Nelson Hill didn’t expect to spend a full week in a classroom. As an HVAC service technician for Quality Service Company, he is usually out in the field, troubleshooting units and helping customers in Florence, South Carolina. But when an instructor at the Advantage Academy had to take a leave of absence, Quality Service Company knew they could help by sending one of their best.
For a week, Hill stepped away from his truck to lead high school students through the hands-on realities of the trades. He created problems on training units for them to solve and wrote troubleshooting steps on the whiteboard.
"I like seeing light bulbs go off in people's heads," Hill says. "It's amazing to teach people stuff. It’s like that old saying: you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. But you teach a man how to fish, and he eats for a lifetime".
Rooted in family and the community
Founded in 2003, Quality Service Company has grown to approximately 40 employees, guided by a mission rooted in being locally owned, quality driven, and family focused.
That “family focused” pillar shows up in more than the mission statement. With three father–son duos and a father–daughter pair on their roster, that sense of family extends beyond the team and into how they treat their customers and their community.
For Tori Alexander, the company’s marketing manager and daughter of one of the owners, it means, “You get good quality humans that want to do quality work and give it back… it all plays into each other.”
That’s the throughline: hire people you’d trust in your own home, train them to do the job the right way. This ensures that giving back is never a side project, but a shared value.
Creating pathways through Advantage Academy
Advantage Academy is one of the clearest examples of how those values turn into action. The local program is designed to prepare students for careers in the trades, and Warehouse Manager Ethan Johnson treats it like a pipeline worth investing in.
"Every semester, we get a couple of guys from Advantage Academy," Johnson says. The reward is witnessing their transformation into professionals. "A bunch of them will come in without having a job, period," Johnson explains. "Teaching them those basics, and then seeing them the last day, shake my hand and [say] 'thank you, sir'... seeing some professional growth is the most rewarding thing on my side".
For many students, the internship is the beginning of a longer arc: they leave for technical college and later return to Quality Service Company full time, already familiar with the expectations and the pace of real work.
The backbone of the nation
When reflecting on why the trades are so important, Johnson is direct: "I believe they’re the backbone of our community".
"You’re not going to get a robot to come unclog your toilet," adds Alexander. "No machine's ever going to take your job. There's always going to be a need".
The challenge isn’t whether the work will exist. It’s whether enough people will be trained to do it.
But Alexander admits: “There’s just not enough people coming into the trades anymore.”
That’s why Advantage Academy matters. It creates earlier exposure, real-world experience, and a clearer on-ramp into the kind of careers that keep communities running.
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
Built for growth and for good
As Quality Service Company expands into plumbing and electrical, the operation gets more complex fast—more job types, more scheduling variables, more inventory, more coordination across teams.
To manage that complexity across a 30-technician operation, they rely on ServiceTitan.
"ServiceTitan is built for trades," says Johnson.
Since joining ServiceTitan in 2018, the company has adopted a full suite of Pro Products to increase efficiency and for Alexander, moving to end-to-end automation was essential to keep up with summer demand.
"It’s going to really free up the dispatchers to work with the technicians more," she says, ensuring that as the company scales toward its goal of growing revenue by 30%, the focus remains on the people behind the tools.
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.
