Whoever builds it, delivers it too.
I am Tico van Gerner. Time after time I took enterprise CRM systems from the first workshop to go-live, from start to finish. And time after time I saw the same thing: a project lasting months, a price per user, and a layer of consultants between the people who build the software and the people who will have to work with it.
For an organisation of five hundred or a thousand people, that model makes perfect sense. The process landscape there is bigger, often more complicated too, and then you need that guidance. It is just that the same pattern was copied downwards without a second thought, to companies it was never meant for.
And it is exactly those companies that now do the work the energy transition runs on. The installer who fits a heat pump is not done once it is mounted. First you look at the house and calculate the heat loss. Then come advice and a quote, including what the customer can expect in subsidy. And after that, maintenance runs on for years, with the refrigerant properly recorded in the logbook. A system that did all of that well, at a fair price, did not exist.
So I built it. I think the installation companies that grow in the coming years will have their whole chain in one system, from the first enquiry to the maintenance years later. And that a system like that should not demand the budget of a company of a thousand people.
what would not let go of me
02
Software locks in how its maker earns.
Look at almost any business software package and you see the same three building blocks. A price per user. An implementation project, because the system is too configurable to set up yourself. And a partner in between who did not build the software.
None of those three is a technical necessity. They are choices. And if they are choices, you can make different ones. Because for a service company of eight people, that pattern is no longer a service but a toll gate.
And the annoying part: that toll gate is not there just once. It is there for every package you add.
what happens next
03
Six systems, six partners, and glue in between.
The packages that do cover everything are so expensive that most smaller companies never start on them. So you buy separate pieces. A CRM, an accounting package, something for the quotes, something for the refrigerant logbook, something for the heat loss calculation. Each piece asks a price that is still defensible for that one piece.
That is how, in a few years, you grow to six systems and six suppliers, tied together with custom connections. And that is where it goes wrong. A connection knows nothing about the intent: it moves fields. If something changes on one side, it stops working, or it quietly writes away the wrong thing, and you only notice when the invoice does not go out.
At the first customer, that was not theory. Six packages side by side, and one of them only existed to tie the other five together. All six of them are gone now. Together they cost € 14,880 a year, and that amount comes from their own accounts.
the full sum is on customers
the reversal
04
Three building blocks, each one turned around.
01
Agent-native from the first line
Almost every system bolts AI on afterwards, as an assistant in the sidebar. Here, control runs through an MCP layer: data, custom objects, fields, import, export. That way an agent can pick up a lot of your work. You do always stay involved: it is working together, never fully separate. But working in a system without an agent? That is simply a huge waste of time.
02
Your technicians cost nothing
In this trade most of your team is in the van, not behind the system. A price per user taxes exactly those people. Here you pay 50 euros per office user per month, excluding VAT, and your technicians are not counted. The implementation is a one-off, at a fixed price we agree with you in advance. It depends on the size of your team and what needs to be moved over.
03
No consultant layer in between
An implementation partner that did not build the software itself bills the hours it takes to get it working. That exact distance between maker and user is what I take out. All the knowledge sits in one place, and your question ends up with the person who wrote the code.
honest about where it stands
05
This is young, and I do not hide that.
The system is up and it works, but it has not yet been put to the test by a great many companies. That is why I do not call the first customers customers but launching partners. They get a fixed price for two years and a direct line to the builder, and in return they help me sharpen it. I find that a more honest story than selling something that has not yet lived up to that promise.
And there is a boundary. If a company has a truly heavyweight process landscape, that is an SAP project and not a job for me. I know both of those worlds well enough to know where one ends and the other begins. Drawing that line is exactly what makes the rest credible: I know precisely what I can do very well.
the full story is on ticovangerner.nl
for those it was never built for
06
The company that plans work and carries it out at the customer's.
Enterprise software was never made for the company of five to fifty people that schedules work and carries it out on site. The installer, the refrigeration engineer, the technical service provider. They always got a stripped-down version of an enterprise idea, with the business model included. Those years on the enterprise side are not ballast to me but the proof: I know those sales and service processes because I set them up time after time at the highest level.