October used to be a stressful month at LJ Kruse Co.
That’s when Will Kruse and his team would rush to invoice all of their commercial and residential customers before Halloween—which marked the end of the fiscal year at the fourth-generation plumbing and HVAC shop in Berkeley, California.
That task was never fun. Because as recently as two years ago, LJ Kruse was still using paper.
“We’d have literal piles of invoices, which would represent tens of thousands of revenue dollars that would sit there,” said Kruse, a VP and service manager. “We weren't emailing invoices. We were putting them in the mail. And we were literally losing invoices. It's a physical piece of paper that can get lost.”
Invoices could sometimes be found in the kitchen. Or the warehouse. Or shuffled into a pile on a desk and completely forgotten about.
“(October) would be a fire drill of, ‘What are we missing?’” Kruse said.
And when customers finally received their invoices, they couldn’t pay electronically. That meant they were sending checks via mail or calling in their credit card numbers.
“Sometimes, it would be a month or two before we'd see payment,” Kruse said.
Looking back, Kruse knows all of this “sounds crazy,” he laughed.
Especially now, with everything they can do after going live with ServiceTitan.
Change is hard—but good
LJ Kruse has operated continuously since Kruse’s great-grandfather started the company in 1916.
Five years ago, the torch was passed to the fourth generation—Kruse and his brothers. That’s when, after surveying the unscalable processes of their business, it was obvious that something needed to change.
“But the hamstrings of being a four-generation company is, change is hard,” Kruse said. “We ran into a wall of how to make that change…the path to get there was unclear.”
That path became much clearer when ServiceTitan announced an integration with Viewpoint Vista, which LJ Kruse had been using for its accounting software.
Soon after, LJ Kruse went live with ServiceTitan in May 2023 and ditched their paper ways. Some of Kruse’s favorite features are:
Dispatching: When Kruse first started working at LJ Kruse 10 years ago, the company’s dispatch board was “literally a bulletin board with stickies,” Kruse said. Kruse added a color-coded spreadsheet to keep things organized—but it was still chaotic. “It used to be that if two calls came in at the same time, the dispatchers would have to fight over who could get it on the board first.” That’s not happening anymore with ServiceTitan’s dispatching capabilities.
Pricebook Pro: Pre-ServiceTitan, 99% of LJ Kruse’s service work was billed time and material rates. But ever since they started using ServiceTitan’s Pricebook Pro, they switched to flat-rate service. “That's allowed us to increase revenue, increase margins, and turn around quotes to customers a lot (faster)."
Reporting: LJ Kruse is a member of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America, and ServiceTitan’s robust reporting features have helped them follow MCAA best practices. “So much of what we do, day-to-day, is data-driven,” Kruse said. “(Now,) I can clue into an individual job, even if it's a one-hour job. I can know exactly how we're doing on that job. That's been huge, (and it allows us) to adjust our prices accordingly. Having the data that ServiceTitan provides has been huge in growing the (service) department and being able to follow some of those (MCAA) best practices.”
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‘Night and day’
Winter is usually the busiest time of year at LJ Kruse due to lots of heating and boiler work.
Even so, thanks to ServiceTitan, the service team is getting invoices out within 24 hours.
“There's a report in ServiceTitan that we use a lot—the old jobs report—which basically tells you what jobs are open that haven't been completed,” Kruse said. “We're running that on a monthly basis. We still find things that are floating out there that aren't closed out, but we're catching them as we go, instead of having a stack of $10,000 that we never billed.
“That headache basically went away with ServiceTitan.”
Both Kruse and customers also love the customer portal and the ease of payments.
“I'll send out a batch of unpaid invoices…and we will get half or more of those paid that night.”
Kruse said that ServiceTitan has allowed the service side to boost revenue by $1 million and increase tech headcount from eight to as many as 12.
“I don't know how many companies are left on paperwork orders, but if there are any, you have to make the switch and you've got to make it yesterday,” he said. “(Switching to ServiceTitan) was night and day.”
Looking ahead, Kruse wants to continue to grow the service side and their commercial HVAC department. And he’s excited to see where ServiceTitan goes.
“(ServiceTitan) started as a residential-focused company. But it's clear to me that they put a lot of money, effort and time into growing the commercial side of things.
“You can tell that ServiceTitan cares about the future and their adaptation of AI,” he said. “It's an exciting software to be a part of.”
