Earlier this year, Kelly Mesaris spoke with an owner of a roofing shop who was looking for a CRM software solution.
The customer was on the fence about ServiceTitan. And the big concern was price.
The customer told Mesaris—the VP of Special Operations at LB Capital, which has eight roofing companies under its umbrella that lean heavily on ServiceTitan—that he was considering a cheaper alternative.
Mesaris understood his concerns. Then she explained why going the cheap route could become very costly.
“There’s so many features and tracking and reporting that we utilize within ServiceTitan. (For example, other CRMs) aren’t really great on marketing-attribution tracking. So I told him, ‘You could make a $30,000 marketing mistake by not having the data. You could be spending all your marketing dollars in the wrong attribution and not know it because you’re not tracking it like ServiceTitan can.
“Just right there, you can make up (the price difference)—and that’s just including what you spend, not with the jobs and the revenue that (ServiceTitan) could bring by making the right decision.’”
Then, she told him about LB Capital’s most recent roofing shop success story.
It’s a shop that has seen a 200% increase in revenue in one year on ServiceTitan.
Built to sell
LB Capital’s motto is “Build it to sell it.” That’s because the company sells its shops to private equity roughly 16 months after acquiring them.
As for the build part? The first thing they do after acquiring a shop is put them on ServiceTitan.
“It's non-negotiable,” Mesaris said.
That’s what happened with Munz Roofing and Siding. LB Capital acquired the shop in July 2023, then rolled up two other roofing shops with it. At the end of ‘23, Munz had $7.44 million in revenue.
Now? The shop is pacing at $24 million for 2024.
“Everyone’s jaw drops at the Munz scale,” Mesaris said. “Munz was really built on ServiceTitan.”
Mesaris said the most critical feature of the software is the reporting and data capabilities. But that’s far from the only one.
Enterprise Hub: For starters, Enterprise Hub allows LB Capital to manage and scale all of its different locations.
Customer communication: LB Capital leans on ServiceTitan for customer outreach. “We use Marketing Pro for all of our email efforts. Our review requests are automated. (We use) SMS text messages for sending out (customer) invoices, for any balance due,” Mesaris said.
Accounting: “We use ServiceTitan for all of our accounting,” Mesaris said. “We do all of our batching and porting into QuickBooks from ServiceTitan. It’s pretty mind-blowing that we can utilize (accounting) with ServiceTitan.”
Dispatch Pro: “Dispatch Pro takes the AI data with (the) success (of our technicians), how we rank the job priorities, and assigns all the calls for us.”
And that’s not even half of it.
“All the features that ServiceTitan offers comes together and creates this monster of a sales organization,” Mesaris said. “Tracking, call booking rates, conversion rates. The data is really what drives the organization to make its next best decision.”
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‘CRM of choice’
For years, HVAC and plumbing have been the darlings of the private equity space. Now, roofing is the next big thing.
“(For Munz), a valuation of a company of that size, we're looking at 8x-10x on EBITDA (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization),” Mesaris said.
With Munz’s extreme success, LB Capital is now repeating the same process for its other roofing shops. And it's working. LB Capital recently started Roofing Pups, which has five locations under its umbrella.
“Some of those branches already have $1 million (revenue) months. And some of them are only three months old,” Mesaris said. “We perfected the process.”
Mesaris said that at first, the team at LB Capital estimated that Roofing Pups had a $100 million dollar valuation.
“Now, it's probably looking at a $300 million valuation,” she said.
Mesaris shared that stat on her call with the roofing shop owner who was on the fence about ServiceTitan. She also challenged him with two closing points.
“If you want to know how to drive your business in the right direction, you need the data from ServiceTitan,” Mesaris said. “And if you plan to scale and exit your business to private equity, that's the only thing that they're looking for.
“It's the CRM of choice.”
