A roofing company was paid $450,000 to license its operating records.

HVAC companies run the same systems buyers list.

We found no published deal for an HVAC company on the buyer pages we checked; that figure is from another trade, on a buyer's own published case-study page.

It can't tell you what your company would be paid, and nobody honest can promise you a number.

Is this for your company?

Tick the boxes that fit your company:

• 30 or more people
• 3 or more years in operation, and 3 or more years of records kept
• Your service calls, estimates, agreements and invoices are kept in systems like ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, FieldEdge, QuickBooks and email
• The company owns its records: they are your own operating records, not files you hold for clients
• The company is in the US (today's buyers take US companies first)

One buyer's published criteria are, word for word, "20+ full time employees & 3+ years in operation". This checklist uses 30 or more people. Our quiz also looks for three or more years of records kept: it asks how far back your records go, not when the company started. The other lines come from our own site terms and quiz. If a box isn't ticked yet, the quiz asks about each of these.

What gets licensed: the systems you already run

AI companies are training software to do multi-step work, and an HVAC service call is multi-step work. A customer calls because the system has stopped cooling. Someone books the call and sends a technician. The tech diagnoses the problem and writes up repair and replacement options, and the customer picks one. A part is ordered, a second visit finishes the job, the invoice is paid, and a maintenance agreement brings the customer back for tune-ups. Your records show each of those decisions, in order, across hundreds or thousands of calls.

You don't need to create anything new. What a buyer looks at is the history already sitting in your software.

Two buyers publish what they look for. We call them the second buyer, which lists ServiceTitan, QuickBooks, Gmail and Outlook among the sources it buys, and the case-study buyer, the one that published the roofing deal. It says it buys from companies in any sector, and that it has bought, anonymized and supplied operational records to AI labs across sectors and company sizes. Its guide to the data sources it covers, with notes on where to find counts, has a Field operations section, covering work orders, dispatch, deliveries, job tickets and site records, that names ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, FieldEdge and Arrivy, and CompanyCam, for photos, videos and documents by project. If your calls and jobs run through one of those, it is on the list. The same guide has a section on phone and call recordings, measured in hours of audio, that names RingCentral, Aircall and Dialpad. It also covers QuickBooks under accounting, Gmail and Outlook for email, and Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive and Dropbox for files. We found no buyer page that names software made only for HVAC work.

For an HVAC company, that can mean:

• Service calls, dispatch history and technician notes in ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber or FieldEdge
• Estimates and repair-or-replace options, with what the customer chose
• Maintenance agreements and service history, customer by customer
• Job photos, call by call
• Invoices and job costing in QuickBooks
• Recorded customer calls, if your phone system keeps them
• Email between the office, techs, suppliers and customers

The guide also says where to find the counts in each system: job, customer and invoice counts from ServiceTitan reports; job, estimate and customer counts from Housecall Pro list exports; job, quote and invoice totals in Jobber; customer, work order and invoice counts from FieldEdge reports; and photo, video and document counts per project in CompanyCam. You don't need any of those numbers to take the quiz.

What never leaves your company

Your originals and your customers' identities. The buyer gets a copy of the records you agree to license, and de-identifies it. Your systems and your originals stay where they are. The second buyer says you decide exactly what is shared, and that all data is scoped, de-identified and kept confidential. The case-study buyer's home page says that, as a general term of its licenses, you keep the business and the underlying data, and that the license is defined and bounded. Its case-study page describes each license as anonymized before delivery, and it says a specialist privacy partner removes or replaces names, emails, phone numbers, account numbers and addresses before it or any buyer sees the record. Its FAQ says its license doesn't cover what you hold on behalf of your own clients.

Files you hold for clients. Our own site terms go further. Records your company holds for clients under contract, records covered by professional privilege, regulated data such as patient or financial-account information, and anything you are not entitled to license must not be offered to a buyer. If in doubt, leave it out and ask your lawyer.

Nothing goes to a buyer before you see the buyer's name. If you ask us for an introduction, the buyers' names are shown to you before you click, and nothing about your answers goes to a buyer until you do. Even then we send only your quiz answers and the contact details you entered: no files, no logins, and not the estimate.

How the money works

Here is how we are paid, in the words of our fee disclosure:

If a buyer we introduce you to signs a license with your company, that buyer pays us a referral fee: a fixed amount, a percentage of the license, or both, depending on the buyer. You pay nothing, now or later, unless you and we sign a separate written agreement that says so. We may share part of our fee with the partner who sent you to us; they see only your company's name and the stage of the process.

Your estimate is never shown to a buyer. It is for you, and it stays with you.

The case-study page lists the roofing company under home services and describes the deal as a "Perpetual exclusive license to the operational record. Anonymized before delivery." The same page lists other deals. None of them is an HVAC company, and the page gives no company names, headcount, years of records or deal dates.

Both buyers also publish pay ranges: typical deals from $100,000 to $2 million and above, and payouts from $100,000 to $4 million and more. Neither range is a promise of what you would be offered.

Is this legal?

One buyer's page on that question calls licensing a company's own operating record an ordinary commercial deal, decided by "ownership, what the company's customer contracts say, and whether personal information can be removed." Its example of what can't be licensed is material held for a client under an agreement giving the client ownership. The same page says state definitions vary and your own counsel should review any license before signing.

What the quiz asks

The quiz asks what your company does, whether it is operating, winding down or closed, where the company and the team are, how many people work there, what year your records go back to, which tools your team uses, roughly how much of your records are in English, who owns them, two yes-or-no checks, and whether you run one company or more. Round numbers are fine for headcount, and you see your range before you give an email.

Who is behind this

Kedric Van de Carr is the founder of ValueMyData.ai and is based in Texas. He built it as an independent tool that estimates what a company's operational data is worth and introduces the owner to the buyer that fits. Kedric reads every question himself. There are no sales calls: the quiz shows your range on screen, and nothing goes to a buyer unless you ask for an introduction. Questions go to kedric@valuemydata.ai.

We are not lawyers, accountants, brokers of securities or financial advisers, and nothing on the site is legal, tax, investment or financial advice. Have your own adviser review any agreement before you sign it.

Boss Financial Education L.L.C., doing business as ValueMyData.ai · kedric@valuemydata.ai · Texas