Karen Hill carefully wove her way through the many vendors at the annual Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors (PHCC) conference back in 2017, seeking the perfect match.
As vice president of HM Plumbing, she was looking for a comprehensive, cloud-based solution to help keep her and her husband’s business operating efficiently. All weekend, she’d heard her peers buzz about an all-in-one software for the trades called ServiceTitan. After a brief showcase at the conference, Hill was sold.
She stopped by the ServiceTitan kiosk and found a sales representative. “I think you're my match!” Hill said.
But she wasn’t theirs.
The rep explained that ServiceTitan was only partnering with residential trades companies at the time. HM Plumbing was primarily commercial. But the rep said the software company planned to add commercial shops like hers in the future. Hill was disappointed, but she understood.
The next year at PHCC, she once again stopped by the ServiceTitan kiosk, hoping things had changed. A different rep gave her the same story—the software was for residential, not commercial.
“I know you can do this! Come on!’” she pleaded. But no matter how persistent she was, ServiceTitan kept telling her no.
By 2019’s conference, she didn’t bother lingering at the ServiceTitan booth.
“No thanks,” she told the rep, sharply. “You can’t handle me.”
Or could they? Hill paused, and caught the last moments of the sales rep’s spiel, finally hearing the words she had long waited for.
At last, ServiceTitan had come for the commercial trades.
Outgrowing outdated tech
HM Plumbing didn’t always require robust technology to operate efficiently.
Over 15 years ago, Hill had just left her career as a corporate marketing leader to join her husband’s fledgling company. She didn’t know much about the trades, but she did know how to grow a company. In 2008, that’s exactly what HM Plumbing needed: After all, they were running the business out of their unfinished basement with just one other employee.
“Oh my God, thinking back on that,” Hill said. “We made it work.”
Two years after Hill joined, the company had boosted its headcount to 12. New customers such as restaurants, movie theaters and office management firms were flocking to HM Plumbing for service. Things were good.
But as HM Plumbing found more success, Hill struggled to organize the influx of customer data, invoices, estimates and appointments. She’d been using a software system to manage business operations, but it was clunky and lacked modern features.
Hill and her team kept detailed records on every job and estimate of their multi-family market customers. If a property manager questioned the need for a service, Hill needed to be able to show them photographs and accurate job notes to justify the work.
The old software system couldn’t keep up with that amount of data—but ServiceTitan’s commercial platform could. To make the deal sweeter, Hill didn’t even have to worry about housing a library’s worth of information on ServiceTitan.
“Knowing that ServiceTitan is cloud-based was great because I don't want all this information on my computer system,” Hill said. “I want somebody that's going to manage it for me. And that's what ServiceTitan is for me. It's my IT department.”
When Hill finally got the green light to join the platform in 2019, she was amazed at how easily she could access customer records and job histories—but her excitement didn’t stop there.
“When looking into a location, I can see right there what I need to find out about the work we’ve done there,” Hill said. “Other software had that look, but ServiceTitan had more bells and whistles that I knew I could use to help benefit my business.”
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New tools, new avenues to grow
It’s been nearly four years since HM Plumbing joined ServiceTitan. In that time, Hill said the platform has been a trusty right hand for the company’s operations.
“It’s like having another person in the office,” Hill said. “If ServiceTitan should ever go down, I would have a heart attack. We rely on it for everything. I mean everything.”
Through ServiceTitan, HM Plumbing now has a dispatch board for the first time, where the team can easily create and modify job bookings, and expedite communication between techs and the front office. Complicated commercial estimates, which the company does in house, are becoming less of a headache with the platform’s estimate builder. Moving forward, Hill is looking into the software’s membership feature to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
“We’ve doubled our revenue since we started with ServiceTitan,” Hill said. “I cannot attribute that solely to the software, but I can say that the support that ServiceTitan has given our office team is definitely integral to that growth.”
HM Plumbing has expanded its team to 24 employees, 18 of whom are service technicians. Hill is looking at building out the residential side of the business, and continuing to lean into ServiceTitan’s new commercial features such as better project tracking, appointments capabilities and fleet management.
She also remains deeply entrenched in the trades community. Hill still attends the annual PHCC conferences as a committee member—and you can bet she swings by the ServiceTitan kiosk every year.
Only now, she’s no longer courting the software.
“I'll look around to see if there's somebody I know and just chit-chat,” Hill said. “(And find out) what's the new (feature)? What's going on?”
