Steve Jones – creator, BillyBot
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.
THE next turning point in Steve‘s life came a month or two after his father‘s death. ‘I went on holiday with my mum, and I remember thinking, I‘m not going back to that job.‘
On that trip, he decided on impulse to change everything. ‘I texted my boss and said I‘m not coming back. It wasn‘t something I‘d been planning for months. It just hit me there and then. I‘d always had the idea of working for myself, but that was the moment I actually did it.‘
He returned from holiday and walked straight into a different path. ‘I started working for other shops, picking up my own jobs, building things up on my own terms,‘ he says. ‘That period really pushed me into doing it properly. I learned everything the hard way, from scratch, but I also realised early on that small business life is tough.‘
That experience has stayed with him. ‘It made me quite passionate about making things easier for people running businesses like mine,‘ he says.
Steve has run his flooring business, Pro-Fit Floorcoverings, for about a decade but even while it was operating successfully in the background, he began to question whether it could ever deliver the life he ultimately wanted.
‘It was a small flooring business in a small town,‘ he says. ‘And to get the life I wanted, I‘d have to put so much into it. The effort-to-reward just didn‘t stack up.‘
That thinking, he explains, was never about walking away from flooring itself, but about scale and leverage. ‘If you‘re going to work hard at something, you might as well work hard at something with the biggest return,‘ he says. ‘With a flooring business, there‘s only so far you can push it before everything becomes more cost, more pressure, more overhead.‘
At its peak, the business grew into a modest team structure. ‘We went from sole trader to employing people; at one point there were about four or five of us, including me,‘ he says. ‘We‘ve had it bigger at different stages, but you learn over time what size actually works for you. Too many people and not enough work just becomes a problem.‘
Eventually, he settled on a leaner operation. ‘Now it‘s three fitters and someone in the shop; that‘s the right balance for us.‘
While the business remained profitable, Steve says the unpredictability of income was a constant challenge. ‘Cash flow in commercial flooring is a nightmare,‘ he says. ‘You can be busy, you can be profitable, but you might not see the money for months.‘
That inconsistency, combined with the limits of scale, became a turning point in his thinking. ‘You‘re constantly in this cycle where one year you think you‘re doing well, and the next it can drop off completely,‘ he says. ‘It felt like you were always fighting a battle you couldn‘t really win.‘
Was he recognising the treadmill his father and uncle had been on?
‘Yes, you just live the same life on repeat every year. And I think that‘s actually how many small business owners live without realising it. It becomes a cycle.‘
For Steve, that realisation became uncomfortable. ‘It‘s a huge problem that everyone sort of ignores. Even when you do see it, not everyone wants to change it. Not everyone wants to spend 12-hour days, every day, for years on end, just sat at a computer, not seeing friends or having a life outside of it.‘
It was that realisation, that effort didn‘t necessarily translate into long-term leverage, which ultimately pushed him to explore other opportunities outside traditional flooring, even while continuing to run the business in the background. ‘I realised it‘s the vertical you‘re in that decides where you end up. I had goals in life, but I could see I wasn‘t going to get there doing what I was doing. I needed a different vehicle.‘
ONE unexpected influence came from outside the trade entirely. ‘I was at the gym one day and the owner could see I was a bit fed up with work,‘ Steve says. ‘He told me to read The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don‘t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber. I don‘t really read books, I wasn‘t academic at all, but I gave it a go.‘
That book, he says, changed his outlook completely. ‘I just got so much value from it. It made me realise I was thinking about business all wrong. From there I started reading more, watching YouTube stuff – Diary of a CEO, Alex Hormozi – and it just snowballed.‘
Slowly, his mindset shifted from running a small flooring operation to thinking in systems and leverage. ‘That‘s when I thought about vehicles, the platform or structure that determines how far and how fast you can scale your success,‘ he says. ‘It all really started with that book, then everything just built from there.‘
Alongside his flooring career, Steve founded CrepStars, an indoor footwear brand built from the same instinct that‘s shaped much of his working life: spotting everyday problems and trying to solve them properly.
The idea, he explains, came from personal frustration. ‘I was always walking around indoors in trainers or socks. I didn‘t like slippers – they‘re like old-man slippers – so I thought, why isn‘t there something that looks like a trainer but actually works indoors?‘
What started as a casual idea soon became a serious side venture.
Drawing on the same hands-on approach he used in flooring, Steve began testing prototypes through overseas manufacturers. ‘The first version was cheap and a bit tacky, but it worked. I sold about 1,000 pairs on Amazon. They were popular, but I was breaking even because the marketing costs were so high.‘
Rather than stepping away, he doubled down on development. He brought in a shoe designer, worked through CAD designs and multiple factory revisions and spent about a year refining the product into something more considered. ‘We probably went through 10 revisions to get it right. It had to feel right as well as look right.‘
The result was the CrepStars Lambo, a laceless indoor trainer designed to combine sneaker aesthetics with slipper-like comfort, finished with lightweight materials and a memory foam fleece insole. To bring it to scale, Steve made a significant financial commitment, remortgaging his home and investing about £120,000 across stock, tooling and development. ‘I bought 3,000 pairs in three colourways,‘ he says. ‘At that point you‘re all in.‘
Steve‘s CrepStars journey took him into the world of Dragon‘s Den in 2023. ‘It‘s filmed over about two weeks in summer,‘ he says. ‘Then you find out around Christmas if it‘s going to air, and it‘s shown early the next year.‘
He initially entered with his first, less developed product, but didn‘t get through. A second application, however, secured him a place in front of the Dragons. In preparation, he leaned on advice from a contact he met at a networking event in London – someone who‘d worked with the founder of Tangle Teezer, one of the show‘s most famously ‘missed‘ investment opportunities.
‘He helped me understand what they were looking for in the application,‘ Steve says. ‘So I went down, filmed the whole thing, but it didn‘t end up airing.‘
While the experience gave him exposure, it also brought mixed outcomes. ‘It‘s entertainment at the end of the day. You‘re there to be part of a show. I didn‘t get investment, and there were bits of commentary that probably didn‘t help either – but that‘s the format.‘
Despite the disappointment, Steve continued to push the brand forward. CrepStars remained active for some time afterwards, supported by paid advertising and online sales. However, by late 2024 he began to reassess its future.
‘I realised I‘d tried everything with it,‘ he says. ‘I‘m not someone who gives up easily, but you‘ve got to recognise when something isn‘t scaling.‘
He scaled back marketing spend and allowed the business to run down organically. ‘I stopped pushing ads and just let it tick over. There was about a year where I wasn‘t sure what direction to go.‘
Rather than leave the business entirely, he redirected his focus back into flooring and other digital opportunities, including SEO-led stair-runner websites, a pivot that came from the skills he‘d picked up through CrepStars.
‘I realised I‘d learned a lot from building it: websites, marketing, all of that,‘ he says. ‘So I started thinking how I could apply that again in a different way.‘
It was that mindset, he suggests, that eventually pushed him to start thinking differently about what he was building – and what he might build next.
THE shift towards AI didn‘t arrive as a single moment but as a gradual awareness that something significant was changing. ‘ChatGPT came out and, like everyone else, I started playing around with it,‘ Steve says. ‘But I don‘t know why I got so heavily into it. I was going home and watching YouTube videos about AI when I wasn‘t working. That wasn‘t what most people were thinking at that time.‘
During a holiday in Portugal in mid-2024, he was driving down a high street when he found himself staring at the shops on either side and asking a question most people weren‘t asking yet: ‘How is AI actually going to change these businesses?‘
He started to imagine a flooring retailer who owns the shop but doesn‘t need to be in it: AI handling the day-to-day, almost like a digital shopkeeper, while the owner runs things remotely. ‘That got me thinking: how does AI fit into flooring specifically? That‘s when it really clicked.‘
He came home with a plan. ‘I started connecting the dots. Could this be used in flooring, could I build something around it? I just knew it was going to be a huge change. So I thought: I need to build something with it.‘
In order to invest himself wholeheartedly in his new project, Steve turned to his 31-year-old brother to run Pro-Fit Floorcoverings.
‘Ben has worked for me for years and likes to think he‘s better than me at flooring,‘ Steve laughs. ‘Obviously he isn‘t. But he‘s very good because I trained him.‘
Over time, Ben became the natural person to take on more responsibility. ‘I knew if I was going to build what I wanted to build, I couldn‘t have distractions. If it meant ignoring repeat customers spending thousands, then so be it.‘
Ben stepped up. ‘He‘s been running the business while I‘ve been building BillyBot. Many business owners would worry about handing control to someone else but you find out pretty quickly they can be better than you expected.‘
The decision required personal sacrifice. Steve has moved back into his mother‘s home to free up capital and time. ‘I‘ve got two sons, but I live at my mum‘s now,‘ he says. ‘I did that to give myself the financial runway to build this. You can‘t build something like this if you‘re out fitting floors 12 hours a day just to pay a mortgage. If you‘re doing that, you‘ve got no capacity left to build anything else.‘
The name changed once before landing. Steve initially called it Tradie Brain, but it felt too generic and trade-broad and crucially, wouldn‘t travel. ‘In Australia you say tradie, in America it‘s contractor, so it already falls apart if you try to scale it.‘ BillyBot stuck because it does several things at once: it sounds human, it references billing and invoicing, and it doesn‘t lock you into a geography. ‘People ask if I‘m Billy,‘ he says. ‘But that‘s fine – it sticks in your head.‘
WITHIN a week of returning home from Portugal, Steve had already started building. ‘I didn‘t know how to build anything at all,‘ he admits. ‘I didn‘t know what an API was. I remember finding out for the first time that an API can connect to systems like Sage or Xero. I was like, what? That was unreal to me.‘
He began exploring automation tools, initially through Zapier, but quickly realised their limitations. ‘As soon as I started using it, I knew it wasn‘t going to cut it. So I just started learning everything as I went.‘
The first problem Steve tried to solve using BillyBot was quotes, and it wasn’t straightforward. But that worked in his favour because he got the toughest part out the way first. ‘Everything starts with a quote. It‘s also one of the biggest drains on time and money. You go out to site, measure up, gather the details, then head back to the office, calculate areas, check supplier pricing, add your margins, and manually build the quote in something like Quote Builder or Sage. It‘s a long, manual process, and often you‘re doing it for jobs you might not even win. So if you can streamline that, you‘re saving a huge amount of time and effort. That‘s where AI can make the biggest difference in flooring.‘
The early version of BillyBot was extremely basic. ‘It was all text-based at first. I was literally writing job details in my phone notes thinking, what if I could just paste this into a message and it replies with a quote?‘ The reality, he says, was far more complex. ‘It was a mess to start with. Quotes were wrong, data wasn‘t structured properly: it just didn‘t work like that.‘ Still, the process hooked him. ‘I just got obsessed with the idea that you could automate something and get a result instantly.‘
His background in music production also shaped how he understood the logic. ‘I made music on Fruity Loops, DJing when I was younger. Automation flows are actually quite similar to building music. You‘re linking things together to get an output.‘
Despite having no coding background, he taught himself as he went. ‘I‘m glad I learned it the hard way, because now I actually understand what‘s going on under the hood. I started before AI could just build everything for you.‘
He‘s also seen how quickly the technology has evolved. ‘When I first started, AI was rubbish: you had to give it every tiny detail and even then it wouldn‘t be reliable. It‘s completely different now.‘
He adds: ‘What I‘ve built has only just become possible in the last year. So I‘m new to it like everyone else except that I‘ve been building it from the start.‘
How did his background in flooring shape the way he built the software? The obvious answer, says Steve, is workflows.
In commercial flooring, he explains, the process is clearly defined. Quotes turn into jobs, jobs get booked in, then come the job sheets, risk assessments, method statements and finally invoices. ‘That‘s the backbone of the business. AI should be able to handle that.‘
His years on the tools meant he could build those flows with the level of detail a flooring company actually needs. ‘You could apply this kind of system to other trades,‘ he says, ‘but flooring has its own specifics. And that‘s what makes it work properly.‘
But BillyBot‘s USP is saving time and money for contract flooring businesses. How well does it fare on that count? ‘For a sole trader, or someone with maybe one fitter, the saving is mainly time,‘ said Steve. ‘You‘re fitting during the day, then pricing and doing admin in the evenings. BillyBot can take a lot of that off your plate.‘
Realistically, he adds, you could save about two hours a day – that‘s about 10 hours a week. ‘If you value your time at, say, £30 an hour, that‘s £300 a week, or £1,200 a month in time saved. You‘re not physically getting that money back, but you‘re freeing up that value in your time. When you compare that to a subscription cost, it‘s a no-brainer. More importantly, it means you‘re not going home and doing quotes late at night. You can get everything done during working hours instead.‘
Interestingly, feedback from users has allowed him to change and improve his product, which is exactly what he wants. ‘I can build something that works for me, but to make it work for everyone, it needs input from the people using it.‘
A good example is lead management. He was generating leads through Facebook and Instagram but hadn‘t really thought about how others handle that. ‘When leads come in, you need to follow them up quickly, and a lot of people were struggling to keep up. So I built a lead management flow on top of the existing quoting system. It helps track and nurture leads properly instead of letting them go cold. There are loads of smaller tweaks as well – pricing adjustments, surcharges, little features that come directly from users. If someone suggests something useful, it can be built in quickly. That‘s how it keeps improving.‘
NOT everyone is as enthusiastic about AI as Steve. Newspaper headlines have spewed out endless examples of the AI onslaught on white collar jobs, and fear among tradespeople is real too. Steve is matter-of-fact about it.
‘Fear is usually the first reaction, especially in smaller, family-run businesses. People worry it‘s going to take their job. But that‘s only if you choose to use it that way. The better way to look at it is as a multiplier. Whatever effort you put in, AI increases the output. It makes you more productive with less effort. That gives you two choices: either grow the business and increase profit or keep things as they are but with less workload.‘
The pitch is: less stress, more time, the ability to run your business from anywhere. ‘It‘s not about replacing people. It‘s about making what you already do more efficient.‘
Steve is convinced AI will become as normal as the internet. ‘People are already signing up to tools like BillyBot and putting AI into their day-to-day business, so it‘s not a future thing, it‘s happening now. It might feel slow at first, but once contractors see others using it with faster pricing, more efficient working and winning more jobs it‘ll snowball. Within a year to 18 months, the mindset flips. Instead of asking why use AI, people will be asking why aren‘t you using it.‘
The internet analogy is one he returns to. If you were still sending quotes by post while everyone else had moved online, you got left behind. ‘This will be the same, but on a much bigger scale. AI itself isn‘t new, it‘s been around for years. But it‘s only recently become good enough to actually deliver in a practical way. And it‘s only going one way. The improvement is exponential, getting better and faster all the time.‘
As for BillyBot, Steve isn‘t looking beyond flooring yet. The aim is to make it the AI operator for flooring businesses, handling everything around the job, so the only thing not managed by AI is the actual installation. Quotes, admin, communication, workflows: all of it sitting with BillyBot.
‘It already does a lot, but the long-term vision is to manage the full process end-to-end,‘ he says. Other English-speaking markets such as Australia and the US are obvious next steps, and the core structure could eventually be adapted for other trades. ‘But that‘s a long way off, if it happens at all. The priority is making BillyBot the go-to AI platform for flooring.‘
When I ask who he wouldn‘t mind being stuck in a lift with, his answer is predictable: Elon Musk. Does he fancy himself as the tech bro of the flooring industry? Of course he does.
‘That‘s exactly what I want to be. There‘s a clear opportunity for someone to become the face of AI in flooring, in the same way other industries have recognisable figures for marketing or digital strategy. I want to get into YouTube and content, because that‘s how people learn now. Flooring needs that for AI and BillyBot is aiming to be right at the centre of that action.‘
Resistance is futile.
