The distance between a gamma-ray camera and a residential furnace is roughly half a century, several industries and one kitchen table. John Steidley has worked at both ends of it. In the 1970s, he studied engineering physics and nuclear engineering at Ohio State, where his graduate work centered on medical instrumentation. In 1976, he and Philip A. Schlosser filed a patent for a gamma-ray camera designed to improve imaging resolution. In 2009, after a long career in medical imaging, Steidley founded Intelligent Mobile Support. Its best-known product would eventually help HVAC contractors arrange equipment, payments and signatures on a tablet.
This is an odd career only if the hardware gets all the attention. Look instead at the job. A detector turns signals into an image a professional can interpret. A proposal app turns technical possibilities into choices a homeowner can judge. In each case, complicated information arrives at a consequential moment, and the design must make it useful. Steidley’s working life has been an extended argument for that kind of translation.
An engineer learns to sell the invisible
Steidley’s Ohio State years compressed a great deal into a small span. His public résumé lists a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics, magna cum laude, followed by master’s and doctoral work in nuclear engineering. It also records membership in Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Pi Sigma, a four-year university fellowship and a graduate award for research and creative achievement. The patent from that period concerns aliasing in an orthogonal-strip detector: the sort of problem that punishes anyone tempted to substitute enthusiasm for precision.
4,047,037
“Gamma ray camera for nuclear medicine,” filed in February 1976 and granted in September 1977, names John W. Steidley and Philip A. Schlosser as inventors.
He began his industry career as director of instrumentation at Radiation Monitoring Devices, then moved to Picker International as a product-line manager for nuclear medicine. In 1984 came Philips Healthcare. Over the years he occupied posts in clinical science, clinical support, magnetic-resonance marketing, vascular systems, cardiovascular products, X-ray, diagnostic imaging and global CT marketing. The sequence matters. Steidley did not travel directly from laboratory bench to corner office. He moved repeatedly across the seams between technology, the people who sell it and the people expected to use it.
By the early 2000s, trade publications were quoting him on the practical consequences of imaging innovation. Discussing C-arms, he put the point plainly: “Being able to see the stent graft with C-arms is what makes the procedure available.” Talking about the race for more CT slices, he was equally alert to economics. A 256-detector panel might be technically possible, he noted in 2006, but a $5 million price was not reasonable. The engineering question and the buying question had to occupy the same room.
“We no longer see a slice barrier driven by technology.”John Steidley, discussing CT detector development in 2006
The phone becomes a field manual
When Steidley started Intelligent Mobile Support in the Cleveland area, the iPhone was two years old. His first thesis was broader than HVAC. Field employees carried increasingly capable phones, yet the knowledge they needed was often stranded in binders, inboxes and office servers. The company proposed short educational material, direct access to experts and discussion features for mobile workers. Steidley described the ideal unit of information as something a busy person could absorb in two or three minutes.
The early customer was familiar: a medical-equipment company whose distributors needed product knowledge while away from headquarters. By August 2010, Intelligent Mobile Support had six customers even though Steidley was its entire sales and marketing staff. He said he had bootstrapped the business and was seeking capital to add a small team. A year later, he was presenting mobile learning to a professional training association and publishing a Mobile Strategy Guide.
The clever part was not putting documents on a phone. Dropbox could do that. The useful part was recognizing that information has a half-life in the field. A sales representative facing a question does not want the corporate library; a service technician does not want to remember which training folder contains the answer. They want the next useful piece, now. That attention to the immediate workflow would survive even as the company’s market became much more specific.
The kitchen table is a peculiar enterprise market
Residential HVAC gives software plenty to untangle. A comfort consultant must identify suitable equipment, account for accessories and labor, explain efficiency tradeoffs, protect a margin, present financing and record enough detail for an installation crew. The homeowner is often making the decision because something has broken. There may be three options, or too many options, or a single option that feels suspiciously like an ultimatum. The room is warm. Patience is not an infinite resource.
Sales Builder Pro concentrates on this encounter. It lets contractors construct multi-option proposals, compare ways to pay, display product material and collect a signature. Later additions reached outward: remote approvals, proposal-pipeline tools, installation-risk checks, field-service integrations and ductless-design calculations. A Fujitsu partnership announced for 2023 added configuration tools that account for local climate and altitude and can work without an internet connection. The stated ambition was wonderfully concrete: configure, quote and finance a ductless system in one trip.
“Simply put, our goal is to create the best possible buying experience.”John Steidley on the Fujitsu ductless partnership
Steidley’s writing about sales is less theatrical than the genre usually permits. He is interested in the architecture of choice. One price corners a buyer. Two can make one option appear right and the other wrong. Three often provide a comfortable middle. Yet he also warns that there is no magic number for every customer. Some want a recommendation; others will keep shopping. The seller’s task is not to display every possibility. It is to help the customer make a legible decision.
That idea shaped a major release of the app. Contractors could move beyond generic “good, better, best” labels and name packages for the thing a customer valued: lower utility bills, a home office or a healthy-air package. Payment choices could sit next to equipment choices. Details could be revealed when useful and hidden when they became clutter. It was choice architecture with work boots on.
A second act built on the first
The temptation in a founder profile is to treat reinvention as a clean break. Steidley’s story is more useful because it is untidy. Intelligent Mobile Support began with one market and found another. The founder exchanged a large corporation for a small Ohio software company. Medical-imaging systems and HVAC proposals share few components, customers or acronyms. Yet his old habits kept showing up: respect the technical detail, understand the sales channel, fit the existing workflow and make the benefit visible.
Former colleagues describe a competitive, hard-working manager with an intuitive feel for product launches, a close focus on the customer and an unusually supportive manner with his teams. The combination is worth noticing. Technical authority can produce a lecture. Commercial urgency can produce pressure. A useful product conversation needs rigor without intimidation. At the kitchen table, the homeowner has to feel informed, not examined.
The company’s recent work points toward durability rather than novelty. In July 2026, Sales Builder Pro announced that it had completed a SOC 2 Type II examination covering security, availability and confidentiality controls over a 12-month period. Steidley framed the milestone around trust and operational discipline: controlled releases, access management, monitoring, governance and incident planning. These are unglamorous nouns. They are also what customers depend on after the demo ends.
There is a pleasing symmetry here. Steidley’s first documented invention tried to improve the resolution of an image by controlling misleading frequencies. His later company tries to improve the resolution of a purchase by controlling clutter, confusion and missing information. One instrument looked into the body. The other looks into a sales process. Both insist that seeing more is not automatically the same as seeing clearly.
His public comments across the decades also reveal a consistent test for innovation: what becomes possible for the person using it? A C-arm mattered because a clinician could guide a procedure. A new detector mattered when it could cover an organ without becoming absurdly expensive. Mobile learning mattered when a field representative could retrieve an answer before the customer lost interest. And proposal software matters when a contractor can explain the work accurately, give a homeowner an honest set of choices and send the installation team a complete record. The technology earns its place by removing a practical obstruction. It is an engineer’s standard, but also a courteous one. Nobody at the far end of the product should have to admire its complexity.
A long career rarely proceeds by grand design. It accumulates useful obsessions. For Steidley, the persistent one appears to be the last mile between a sophisticated system and the person who must trust it. The distance may be only the width of a scanner console, a smartphone or a kitchen table. It has been enough room for a life’s work.