Scott Stewart made a life-changing decision in 2017 when he left a job in the hotel industry to join Southern Home Services, a fast-growing contracting company headquartered in Maitland, Florida, that uses private equity to acquire and operate successful home service companies.
Soon after joining Southern, Stewart played a key role in another game-changing decision when the company chose cloud-based ServiceTitan as its software solution. He’s had a front-row seat as Southern has expanded to 27 locations – 20 acquired in the past four years.
Stewart, a Business Systems Administrator, is convinced that its growth would not have happened nearly as fast without ServiceTitan and its Enterprise Hub – the tool built to help multi-location businesses like Southern streamline and scale their operations.
“For a company like Southern, or anyone with multiple locations, I couldn't imagine doing your business without it, and I'm not sure how we used to (manage it),” Stewart said while attending ServiceTitan’s user conference, Pantheon 2024, in Orlando. “It has changed our business, it has saved us time, it has saved us money, and it has saved resources.”
Stewart said Southern chose ServiceTitan over several other software options because it can be tailored to fit your company, adds useful updates, and provides efficient reporting so businesses can get standardized data across multiple entities and improve their processes.
“We needed something that would be able to work across all 27 locations,” he said. “It's made it so much simpler, where we don't need to have 56 logins for every single person at corporate, and we can now provide better assistance and support with a smaller team.”
Saving time, fueling growth
Stewart considers Enterprise Hub a key to Southern’s success, in part because tasks that once took hours now take minutes.
“I can push through business units or job types in maybe five minutes tops, whereas before, it would've taken me about five hours per center to build all of that,” he said.
That efficiency is why he loves pushing Marketing Pro campaigns through the Enterprise Hub to multiple locations.
“Before, we had to make 27 different campaigns every single time we wanted to do any promotion, and like any company, we're constantly doing marketing,” Stewart said. “It's the bloodline of a company – it gets the phones ringing.
“(Marketing Pro) allows us to create one campaign, push it through to the rest, and saves weeks of work. And it's not always just for promoting. Sometimes we're reaching out for invoices, or looking for scheduling maintenances. It really helps streamline everything.”
Some other ways Enterprise Hub benefits Southern, according to Stewart:
Standardization happens faster: “Whenever we need a new tag or a new form or even a new report that we want to have standardized, it's just a click of a button, and within a minute every single location can have the exact same thing.”
Better coaching: Though Southern employs about 2,000 technicians, Stewart said Enterprise Hub allows managers to “drill down and see what each individual needs to work on,” so the company can customize its training rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.
Visibility on the jobs: “You're able to see everything that is done. … We can see that the customer has opened the estimate after the job. The whole process – from start to finish of calling, call booking, all the way to completing – is right there.”
Permissions: Stewart said Enterprise Hub adding a permissions feature “was probably the happiest day for me professionally. It gives more people access, as opposed to someone sitting there having to create 50 new employees. We can now just simply add it to someone's Enterprise Hub login, and they have access.”
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A partner, not just a vendor
Stewart learned early on that ServiceTitan is invested in the success of the businesses it serves, prioritizes communication, and isn’t just paying lip service when it requests feedback.
“We work with various people (at ServiceTitan) who, normally, their position would not be customer-facing, but they come out and want you to know that you're being heard,” he said. “They listen to you, and if you have an idea that maybe they haven't thought of … they're not too proud. They're learning. That's their product, but they want it to be for the customer.”
As Southern pushes toward its goal of becoming the top-of-market contractor in the Southeast and beyond, Stewart said the company doesn’t specifically target companies that use ServiceTitan, but notes that 12 of its past 13 acquisitions were already using the platform.
“It is just that crucial to the industry,” he said. “It really has become the system of the trades. You would probably have to have 12 different programs to do the basic functions of what you can do with ServiceTitan.”
To that end, he has advice for businesses hoping to grow and experience success similar to Southern.
“I would tell them that they need to get on ServiceTitan,” he said. “Enterprise Hub is the tool that's needed to grow. ServiceTitan is taking over the industry, and if you're not on it, you won't have the features you need to grow your organization.”
