Early last year, Sarah Kott started her own business, a wholesale flower market.
But while she was getting her company off the ground, her dad suggested she help out with the administrative work at his commercial garage door company, Overhead Door of Chicago.
“He was trying to manage the software we were using, which was super glitchy and very inhibiting for doing work,” Kott said. “The system was the worst.”
Kott soon realized the software wasn’t just annoying—it was harming the business.
“Sometimes we would receive a check and we were like, ‘I do not even see that this invoice was due, I don't know where this came from,’” Kott recalled. “But most of the time, we would not even know that the invoice needed to be sent still.”
Needing a more trustworthy software solution, Overhead Door joined ServiceTitan in January 2024.
Now, Kott relies on the software to track invoices, manage estimates and more. Already, she’s seen a 28% increase in collected dollars—with no more mystery checks.
“It's been very grounding to know that I can trust the numbers that I'm seeing in ServiceTitan,” Kott said. “I think that's the biggest thing: feeling confident in our invoices and that they're getting sent out.”
Customer support that has your back
ServiceTitan may boast a wide range of features designed to make life more efficient for those in the trades—but there was one feature that was non-negotiable for Kott. Surprisingly, it wasn’t even tech related.
She needed excellent customer service.
“(When) we would call (our previous software), (we’d) just go into this black hole,” she said. “You had to chat (online) with them first, and then maybe they'd call you if you really begged.”
With ServiceTitan, however, she said the difference has been “night and day.”
“The first time that someone (from ServiceTitan) called me within 20 seconds, I was like, ‘How in the world is this possible?’”
That human touch was important while Overhead Door onboarded with ServiceTitan, because learning a new software can be overwhelming.
“Just being able to have a live person as a resource (who) I can email or talk to during onboarding has been awesome,” Kott said. “(The customer reps were) really friendly and really wanting to understand our business so that the platform can be tweaked into exactly what we need.”
Meet your new administrator
Less than a year into using ServiceTitan, Kott said it has “become our little admin that we didn't even know we needed.” Here’s how the software has saved her team time:
Go wireless: Kott isn’t chained to her desk—even when covering the phones—thanks to ServiceTitan’s mobile app. “I can just click ‘call’ and automatically call the customer from my cellphone instead of my desk phone,” she said. “That’s really nice.”
Close the book on errors: Pricebooks for garage door companies are no joke. “I think we have 7,000 part numbers in our pricebook,” Kott said. ServiceTitan allows her to bulk-upload changes to the pricebook, “versus clicking into certain cells in a program.”
Find what you need fast: Nobody wants to waste time hunting for information, which is why Kott’s father “loves the search function (in ServiceTitan), whether that be for invoices or for a job summary (or) an invoice description,” Kott said.
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Maintain your edge
In Chicago, the garage door industry is fiercely competitive.
But Overhead Door’s techs have found ServiceTitan helps them provide better service and show up to a job fully prepared.
That’s because ServiceTitan allows techs to log notes, customer information and take photos of equipment directly from the field. They can even look up specific equipment serial numbers from previous jobs.
“(Techs) really like that they can easily go back and look at past jobs and see, ‘What did I do at this last place? Did I need a scissor lift when I was there last time?’”
These tools keep the team organized, which is more important than ever: According to Kott, Overhead Door logged 113 jobs in the first quarter of 2023. This year, it hit 267 in that same period.
“There are so many door companies that are often vying for jobs,” Kott said. “(ServiceTitan) is a good edge for us as we continue growing, because we’ve got a good foundation now.”
And perhaps with that good foundation, Kott will be able to spend more energy on her wholesale flower market, Chicago Flower Market, which reached its first anniversary this summer.
