How to Manage Multiple Service Locations with Len the Plumber

What is LTP Home Services?

Len the Plumber, founded in 1996, evolved into LTP Home Services Group, a leading residential services platform headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, that specializes in plumbing and HVAC services, and operates across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions under various brands.

“LTP Home Services is the network of companies we have, which includes Len the Plumber and all of the other companies we’ve acquired,” Patel explains. “Len the Plumber is the original platform company that started this ride.”

Patel says Len the Plumber currently operates in seven locations, soon to be eight, and provides 80% plumbing services and 20% sewer services. The network employs nearly 500 people, including more than 300 technicians.

“It’s big, it’s growing, it has a great Mid-Atlantic footprint up and down the East Coast. We acquire really strong businesses with a great footprint in their geography, who are known as great brands, and who serve their customers really well,” says Patel, who oversees not only  LTP’s business integrations, but also IT operations and its ServiceTitan account.

How LTP uses a centralized hub model for multiple branch support

Len the Plumber operates in distinct locations with a centralized hub in its Baltimore corporate center. Each branch employs its own service managers to run operations, collect payments, and even host its own community events. The corporate office manages back-office functions that span the different branches, and include marketing, purchasing, and a centralized call center.

“What this allows for is a fair amount of operational efficiency and consistency, so as we continue to open new branches, it still feels like the same DNA of the home company but with some tweaks, depending on the market that we’re in,” Patel says.

For the centralized call center, LTP partnered with ServiceTitan one year ago to build a seamless, but scaleable, operation.

“We have a centralized call center where we utilize ServiceTitan to build a call flow that recognizes customers are calling in from different locations,” she says. “Everyone who is picking up the phone is either sitting in our centralized call center in Baltimore or working remotely, but still within that centralized model.”

Patel says LTP utilizes the “zones” function in ServiceTitan software to essentially map out which ZIP codes are tied to different service area locations and which business units are associated with those service areas.

“For example, we have a Baltimore plumbing business unit and we have a Northern Virginia plumbing business unit, and the ZIP codes associated with those are tied to those specific business units. When a call comes in, our CSR department will identify where the location of the job is going to be, and it will guide you to the right business unit in the call flow, so you can make sure the customer is being served by the right business location,” Patel says. 

Operating through a centralized hub model provides consistency for a vast majority of back-office functions, and allows operational leverage as well.

“I think it’s been a huge success factor in the company’s growth,” Patel says. “You’re no longer needing an X number of dispatchers, call center managers, or marketing managers at each location, which really helps to leverage resources. It allows some degree of flexibility and makes the investment in a new branch a little easier.”

How to support different needs, different branches

Once a new company joins the LTP network, a collaborative team of experts works with the management team in place to set up a well-oiled plumbing system to help them grow.

“We had a company that recently joined our network—Service Today Inc., out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—and they are a 90% HVAC company with a small plumbing department,” Patel offered as one example of the Len the Plumber training process. “We spent the first six months setting up their plumbing processes, training for best customer service, and hiring the best techs.

“And we tripled the size of the plumbing department in just six months,” Patel adds. “We don’t want to change a company’s culture, so we work with the management team in place to make sure new hires fit in well and truly augment the team.”

LTP also ensures it has an appropriate headcount in its centralized call center to handle the additional volume as it opens new branches, and the ServiceTitan integration actually makes it much easier to add multiple locations for one company.

“In ServiceTitan, we are one tenant with multiple locations, so adding a new location is fairly simple because all of the settings are already there,” Patel says. “You’re not having to clone the account and modify it; you’re really just adding another location and adjusting the pricebook.”

Managing the post-merger process involves two separate components. There’s the due diligence and driving toward the deal closure, and then there’s everything else that comes after.

“I would say approach this as one whole process, including integration, and be very transparent with the folks who are joining your network about what their world is going to look like, what the org structure is going to look like, what people’s titles are going to be,” Patel advises. “The fear of an acquisition is in the unknown.”

Depending on how many people you’re acquiring and how much the company is willing to share about the transaction, the merger might be a bit of a shock on day one. 

“Be very collaborative in working through this process,” she adds. “Look at this very comprehensively and make sure you have a good sense of what resources are available to go through your post-merger integration activities. Make it one big process, where the signing of the purchase agreement is just one big milestone of it.”

What to consider when acquiring an existing business

How do you decide when to branch out to a new location? At LTP, the different factors to be considered include the type of service business to be acquired, the service mix to be offered, and the makeup of the location primed for expansion.

“We look at a certain market size and we want a certain ROI, but we also look at how you define your market sweet spot, how you dispatch (is it from home or the office?), and does it make sense to build your branch out or just expand your service area,” Patel says.

Other factors to consider include:

• How do customers view the brand?

• Do customers report a positive experience with the brand?

• Do customers leave positive Google reviews, and how many reviews do they have?

• Do customers in this market know this company and like it?

“Then, we look for a very strong management team dedicated to driving the growth of their people,” she says.

Another big part of making a successful acquisition is understanding the investments you’re willing to make to create a new branch or create an offshoot of that brand, she explains.

“If you’ve got customers already seeing your ads, your signs, your digital marketing—those investments look a little bit different than branching out into a whole new market,” Patel says. “So, just understand what investments you’re willing to make.”

It’s also important to understand how different or similar a new market might be. For instance, some counties with big cities may have 500,000 residents, whereas smaller counties might only have 50,000. If those customers fail to consume your ads the same way or require changes to dispatching and routing, that can have a dramatic impact on your lead flow and ability to break even on an investment in a new location.

“I would think a lot about building out that model and being comfortable with the lead intake you’re going to need and the investments you’ll need to make to support that, and how much you can centralize back to your existing location,” Patel says.

When merging acquisitions into your existing infrastructure, pay close attention to integration.

“Every business is a people business, but I think this one is even more so. Integration is so critical,” Patel says. “We focus on creating a partnership with the management team who’s going to be there, and we have a list of high-priority integration items primarily tied to compliance, governance, cybersecurity, IT, and Intacct (our accounting software). We all need to be speaking the same financial language.”

Beyond that, it’s really documenting and understanding core growth functions and value creation levers, and learning the nuances of how that business is operating. 

“We’re buying great brands with great management teams and cultures that support that. We use a collaborative project management approach. Also, many are already on ServiceTitan, so we’re speaking the same language. That’s a big part of the equation to becoming one, cohesive company,” she adds.

How ServiceTitan features support multiple location management

Patel says that, since LTP signed on with ServiceTitan one year ago, the company successfully launched two new locations utilizing its central hub model.

“The call center is the biggest piece,” Patel says. “It’s easy for the call center and, from a KPI reporting and tracking perspective, all the way through with Intacct, for us to set up ServiceTitan in such a way that we have branch-level P&Ls and service-line P&Ls for our management team in different locations. Location specific Profit-and-Loss statements are very helpful, especially for incentive programs.

“From a marketing and lead-tracking standpoint, the ability to use the zones has been really nice,” she adds. “CSRs understand the market they’re talking to…the ServiceTitan call flow makes it easy for tagging and identifying customers in those areas, and that flows into the dispatching and sending the right techs.”

LTP also uses ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro and Reputation Management to manage reviews and marketing leads.

“We can go to one place for the entire company or drill down on specific locations. We have one Marketing Pro account for all of our branches, and it provides a clean snapshot view for our marketing department,” Patel says.

In addition, LTP is currently a beta user of ServiceTitan’s new Enterprise Hub, which will serve as a command and control across multiple ServiceTitan account tenants. This central hub for enterprise tenants includes the ability to pull reports across multiple locations in one place, work from a centralized contact center, pricebook, and more. Opening new locations and acquiring companies are streamlined by simply adding each to Enterprise Hub. 

“We’re most excited about roll-up reporting. We can get consolidated reporting for the network in other ways, but this is a nice quick way to see where businesses are in real time,” Patel says of the Enterprise Hub. “We can pop into any business in the network at any time and help navigate, troubleshoot, and assist. It’s a great tool from an admin perspective.”