Eugene Koltakoff

I ran a plumbing company for twelve years. Trucks, techs, callbacks, payroll on Friday, the whole thing. That is where I learned how this business actually runs, which turns out to be a separate education from the one that teaches you how it is supposed to run.

Now I build pricebooks. Mostly inside ServiceTitan, mostly for HVAC, plumbing and electrical shops that already have the trucks and the people and cannot work out where the money went. Half of that job is data and the other half is teaching. Somebody has to put six hundred line items in order, and somebody has to sit with the owner afterward so he can read what he is looking at.

What I argue

The people who do the work with their hands sit on one side of a canyon. The people who build the software sit on the other. Standing in both places is rare, and what gets sold as the bridge usually turns into one more thing the hands-on man cannot use. Standing in the middle of that is what I bring to a company.

I have written that out properly, along with the two arguments that come off it, in the thesis.

Where the writing comes from

Everything on this site started as something I watched happen inside somebody's account. The names come off before anything gets published, and so do the figures, unless I measured them myself in a book I had open.

I listen widely. Client calls, audits, podcasts, conferences, a conversation at a supply house counter. That is how this trade has always learned. What goes up here is my own understanding of why a thing behaves the way it does, written in my own words. Somebody else's customer story stays with whoever told it.

This site sells nothing

koltakoff.com carries my name, and I keep it for thinking out loud. The work itself, the tools and the instructional material live atTitan Tech Tools, which is my company. If you want to know what the work looks like before you go over there, this page covers it.

Elsewhere

I post most of this on LinkedIn as well, which is the easiest place to reach me. The company isTitan Tech Tools.