Julie Marlowe isn’t exaggerating when she says she’s seen a lot of growth in her time at Vines Restoration, Plumbing and HVAC.
Seven years ago, it was just her and another woman in the office, plus maybe five plumbing technicians. Now?
“We have over 70 employees and over 70 trucks on the road,” Marlowe, Vines’ office manager, said. “We are constantly growing, very quickly.”
How is the family-owned-and-operated business that’s on-pace for $10 million in revenue this year able to sustain and continue such growth? ServiceTitan. The all-in-one software for the trades keeps everything in the same place for Vines, fueling its dispatch, reporting, marketing—you name it.
“(Our) owners are just amazed at all of the things that ServiceTitan does and continues to do,” Marlowe said. “It 100% has helped with our growth and scalability.”
It’s no coincidence that this surge in Vines’ revenue and headcount can be traced back to 2018. That’s when the commercial and residential shop in Conway, South Carolina, switched from its previous software, Jobber, to ServiceTitan.
There were numerous reasons why Vines ultimately made the change. But the overarching reason was quite simple: Vines wanted to grow.
“If we were using Jobber (today) with the amount of technicians that we have, it would be very difficult,” Marlowe said.
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Switching software
For years, Vines used the traditional pen-and-paper approach. Their first foray into software came with Jobber. At the time, with such a small staff, it felt like a good fit, and it certainly beat following a paper trail.
But soon after Marlowe joined the company in 2016, she and others started noticing some problems. For one, Jobber didn’t make it easy for Vines to automate its commercial customers.
“Jobber was definitely more geared toward residential,” Marlowe said. “(Not) being able to put several different locations under one customer was not a good thing for us because we do so much commercial service.”
Jobber also didn’t offer the reporting capabilities that Vines needed, and the software’s dispatch board was not easy to navigate.
“With Jobber, I felt like it was very jumbled, so there wasn't an easy way to look and see where everything was,” Marlowe said.
As for no longer needing to follow a paper trail? Well, that became an issue, too. That’s because Jobber didn’t offer a call recording feature, which meant the Vines office staff had to manually record calls with, you guessed it, pen and paper.
“We were literally writing down every call and a business unit or job type of what (our customers) were calling for so we could track it,” Marlowe said. “The reporting wasn't great.”
Yes, it’s not easy to switch software. But if you combine all of the above obvious reasons and then some, Vines’ switch to ServiceTitan made perfect sense.
And it's never looked back.
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‘It’s just all streamlined’
ServiceTitan allows Vines to easily serve its commercial clients and record calls.
“In ServiceTitan, everything has its own housing,” Marlowe said. “So you can go to one place and find all the pictures, you can go to one place and find all the emails, you can go to one place and find all the estimates.”
Here are some more of Marlowe’s favorite features:
Schedule Assistant: Schedule Assistant improves margins by suggesting a date, time, and technician for a given job that minimizes drive time. For Vines, it also limits overbooking, which used to be a challenge. “We schedule a lot of calls a day, and if one of those spots are doubled then we're immediately overbooked,” Marlowe said. “(Schedule Assistant) has taken a lot of stress off of our technicians, and helped our scheduling team to not overbook our schedule every day.”
Reporting: Vines uses ServiceTitan's reporting tools to provide robust analytics to help bring its business to the next level, especially when it comes to servicing both commercial and residential customers. “Being able to pull reports to see what our commercial (numbers are) vs. residential is huge,” Marlowe said.
Phones Pro: Vines used to have 400-500 abandoned calls every day. Now with ServiceTitan’s Phones Pro? “They're slim to none each day,” Marlowe said. Phones Pro is a modern, cloud-based phone offering that is fully integrated with ServiceTitan and designed to improve your customer-facing team’s performance, drive higher booking rates, grow revenue and improve efficiency. “We're really big on listening to our phone calls, so anytime we can go back and listen to a phone call, it's right there,” Marlowe said. “Then also the analytics, we are learning to read those.”
Vines also benefits from using Marketing Pro, an all-in-one marketing automation solution, and Pricebook Pro, a solution that simplifies pricebook management. Features like these and others make running Vines a smooth process.
“It's just all streamlined,” Marlowe said.
Long-term vision
To this day, Marlowe sometimes has to check Vines’ Jobber profile to access a customer’s information. From Marlowe’s vantage point, the website hasn’t changed much since 2018.
“For the most part, it does look the same,” Marlowe said. “It is quite stressful to look at because everything is just, it's kind of just a jumble.”
Her experience with ServiceTitan has been the opposite.
“Majorly because of ServiceTitan, we've been able to define all of the roles that we should have and where we should hire to make a position work seamlessly,” Marlowe said. “We've done a lot of hiring because of ServiceTitan and grown a lot.”
The company has even changed its offerings due to ServiceTitan. After attending ServiceTitan’s Pantheon, Vines added HVAC to its list of services.
The company’s five-year plan is to do $40 million in revenue within its service department. Vines would also like to open another location, and continue its reach across South Carolina.
ServiceTitan is helping with that, too.
“We are trying to make everything scalable and sustainable,” Marlowe said.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
