The July edition of CFJ will contain an exclusive interview with Steve Jones, founder of Pro-Fit Floorcoverings in Yeovil. Steve has developed an AI app called BillyBot which aims to make life easier for flooring contractors – and, crucially, to save them time and money.
Read the full story in our July edition. Here is an excerpt:
RESISTANCE is futile. It isn’t something Steve Jones ever actually says. But spend an hour with the man, and you’ll find yourself thinking it anyway.
Walking to the back lobby area of The Flooring Show South at Sandown Park in April, I almost walked past his gimmick-free stand with its simple pitch: ‘Stop doing admin: quotes, invoicing, RAMs, diary, MTD compliance, customer follow-ups – Billy does the work for you. Scale without the extra wages.’
I stopped and asked the man behind the stand what he was selling. ‘BillyBot,’ said Steve. ‘Software to manage your flooring business by getting AI to do your mundane tasks.’
We got talking and I raised the obvious: AI coming for my job. Steve didn’t bite. ‘It’ll make your job a lot easier. When used correctly AI is about efficiency rather than job replacement.’
He’s no evangelist, and he won’t bore you with buzzwords or vision statements. But he’s utterly unapologetic about one thing: this technology is coming, and the only sensible move is to get ahead of it.
I set up a post-event interview with him. What follows is fascinating reading, and if you run a contract flooring company – essential.
Steve was born in 1989 in Yeovil, Somerset, where he still has strong roots, dividing his time between there and Bournemouth, where his partner lives. ‘My two boys are in Yeovil,’ he says, ‘so I’m kind of split between the two.’
School wasn’t for him. He got a C in maths and left at 16. ‘I was working a week after I left,’ he says. That work was floorlaying: his father and uncle were already at a local flooring business, and Steve followed them in.
He took to it immediately, and hard. ‘I just started work and never really stopped. I was always properly grafting. Even at a young age I realised I was working too hard for someone else but back then you don’t think like that, you just crack on.’
He developed a reputation for pace without compromise. Left alone on jobs, he’d power through them. ‘The boss would come back and be like, what’s happened here?’ He ran council housing projects solo: kitchen and bathroom flooring, site management, the lot. ‘That probably taught me more about managing work than anything else.’
His colleagues had a name for him. ‘They called me the tornado,’ he says with a laugh. ‘Flying round jobs, getting everyone else up to speed as I went. Chaos at times but we got the work done.’
The drive, he says, was never really about flooring. It was about being good at something. ‘If you’re good at it, you stand out, and that’s where the money is, because there’s less competition.’ He couldn’t switch off. Ate on the go. Went to bed thinking about the next job. ‘I was quite skinny back then,’ he says. ‘I just didn’t stop.’
Then, in his twenties, his father died unexpectedly. Not long after, his uncle too. It shook him to his core.
‘Both of them spent their whole lives doing the same job in Yeovil. My worst fear was I’d go the same way in exactly the same place. When I went to the funerals, the eulogies recalled their love for their jobs as floorlayers. I was like – what? I’m not doing this.’
It’s not the story you expect when you ask someone how they got into flooring. But Steve’s journey has more twists and turns than a twist pile carpet.
READ THE FULL STORY IN JULY CFJ
