For $8 a month, this company will track your tools

A few months ago, we had some tree work done on our property, and while here the crew left behind a water bottle, a rake, and a chainsaw. When we called to tell them, they weren’t concerned about the water bottle and rake; it was, however, worth it for them to come and fetch the chainsaw. But what if we hadn’t called?

It’s possible that such a valuable piece of equipment would be counted as lost, costing the business money and — until they purchased another chainsaw — productivity. Preventing gear from being lost and/or finding it once it has been is one reason businesses are interested in asset tracking services. But the current process and business model associated with trackers can make it hard to track anything but the most expensive items, such as cars or large equipment. So a company called Momentum IoT hopes to bring that price down.

Momentum IoT, a SaaS-based asset tracking business based in Long Beach, Calif., has created Toolie, a tiny device that affixes to customer equipment and works in conjunction with the company’s car-based cellular gateway, which is known as the Eagle One. To date, customers have been putting an Eagle One in their trucks to track their fleet of vehicles. Now they can use it to extend their tracking capabilities to the Toolie.

The Toolie is about the size of a quarter, and uses Bluetooth to talk to the Eagle One. It also contains an accelerometer which can be used to indicate when someone is using a tool. The combination of tracking and tool usage data opens up a bunch of use cases for customers. According to Momentum CEO Justin Silva, the Toolie has been in beta testing for the last three months and he’s already impressed with some of the use cases people have come up with.

For example, a customer in the landscaping industry uses the Toolie to track how productive employees are across different jobs and then rewards the highest performers (and presumably dumps the worst ones, although in this labor market that seems unlikely.) The customer can see when tools such as a lawnmower, an edger, and a blower are unloaded from the truck and how long each of them are in use, as well as the time spent driving to each job. Tracking which tools are in use at what times also helps the customer better pace jobs, because certain tools are only used at the end of an engagement.

David Clifford, the COO of Turfmaster Lawn Maintenance Inc. in Indianapolis, told me that he’s using Toolies to make sure the right tools for the job are on a truck when the truck goes out. He can also use them to see if something has happened to stop a job so he can go out and check on the crew. But mostly he’s appreciative of the devices because they help him show his clients that his crew was where they were supposed to be, on time, and doing the work that they hired Turfmaster to do.

Several of his clients are municipal entities, and he’s constantly dealing with competitors trying to disparage his work in the hope of getting the public contract for themselves. But with the documentation provided by the software, he can defuse those accusations with data. He also plans to use Toolies to track necessary maintenance. As he said to me, since he can use a Toolie to track how many hours a piece of equipment runs, he can easily see what needs maintenance at the same time.

“To be able to make money nowadays, you’ll need to be better able to understand your business and analyze the data,” Clifford told me. Given the pressures of the labor market and the almost commodity nature of the landscaping business, it’s not enough to simply show up and do a job.

Clifford currently has seven Toolies. He’s affixed them to snow removal equipment, lawnmowers, blowers, and some heavy earth-moving equipment. And he’s sure that the more stuff he can track, the more he can improve his operations, so he’s excited to see costs come down even further.

Clifford pays $12 a month for the Eagle One devices in his fleet and $8 a month for each Toolie, which is less than what his prior fleet tracking company charged him. The prior supplier charged him for the devices for his cars as well as a $15-a-month service fee, but it is now getting out of that business. The all-SaaS model is also a plus for Clifford.

Silva told me the all-SaaS model is a big differentiator for Momentum. Each Toolie device will have a roughly two-year battery life, and when the backend software sees the battery getting low, the customer will get a notification and Momentum will ship out a new Toolie. The payback on the Toolie, Silva said, is really fast.

I like the model. I also like the idea of a future in which you can track smaller and smaller tools used in lawn maintenance, construction, building cleaning, and other use cases. A lot of companies providing these services are small, so the ability to easily pull data off of their equipment could really help them compete against bigger operations or at the very least, keep costs down in the face of inflation.

This is where the IoT can shine, using cheap connected devices, cloud analytics, and data to make the invisible visible.