Most field-service promises are kept or broken at the dispatch desk before a technician starts driving, so that is where I put my operating attention.
I am chief operating officer of Brisendale Field Services, an Indianapolis company that installs, maintains and repairs point-of-sale terminals, payment devices, self-order kiosks and digital menu boards for about 150 restaurant, convenience, pharmacy and grocery operators. Our contracts cover equipment at roughly 74,000 locations across the lower forty-eight states. Revenue was US$512 million in 2025. Amberlode Capital Partners has held 61 per cent since January 2021, with the founding family and management holding the rest. I lead 3,180 of our 3,460 colleagues, including 2,240 field technicians, and a delivery budget of US$372 million.
I started in 1993 as a dispatch coordinator for a copier-service company in Dayton, Ohio, assigning calls by telephone and a wall map. Since then I have run installation crews for a retail-systems integrator, a depot that repaired handheld scanners and receipt printers, and the support and implementation teams of a restaurant software company. I joined Brisendale in 2016 to lead remote resolution, dispatch and depot repair, and opened our nearshore centre in Querétaro, Mexico, in 2019. Each role taught me that the visible work, a technician kneeling behind a counter, depends on choices made hours earlier by someone reading a queue.
The cases on this site concern three of those earlier choices. We paid service credits that our contract would probably have let us dispute, because our own triage had lost seven hours. We committed to fewer kiosk installations than a restaurant client wanted and watched another firm take the remainder. We kept an acquired dispatch desk in Spokane open long after the deal model had closed it. Each choice cost money or revenue. I describe what we gave up as plainly as what we gained, because a board weighing a field-service business needs both halves of the account.
US$620,000 credited where our triage was at fault
After a payment processor's update disabled 11,400 terminals at 2,180 convenience stores, we credited the client for the hours our desk spent treating one fault as thousands of separate calls. A clustering rule now opens a single incident within minutes.
940 kiosk installations instead of 1,600
We declined to hire 220 agency installers for a restaurant group's 26-week rollout. The client gave 660 sites to another installer; our own crews completed 940, with 3.2 per cent needing a second visit.
An acquired desk kept for eighteen months
The acquisition model for Sallowmont Technical Services assumed US$2.6 million of annual savings from closing its Spokane desk within six months. We realised US$0.9 million in the first year and kept the region's two largest clients.
Current focus
I am rebuilding our technician scheduling so that drive time, parts collection and rest between late calls count as planned hours, rather than as the slack that makes a utilisation report look better than the week felt to the person working it.
Conversations I welcome
I would welcome one independent board seat at a private or sponsor-backed multi-site services business, starting with about 24 days a year, subject to Brisendale's consent and a careful review of client and supplier relationships.
