Case study · Edmonton, Alberta
One crew. Zero back office.
Evolve Eco Blasting is an industrial surface-restoration company: abrasive blasting and substrate profiling on driveways, equipment, and structures across Greater Edmonton. Real equipment, real jobs, one crew — and nobody in an office. kr8tiv AI built the entire operations layer that runs the business between jobs.
- Office staff
- ZeroBefore and after
- Tools replaced
- NoneSame sheets, same drive
- Receipt filing
- AutomaticPhoto → ledger
- Quote turnaround
- Same dayWas three evenings
- Ops digest
- 6:30 AMEvery day, unattended
The problem
The work was never the problem. The paperwork was.
A one-crew operation doesn't fail because the blasting is hard. It fails in the gaps: a receipt photographed at a gas station and never entered, a quote that takes three evenings and goes out a week late, a deposit that lands while the job sits unscheduled, an invoice nobody chased because nobody was watching.
Every one of those is an admin problem with a dollar figure attached. The owner was doing all of it after the crew went home — which meant it competed with sleep and usually lost.
Before
- Receipts photographed, then lost in the camera roll until tax time.
- Quotes hand-built in the evenings; pricing guessed against memory.
- Schedule lived in the owner's head and in text threads.
- Follow-ups happened when someone happened to remember.
- No answer to "did that job actually make money?"
After
- A photo dropped in chat becomes a filed, categorized, logged expense.
- A job walk becomes a priced, branded quote PDF the same day.
- Every job tracked from lead to deposit to dispatch to invoice.
- Watchdog agents raise the dropped balls before they cost money.
- Per-job profit and margin, quoted versus actual, on one tab.
What we built
Five systems, wired into what they already had.
Nothing was migrated and nothing was replaced. The workbook and drive Evolve already owned became the database; the AI agents were wired in underneath them.
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01
Receipt pipeline
A photo of a receipt is read, vendor and total extracted, the image filed into the right drive folder with a dated name, and a row written to the expense ledger — no typing, no shoebox, no April panic.
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02
Quoting engine
Square footage and blast depth go in; a rate table, access factor, and mobilization come out as a branded PDF with deposit terms. A profitability check runs against media, labour, fuel, and overhead before the number is ever sent.
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03
Dispatch tracking
Every job moves through one pipeline — awaiting acceptance, booked, confirmed, in progress, complete — with the customer record, quote, and photos attached at each step.
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04
6:30 AM digest
An agent reads the whole operation before dawn and sends today's jobs, overdue follow-ups, quotes about to expire, and the leads that have gone quiet. It runs whether or not anyone remembers to ask.
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05
Watchdog agents
Standing rules that catch the expensive mistakes: a deposit received but not scheduled, an invoice unpaid past seven days, a quote unanswered, a finished job never invoiced.
How it went in
Built around a working season, not on top of it.
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Week 1 — Audit
We sat inside the operation and mapped where the hours actually went. The output was a written plan: what an agent could take outright, what needed a human, and what it would cost to build.
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Weeks 2–3 — Spine
One workbook became the single source of truth — dispatch, quotes, customers, expenses, leads — with the drive folder structure that mirrors it. No new app for the crew to learn.
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Weeks 3–5 — Agents
Receipt pipeline, quoting engine, and the scheduled digest went in one at a time, each proven on real jobs before the next was started.
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Ongoing — Care
New automations get added as the season demands them. The system watches the business; we watch the system.
“The whole back office runs on the stuff we already had. I take a picture of a receipt and it's done.”
Evolve Eco Blasting — Edmonton, Alberta
Why it transfers
Different trade, same grind.
Evolve is a blasting company, but nothing in this build is about blasting. The shape repeats in every field-service business we've looked at: someone is doing paperwork at night, pricing is set by feel, and the ball gets dropped in the gaps between jobs.
- Contractors and trades — quoting, deposits, scheduling, job costing.
- Field service and mobile crews — dispatch, photo evidence, invoicing.
- Owner-operated shops — receipts, payables, the weekly numbers nobody has time to pull.
- Professional practices — intake, follow-up, renewal and expiry watching.