For nine years, a homeowner in greater Boston kept warm the hard way.
The buried oil tank had rotted out. The lines to the house had corroded to nothing. So every winter — every brutal, unforgiving New England winter — she fed a wood-burning stove and remembered what central heat used to feel like.
Then Sila showed up.
The Boston location of the East Coast HVAC company tore out the old oil system, installed a high-efficiency heat pump, and handed her something she'd never had in that house before: air conditioning — no more fossil fuel dependency. No more underground tank slowly surrendering to the earth.
It wasn't a service call. It was a donation.
"We are geared to do something for the people that are sometimes less fortunate, in need," said Eric Rowe, Sila's Director of Revenue. "We built a lot of our systems and processes around making sure we can give back to those people when needed."
‘People first, people first, people first'
Rowe joined Sila about six months ago. What drew him in wasn't a job description. It was something harder to find: a company where the stated values actually matched the lived ones.
"I met with every manager at the C-level, and it was the same consistent message: people first, people first, people first," he said. "And when I got here, I realized they don't just mean people inside the building — they mean the people we work with outside too."
That shows up internally — basketball tournaments, Topgolf outings, company barbecues. "We make everyone feel like we're one big family," Rowe said.
But the culture doesn't stop at the front door.
In Boston, winter isn't a season you romanticize. It's a survival test. Heating isn't a luxury. "When you get to go to someone's house that has no heat at the least optimal times and fix a major problem, it is great," Rowe said. "It's an absolute need."
Embedded, Not Just Passing Through
Sila's community work isn't a campaign. It isn't a line on a PR calendar. It's a posture — showing up as neighbors, not just contractors.
Part of that means hiring from the communities Sila serves. "We're bringing people from these neighborhoods to work for us to deliver back to these neighborhoods," Rowe said.
The technician who knocks on your door grew up near your street.
Rowe's clearest proof of that philosophy is the company's own general manager, who started as an installation apprentice more than 13 years ago. Today, he runs the operation.
"He's the exact story of what Sila is about," Rowe said.
Building the Next Generation of Tradespeople
The skilled labor shortage is real, and most companies respond the same way: find the 10- or 15-year veteran who can hit the ground running. Sila goes the other direction.
"We are looking for the person who's interested in stepping into this world and then taking the time to hand-hold and coach and develop," Rowe said.
Through partnerships with local trade schools in the Boston area, Sila recruits students at the start of their careers and invests in their growth — through mentorship, apprenticeships, and side-by-side work with lead technicians.
Rowe sees something bigger happening in the way people think about trade careers.
"Previous generations kind of lived in this world where if you're going to be successful, college is a need," he said. "And now we're realizing: people can be very successful in the trades and have a great business, make a great living, and provide for families."
Every apprentice Sila brings on makes that argument in real life.
How ServiceTitan Makes Giving Back Possible
Sila is PE-backed, and Rowe is clear-eyed about what that means: scale requires systems. When he joined, his first order of business was to examine how the company ran and find every place where the process could be tightened. ServiceTitan became the foundation of that work.
"ServiceTitan is absolutely a source of truth," he said. "It removes the friction from analytics where we're not trying to take the source of truth from multiple spreadsheets. It all lives in one place."
Every morning, Rowe and his leadership team pull a 15-minute snapshot of the business — booking rates, call center efficiency, field routing, revenue — from a single dashboard.
That visibility has real consequences. In the call center, ServiceTitan's data revealed a stark gap between agents: one booking a call every six minutes, another taking 20. With that information, Rowe could identify what the top performer was doing differently and build it into the rest of the team.
The efficiency gains aren't just good business. They're what make the giving possible.
"The more we can use ServiceTitan to improve our day-to-day operations, the more it frees up not only time but also funding to be able to do projects like this," Rowe said. "It's allowed us to make giving back part of our day-to-day. It's forefront in our mind and our clear mission here."
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A Moral Obligation — and a Feel-Good
When Rowe talks about giving back, he doesn't reach for marketing language. He reaches for something more fundamental. "It's a moral obligation," he says simply. "As people, we need to give back to our communities and to people who are less fortunate. And not only is it an obligation — it's a feel-good. It lets people know that we're not just a business. We're people that care about people."
For that homeowner in Boston who spent nine winters stoking a wood stove, Sila's visit wasn't just an HVAC installation. It was a restoration — of comfort, of warmth, of dignity. Central heat. Air conditioning for the first time in her life. A cleaner, more efficient system that no longer relies on an underground tank slowly rotting in the earth.
That's what it looks like when a trades company takes seriously what it means to power a nation — not just its pipes and wires, but its people.
Want to learn more about ServiceTitan’s Power the Nation initiative and the contractors making a difference across the country? Visit ServiceTitan’s Power the Nation home page.
