Until 2016, Scott Reisack was a one-man operation. His decision to expand after a decade in business, and to start hiring employees, was spurred by a couple of thoughts.
“Up until that point I was answering the phones and doing the scheduling and running the calls—you know, everything,” he says. “One reason for expanding was that I really don’t like answering the phone.”
Fair enough.
Reisack also reasoned that he didn’t want to look up on his 60th birthday and be burned out because he’s still the one turning the wrench.
“I enjoy the work and the business is fulfilling,” he says. “And a one-man operator can make a lot of money. But it was time to make a change—time to expand.”
By himself, Reisack was doing about $400,000 in annual revenue.
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In 2019, his EZ Flow Plumbing company, based in Arizona and serving Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe, did $1.3 million in annual revenue. In July, he had five techs—down a couple because of the coronavirus—and he is planning to add to the roster.
There are eight people working in the office, and again, Reisack is ready to bump that up as soon as possible.
He’s projecting 20 percent annual growth over the next few years by doing 50 percent of his work on maintenance, 25 percent on spot repairs and 25 percent on projects.
That growth plan is based on continuing to do residential service, but with an emphasis on picking up new commercial business.
That part of the plan is in growth mode—and Reisack is confident the ServiceTitan software platform that works so well for him on the residential side will also help him build and serve a base of commercial clients.
Switching to ServiceTitan
Before switching to ServiceTitan, EZ Plumbing was using a software system that frustrated Reisack and his techs.
“There were processes within that system that either didn’t make sense or they weren’t complex enough to allow us to create jobs off estimates,” he says. “And there’s so much we should be able to do with estimates.”
Another frustrating aspect of the old software is that it was buggy.
“For example, there were times when we would spend a good amount of time putting together a nice estimate, write it up, and then it would vanish,” Reisack says.
If that wasn’t a big enough pain, the old software also wouldn’t let a tech do multiple estimates for a single customer. “We’d literally have to book another job with the same customer to do multiple estimates,” he says.
The final straw was reporting ability.
“I like data, building spreadsheets and looking at the numbers,” Reisack says. “I wasn’t getting that—and reporting is a big part of why ServiceTitan has such a good reputation.”
Reisack uses ServiceTitan phone integration a lot. He also relies on reporting to track advertising—something he used to have to do manually. Now, Reisack looks at reports on a monthly and a weekly basis to see what’s working and what isn’t.
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Leaning in with commercial
Surviving COVID-19 has been a challenge, but Reisack believes EZ Plumbing will survive and thrive after the pandemic subsides.
“We’ll definitely come out of this stronger,” he says. “There will be some shops in our area that won’t be around. But we’re actively trying to put another truck on the road right now.”
Part of the strategy to come out stronger after the coronavirus is safely managed will likely be a push to do more commercial business. At the moment, most of EZ Plumbing’s business is residential, but they have been doing service calls for commercial properties for some time.
“We try to stay out of restaurants and bars—because we're not a 24-hour company,” Reisack says. “We don't work on Sundays.”
How that approach shapes up in the future remains to be seen. Reisack is very happy with how ServiceTitan helps him run the residential side of the business, and he says that though there are definitely differences in managing commercial business, the solutions are there for both.
Examples include:
Price books. ServiceTitan has forms that are applicable to both commercial and residential work processes.
Contact-less features. Contracts can be e-signed—an especially helpful factor during the COVID-19 age.
Duplicating commonly used forms. Commercial customers sometimes have different units that require different settings. ServiceTitan lets you duplicate a form and not just a section in a form.
Reisack knows commercial plumbing systems tend to be more complex and get more use than residential systems.
“Bottom line, ServiceTitan is the biggest and the best with the continuous updates it does,” Reisack says. “It’s always ahead of the curve and kind of driving the software industry. I feel like it will never become obsolete. And if I need to make a change here or there it’s easy to make that happen.”
There are definite complexities to running the business and doing both residential and commercial, he says.
“But we’ve got the knowledge base with ServiceTitan,” Reisack says. “And that’s basically become the way we do business. There are workflows for residential and there are workflows for commercial. It’s just a matter of changing or expanding what we already do.”
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