Greg Brewer always understood the value of community.
He started Quality Air Houston more than 40 years ago, with much of the original business growing from word of mouth within Spring Woods Baptist Church.
He was with a commercial air conditioning company in Houston, working on big projects such as Memorial City Mall, when he met the woman who would become his wife, Lisa.
She was in the business too, working for CE Roberts A/C & Heat, her father’s residential service company in Houston. They married after a whirlwind romance, and Greg Brewer went to work for his new wife’s father.
Word got around the Spring Branch neighborhood in Houston that he did HVAC work. There’s always more trust, and more connection, with someone in your community. People trusted Greg and Lisa Brewer.
Soon, the Brewers realized there was enough business within the church and community for the two of them to start their own company.
Quality Air was born, based on excellent service at a fair price, serving the Spring Branch community and beyond. He was the only technician then, and she was running the office.
The communities you are part of are important. But even Greg Brewer’s family didn’t realize how important they could be.
When Greg died in a tragic boating accident on April 26, Lisa and her sons, Greg Jr. and Jon, saw the importance. And they saw how big a community could be in a time of need.
Meeting a need
Greg Brewer was an exceptional technician, able to work on just about any type of equipment.
“He was just really, really mechanically gifted,” said Jon Brewer, the youngest of the two sons and a Training Specialist at ServiceTitan. “There was a while where they were working on gas air conditioners, and he was one of the few people in Houston that could work on them.
“They ended up getting this big deal with CenterPoint Energy to go and install gas air conditioners that were financed through Centerpoint. They also became the company Centerpoint called to service, install and monitor online big gas-powered units at different locations around Houston.”
The community grew, and the company grew, but the commitment to exceptional customer service and fair prices never changed.
“They grew up, and neither one of them had a lot,” Brewer said. “They knew how hard it was for people, young families and the different people that they went to church with. They just saw too many people getting taken advantage of by unscrupulous people.
“Those people are out there.”
Quality Air focused on fairness. For years, customer service, fair prices and word of mouth were enough.
Then came 2020, and Covid-19.
An aggressive plan
At the end of 2020, Jon Brewer was still acting general manager with Quality Air. Covid had made it a difficult year, and revenue was down. Brewer said he knew he had to do something to right the course, so he came up with a plan and presented it to his father.
The key? More training, and a strong move into marketing.
“It was something that we weren't doing enough of,” he said. “I was convinced we needed to set a fairly aggressive marketing budget and commit to it over the course of a year or two.”
The question was how to pay for it. The answer, in two different ways, was ServiceTitan.
“I was like, well how can we afford this?” Brewer said. “How can we bring on these new expenses and not just really hurt a company that's already having a rough year with this pandemic?” The answer, he thought, might be embedded in a question he had been asked more than once. Why not go to work for ServiceTitan?
“I was like, ‘Well, I mean, that'd be really cool, but they wouldn't want me,’” he said. “Why would they want somebody like me? Like I'm just some nerd who works for a company and knows a bit about the trades and loves this software.”
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The right move?
There were concerns. ServiceTitan has a strict policy of no poaching from customers, and refused to consider him without his parents’ express approval. So he’d have to convince them the plan was solid.
He started with his mother. She didn’t want him to feel like the family business couldn’t take care of his family, too, but wanted him to be happy.
Jon created a 2020 year in review and a 2021 business plan to present to both parents. It included an aggressive budget.
“They're going, ‘Well that's insane we can't bring on all these new expenses.’ And I said, ‘Well, I'm glad you brought it up.’”
The next slide showed his plan for restructuring the company’s expenses, including how much of his job he had automated or streamlined with ServiceTitan. The company could function without him and invest in the long term.
His father suggested another plan—taking a pay cut himself.
“And I'm like, that's stupid, you're one of the owners,” Brewer said. “If anybody should take a pay cut, it shouldn't be you. They already had taken a pay cut that year to make sure all the employees were paid during the pandemic.”
Eventually, Greg Brewer came around. And when ServiceTitan offered Jon Brewer a job, his father was on board.
“Before I'm your boss, I'm your father and I want you to be happy and I want you to do well financially,” Jon Brewer remembers his dad saying. “If they have more opportunity for you than I do right now, you've got to go."
He did. But he never expected what happened next. Or what else he found at ServiceTitan.
A retirement plan
Jon Brewer’s solution meant Greg and Lisa Brewer’s retirement plan stayed on course. They were three or four years away, and that didn’t have to change—pandemic or not.
But that was before April 26.
Greg Brewer had scaled back his role at Quality Air and started an inshore fishing guide service in the Texas bays and bayou, taking advantage of 35 years of fishing experience. As with his HVAC company, he was focused on customer experience, with the smiling faces on his website as proof.
The boating accident that took his life was a shock. And, for Jon Brewer, a revelation.
“My relationship with my father was always a little different,” he said. “So much of our relationship revolved around work that we didn't spend a lot of personal time together.”
That meant he didn’t see as much of his father’s interactions with his friends, or the fishing community. The accident brought a new perspective.
“There were a lot of people who said, ‘I was in this bad situation and he helped me out,’” Brewer said. “Or he was super generous when this happened.
“I definitely got to kind of see a different side of him from the stories that people told.”
Those stories also revealed a new view of his career move.
“Finding out from all these strangers how much he talked about me or my brother or my wife, and the things that we did, and how proud he was of us, it's some things that some people can never bring themselves to say directly to the people that they care about.
“Everybody that I met at his funeral knew that I played music and my wife played music. And that I was super involved with my church, and about my new job at ServiceTitan and how excited he was for me and how glad he was that I was getting to help all these people.”
Little did Brewer know how much some of those same people were about to help Quality Air.
Finding out from all these strangers how much he talked about me or my brother or my wife, and the things we did, and how proud he was of us, it's things that some people can never bring themselves to say directly to the people that they care about."
Help for a grieving family
Jon Brewer’s managers at ServiceTitan had a message for him when they found out about his father: Go focus on your family. We’ll talk later. If you need something, let us know.
“Basically, we love you, go away,” he said.
That was both expected and unexpected for Brewer. But it wasn’t the biggest shock he got.
His family was grieving, but they still had a business to run. His mother and brother were involved day-to-day. Greg’s cousin is Quality Air’s lead technician.
How would they continue to operate in the short term, after a family tragedy? Two groups of users of the software, Lady Titans and a Facebook group for users of the software, ServiceTitan Masterminds, had the answer.
“From the first moment they just said, OK, we're taking over your company,” Brewer said. “Four or five different companies from all over the country. Texas, Oklahoma, Maine, California, Ohio—just literally all over the country.
“These people reached out to everybody that we work with, every vendor, our marketing company, our distributors, our financing company, our answering service, just everybody. They just took over everything.”
Other ServiceTitan customers were answering the phones for Quality Air. They were dispatching calls and dealing with questions from technicians who chose to keep working. And they were running the company, gratis.
“There's just only so many people that would take care of another company’s business for no profit for themselves,” Brewer said.
“It's one thing to send condolences or bring over a plate of lasagna, all that's wonderful and it is a very big comfort. But for somebody to be willing to pick up your livelihood and work for you ...”
Greg Brewer’s technical gifts made him the go-to call for Quality Air technicians, and that resource was gone. ServiceTitan Masterminds filled in immediately.
“Multiple people stepped up,” Jon Brewer said, “and just said, ‘Hey, if you guys need that, call me, here's my cell phone.’"
For weeks, until after the funeral, every aspect of the business was run remotely, through ServiceTitan, by other users.
“Only then, when my mom decided that she was ready to start taking some of the aspects of the business back over, did they start letting us answer our own phones again,” Brewer said.
“That was something else.”
The value of community
Sometimes, a community is what changes your life, like the community around Spring Woods Baptist Church changed the lives of Greg and Lisa Brewer all those years ago. Or like their community now in Freeport, which came together to help when Greg passed.
Thousands of contractors nationwide have built communities of customers like the one around Quality Air.
Jon Brewer wants people to remember his father by remembering the importance of participating actively in your community, even when the help is not tied to a tragic event.
That community is willing to help, if you just ask. And sometimes, even when you don’t.
“In the life that we've chosen, in a service industry, servant is just right there,” he said. “And that's what these people did, they loved and served us in our time of need.
“If you want to get better, you have to find somebody that is willing to help you. And what a lot of people don't realize is there are so many people who are willing to help. For whatever reason, people don't feel like they are deserving, or they don't want to inconvenience people.”
Community means helping is not an inconvenience. It’s an honor, whether it’s the local community Greg and Lisa built around Quality Air, or a larger one you might not even recognize.
“The business that you imagine, the career that you imagine for you and your team, all of that is absolutely available, but you're going to have a really hard time doing it alone,” Brewer said. “If you're struggling, even if it's not something as catastrophic as what we've gone through, there are people out there just waiting for somebody to raise their hand and say, ‘I need help with this.’
“I really believe that if people are willing to do that, they'll find people willing to help, and it'll absolutely revolutionize their lives.”
Just like the one around Spring Woods Baptist Church changed the Brewers’ lives by giving them the confidence to start their company. And their neighborhood community. And the community of ServiceTitan, which supported Lisa and her family through the loss of a big piece of their heart and their company.
“Community,” Jon Brewer said, “is what we were made for.”
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