Michael Takemura, the Director of Business Development at Barron Heating & Air Conditioning in Bellingham, Wash., started his career as a chemist, working for a paint company developing products in the aerosol market, spray textures and the like.
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But when his company moved, Barron reached out with a position for him, with an emphasis on how the whole home breathes and lives and the science that entails.
“I was fascinated by all that,” Takemura said. “It’s a lot of things that you don’t think about how it’s working until it’s not working.”
For Takemura and Barron, one of those things turned out to be their operating software.
“The system we had before, in the five years that we had it, it never changed,” Takemura said. “The day we got it and the day we put it to bed, it was the exact same system.”
Takemura, who has applied his skills to different facets of the business since joining Barron in 2017, saw that the old software wasn’t wasn’t meeting the needs of a growing company.
Enter ServiceTitan’s all-in-one software for the trades, the implementation of which Takemura led in 2020. Barron uses the software for both the residential service and replacement portion of the business and for construction subcontractor work in both residential and commercial, which he said represents about 20% of its nearly $30 million in business.
In new construction, the challenges can be different.
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Addressing construction pain points
The new-construction sector of Barron’s work—three or four installation crews in residential and two more in commercial—presented interesting challenges and processes for both Barron and ServiceTitan.
In discussing the positives of ServiceTitan in the construction space, Takemura touches on facets of the software that many appreciate—the appointment feature, real-time job costing and more. But he emphasizes that the pain points in new construction are a challenge for a business whose HVAC profile is diversified and contemporary.
Pricing. The biggest struggle is pricing new-construction jobs high enough to turn a profit, he said. “They are long jobs, so cash flow is an issue in terms of how you're managing that, how you're billing that out,” Takemura said. “That's a huge stressor.”
Long projects. A big project could require purchasing equipment and putting in labor, but not being paid immediately. “You may not get fully paid for that job for a year, two years, even longer on some projects,” Takemura said. “So that's tough.”
Avoiding the race to the bottom. Some companies are willing to make much lower bids to win the work, but don’t provide the security Barron offers customers. “The beauty of going with Barron is that you have all this backing and this knowledge and education,” Takemura said. “But we also have overhead for that. It costs money to do all that.”
Cleaning up messes Barron didn’t create. Some accounts include cleanup for work that was done incorrectly by others. “You deal with coming back in and fixing these problems, and you're paying for the sins of the father on that,” Takemura said.
ServiceTitan has helped with all those issues, Takemura said. But what both Barron and ServiceTitan have learned is that using the cloud-based software for the trades requires adjustments. And ServiceTitan continues to grow and adapt, Takemura said.
“We love that ServiceTitan is constantly coming out with new features,” he said. “ And it's obvious from the features that are coming out, that they're very focused on the (construction) space.”
How ServiceTitan helps
ServiceTitan’s Pricebook and estimate templates allowed Barron to pre-build “kits” for estimating jobs, priced with profit built in. Those kits led to consistency in estimating jobs and reduced guesswork.
Takemura said he also sees better internal communication, with videos, images and notes stored in ServiceTitan and constantly updated—all important for an ongoing job.
Tracking workflows, on-site adjustments and purchasing all became simpler with ServiceTitan, he said, because the software improves communication internally.
“A general contractor might see one of our guys on site and say something to them that needs to get back to the next crew who's going to be out there,” Takemura said. “A lot of what we use ServiceTitan for is that communication between appointments.”
Sharing images, tracking progress on the job, tracking expenses all matter. Takemura said he sees many companies still working off spreadsheets and non-integrated systems for new construction, not able to take advantage of ServiceTitan’s real-time job costing and reporting capabilities.
“I think that's a huge, huge feature for us,” he said. “A lot of times we have 90% of our labor in the job, but only 30% of the cost because all the equipment's going in at the last step. So understanding those cost factors has been very helpful.
“We're still honing how we want it to look, but there really is no drawback. Anyone who answers the phone here could tell you the status of a project, which saves us and the customer a lot of time.”
Software that’s still improving
Takemura has talked with ServiceTitan about improvements in purchasing, billing and pricing, with most of the challenges caused by the complexities of Barron jobs. He lauded ServiceTitan’s willingness and ability to listen and respond. And he sees the value in that constant improvement.
“All of these things, ServiceTitan has in one way or another addressed with me that it’s coming,” he said.
“If you're a company that's continually moving and progressing and you want to keep doing things better, then I would go with a company like Service Titan that is also doing that,” he said.
“If you want to continually improve, then I would go with something like a Service Titan.”
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