Able Leak Detection is a specialist pool and spa leak detection business scaling from owner-operator branches toward a national franchise network. The problem wasn’t the trade — it was the plumbing behind it. Enquiries landed in one system, jobs were managed in another, and someone had to re-key every client’s details by hand to move a lead from “website enquiry” to “booked job.” For a high-volume operation run largely by one person, that manual handover was a daily time sink and a constant risk of jobs slipping through the cracks. And as ALD looked to standardise across franchise territories, that fragmented way of working was impossible to replicate cleanly — every new branch would inherit the same mess.
Freewave came in as ALD’s digital operations partner — not to sell a platform, but to design the system behind the business. Instead of forcing everything into one tool, we mapped how the business actually runs, from first enquiry to a signed, scheduled job, and designed an architecture where best-fit tools talk to each other automatically. We deliberately tested and ruled out the alternatives before committing to a Formitize, ServiceM8 and Zapier stack — choosing the right tools for ALD’s scale, not the flashiest. And every piece was built and proven in a sandbox first, so nothing touched a real customer until it had been tested end to end.
A fully automated enquiry-to-job pipeline. A website enquiry flows into the CRM, and a single click pushes it into the job-management system — carrying every client and site detail across automatically, with no double entry. When a job is dispatched, the customer is automatically emailed and the job is flagged so the team can see its exact status at a glance; when the customer signs the digital agreement, that status updates itself. Underneath sits an automation layer engineered to handle the messy real-world edge cases that usually break these integrations. Around the core pipeline we set up a national 1300 phone system routing calls straight into job management with recording, unified email across the business, and a roadmap of further automations.
Enquiries now move from the website to a booked, signed, scheduled job with the client’s details carried across automatically — the manual double-entry and the dropped-ball risk are gone. The team sees every job’s real status at a glance, and a high-volume operation runs lean without an office team behind it. The whole system went live with zero disruption, run in parallel with the old process until it was proven.
What began as one branch’s automation became the operating template for the entire ALD franchise network. Freewave is now ALD’s network-wide digital operations partner — the NSW build is the standard every new franchisee is onboarded onto, with a connected digital setup built into the franchise package itself. The outcome is a business that can grow across territories without each branch rebuilding (or breaking) its systems. The trade is leak detection; the real product Freewave delivered is the connected operating system the franchise scales on.
