Real-time data saves Mendel Plumbing and Heating from ‘blowout horrible month’

For Mendel Plumbing and Heating, the addition of ServiceTitan quickly became a “welcome to the future” kind of partnership.

Let an anecdote explain.

Mendel, based in St. Charles, Ill., was chopping through a tough month in the fall of 2022.

“A blowout horrible month” was the way Tom Mascari, Mendel’s president, put it.

With some software systems Mendel had used, the company stood no chance of recovering because information and analysis were not immediately available.

But because of the daily tracking abilities provided by ServiceTitan, a cloud-based software for the trades, Mendel was able to adjust and turn what would have been a bad month into a good one. 

“The last week of the month, we created the third-best week of the year,” Mascari said.

Mendel turned what Mascari called “a train wreck of a month” into a profitable one.

“Because Titan gives us that visibility to effectively manage real-time,” Mascari said. “What corrective actions do I need today? That’s huge. It’s a game changer.”

» Want to grow your business? Click here to get a demo.

That single experience is emblematic of Mendel’s aggregate experience with ServiceTitan. With previous softwares the company used, Mascari said it felt like “you’re pulling your software company to catch up with you.”

ServiceTitan, he said, is “pulling you into the future.”

Put another way, traditionally a software operates on a need-response basis.  A client expresses a need, the software tries to respond.

Mascari sees ServiceTitan operating uniquely. When he sees a need, he quickly learns ServiceTitan already has the tools in place to address it. He merely has to use them.

“ServiceTitan is the first software that I’ve come in contact with that, literally, is pulling us forward,” he said. “We’re trying to catch up with all the tools that are out there. And we struggle to do it, because there’s so much out there.”

Stop looking in the rear-view mirror

Consider profitability. With the previous software, Mascari said he didn’t have a prayer of knowing monthly profitability until two or three weeks after the month had closed.

“I’m looking in the rear-view mirror,” he said. “I can’t correct that. It’s already gone. Today (with ServiceTitan), it’s all real-time.”

Real-time as in real-time viewing of gross profit, revenue, conversion rates, average ticket, and business units—every morning. In that already-described month, Mascari said real-time information led Mendel to run promotions and specials, which generated business and saved the month.

Mascari joined Mendel a little more than 10 years ago, bringing his strengths in operational efficiency from McCormick FONA, a developer and manufacturer of food flavorings. Mascari also majored in Organizational Efficiency at Purdue.

He found Mendel was using software, but was basically operating on paper. Scheduling came from a stack of papers stuffed into a drawer the night before.

“It was a nightmare,” he said.

He found ServiceTitan at a trade show in 2015, and joined in 2017. He has not looked back.

“It's really helped us step up our game and differentiate ourselves from a lot of the other players in the market,” he said. “There's a lot of things inside of Titan that we can do. The win is, how do we better use the tools at our disposal than our competition? Because more and more of our competition, and even locally, is going to be on Titan, and is on Titan. How do we use the system better than they're using it?”

Managing success, one feature at a time

One way was to ask the ServiceTitan Customer Success Manager to visit the facility to assess processes and offer ideas from the software to help Mendel improve 

“He be-bopped around, and gave some ideas and suggestions that we weren’t aware of, because we can’t absorb (the software) fast enough,” Mascari said.

Other specific benefits Mascari mentioned include tagging, which allowed Mendel to prioritize jobs properly. Before adding ServiceTitan, it had been tough to place its “Code Blue” on a job that needed immediate attention, or tag jobs with priority levels. ServiceTitan provides that option, which helps with scheduling.

When it comes to dispatch, ServiceTitan allows techs to avoid having to call in for parts, which forced office workers to step back from their assigned jobs to ensure that parts were ready for pickup.

“Now, they're out in the field, they fill out a form, then the form pings somebody. It sets off a text message. And they go back to work,” Mascari said. “All that phone call, waiting for somebody to talk to, it's all gone.”

Finally, forms and tasks streamline processes and workflows, which Mascari said has helped operational efficiency tremendously. A call to Tech Support or the Success Manager typically leads to a solution that’s already built into the software.

“There’s just so much in the system,” he said. “That’s one of the things I’ve really come to appreciate about being part of the world of Titan.”