Two people peer through the window of a locksmith’s van on a city street. On its side, the vehicle advertises commercial, residential and auto work. Steven Gottfried submitted the picture to a ServiceChannel van photo contest and won. The company called it ironic. A locksmith’s van, with people inspecting it from the outside, is certainly an invitation to wonder where the keys have gone.
It is a small, pleasing joke from a career spent taking service work seriously. Gottfried co-founded ServiceChannel in 1999 with Serge Lubensky. He helped build software for a world of repair requests, contractors, invoices and buildings that require attention at inconvenient moments. Long before facilities management became a subject for investment presentations, he was learning how the contractor’s business actually worked.
His career offers an unusually practical way to think about technology. Start with the person doing the job. Follow the information that person needs. Then notice how often it gets stranded somewhere else. The recurring subject of Gottfried’s companies is the distance between work happening and everyone involved knowing what happened.
A keyboard at Gotham Air
The beginning belongs to air conditioning. Gottfried interned at Gotham Air, learning the workings of a commercial mechanical service business while studying at George Washington University. In 1986, Herb Natiss needed someone who understood both computers and the company. Gottfried began writing the software that became Gotham’s internal system.
The circumstances matter. This was software developed inside the business it was meant to serve. The work had names, equipment and customers attached to it. A service company had to organize what its people were doing, and a computer offered a way to make that organization less dependent on information passing from one person to another.
Gottfried’s subsequent contractor software business gave him experience with enterprise resource planning for service contractors. By 1989, he was building a company around that need. His early career put him close to the service provider’s side of the transaction, a perspective that would remain useful when he began connecting providers with the organizations buying their work.
There is a certain advantage to discovering an industry’s administrative difficulties before discovering its market size. The difficulties supply the product brief. Gottfried’s route into software began with a functioning business that needed help keeping track of itself.
- Inside the contractorSoftware to organize a service business.
- Across the transactionServiceChannel connects facilities teams and providers.
- At the equipmentEquip ID attaches a digital identity to the asset.
The gap between two businesses
ServiceChannel shifted the unit of attention. A contractor could have its own system, and a retailer could have its own records, yet the relationship between them still needed organizing. Gottfried and Lubensky built a platform around that shared territory. Facilities teams could find providers, manage work and handle payment while retaining visibility into the transaction.
The principle becomes easier to see through an actual customer. In 2013, CraftWorks Restaurants & Breweries selected ServiceChannel for 140 locations, including Old Chicago, Gordon Biersch and Rock Bottom. Its facilities director, Jack Jones, described a cumbersome manual process for repairs and contractor tracking. Keeping the company’s existing contractors was a selling point.
That detail explains the appeal more clearly than a software category does. CraftWorks wanted better coordination without surrendering those working relationships. Its restaurant managers also had another job waiting for them: looking after guests. The proposed improvement was quite concrete. Requests, work orders, invoices and payments would become easier to follow across a collection of restaurants.
For Gottfried, connecting facilities managers directly with contractors was central to the proposition. It gave the customer a way to see the work and its costs across locations. The repair still required a person with the right skills. The surrounding transaction could become less laborious.
Recognition from the people using it
In April 2011, Gottfried accepted PRSM’s Vendor of the Year award on ServiceChannel’s behalf. Retailers and industry vendors voted for the recipient. At the same conference, he was elected to the association’s board. The company had been operating for more than a decade; the recognition came from the community whose daily routines it was trying to improve.
This is one of the more revealing parts of his career. Facilities technology depends on relationships among people with quite different responsibilities. Store operations, contractors and finance may all care about the same repair for different reasons. An industry association offers a place for those perspectives to meet, outside a product demonstration or a contract negotiation.
Gottfried’s involvement continued through committees, advisory work and international activity. In April 2018, in Nashville, PRSM presented him with its Lawrence W. Whelan Lifetime Achievement Award. The honor recognized his contribution to the profession and his willingness to share knowledge with colleagues. The association, now ConnexFM, continues to list him among its past recipients.
“Retail is evolving and the online revolution will continue.”
Steven Gottfried, 2018
His comments around that award looked toward a trained, mobile workforce and the need to attract people into the industry. It was a fitting concern for someone whose software career had begun beside the work itself. Better information still needed people who could use it.
Leaving, with another company in mind
In June 2017, ServiceChannel announced that Gottfried and Lubensky would leave to establish Re:Tool Ventures. The new technology investment firm would focus on commercial facilities and contractor applications that could extend the platform’s usefulness. It was their third company together over roughly 25 years.
The move followed Gottfried’s work as managing director of ServiceChannel Ventures, the company’s innovation lab. Lubensky had been chief technology officer and had worked on European expansion from London. Their next project kept them in the same industry, looking for applications around the business they had already helped create.
“We are as excited and passionate about the industry as ever.”
Steven Gottfried, announcing Re:Tool Ventures in 2017
Gottfried remained on ServiceChannel’s board at the time of the announcement. His stated intention was to help the company develop through complementary applications and further innovation. The departure had a practical continuity: the accumulated knowledge of one platform could become the starting material for other businesses.
The number that arrived later
Fortive completed its acquisition of ServiceChannel on August 24, 2021. The consideration was approximately $1.2 billion. Tom Buiocchi was ServiceChannel’s CEO at that point. Gottfried’s founding contribution belongs to the longer history that preceded the transaction, alongside the work of subsequent leaders, employees, customers and providers.
Approximate acquisition consideration paid by Fortive.
At completion, ServiceChannel served more than 500 enterprise customers in over 70 countries and had a network exceeding 70,000 facilities maintenance service providers. Those figures describe the company at the acquisition, a useful snapshot of how far the original coordination problem had travelled.
There were now many versions of the same basic task: a location needed work, a provider could perform it, and both sides needed a dependable record. The scale came from repeating that relationship across businesses and countries. Fortive placed ServiceChannel within its Intelligent Operating Solutions segment, making facilities workflows part of a broader industrial technology portfolio.
Giving the machine its own record
Equip ID, another company Gottfried co-founded, brought the focus closer to the equipment. Its approach uses near-field communication tags on mechanical assets and physical spaces. A technician can retrieve information where the work is being performed, including manuals, wiring diagrams and maintenance guidance.
The equipment gains a digital identity and a history that can be consulted. It is a logical next place to look after connecting the people around a repair. A well-organized request is useful; so is knowing which machine is in front of you and what has happened to it before.
In August 2021, AllPoints announced an EquipID partnership enabling replacement-parts ordering through the app. The arrangement connected equipment information with the next practical action: finding the part needed for the job. Gottfried, then Equip ID’s CEO, described the goal as helping customers’ mobile workers simplify parts ordering and warranty tracking.
The appeal lies in removing an interruption. A technician consulting a machine’s record should be able to move toward the repair, rather than begin another search elsewhere. That is the modest, consequential territory these products occupy: the minutes between learning what is needed and being able to do something about it.
The contractor is still in the picture
Gottfried also chairs UtilizeCore, whose platform addresses service companies managing subcontractor networks. Its tools cover operations, receivables, payables, onboarding and proposals. The company’s own account of its origins places his earlier contractor software and ServiceChannel before the business founded by Ryan Gottfried in 2020.
At UtilizeCore, the operational question changes with the customer. A facilities team needs oversight of its locations. A service company needs oversight of the providers carrying out its commitments. Following Gottfried’s career means moving between those viewpoints, with the contractor repeatedly returning to the center of the frame.
Today, All Scientific Tech lists Gottfried as a managing director and board member. Its technology platform work again concerns equipment intelligence, connected workflows and service delivery. The setting has changed from his early contractor systems, while the interest in making operational information usable remains recognizable.
The van photograph makes a good companion to this history. Technology can organize a service call, preserve a record and help someone find a part. The physical world retains its sense of humor. Somewhere, two people may be peering through a locksmith’s window, wondering about the next move. Gottfried’s companies have spent decades giving the people on either side of that call a better way to work together.