Michael Ainger is good at math and knowing his numbers. So is his brother.
But at a second-generation company with 150 to 200 people, that only gets you so far.
"We knew where we were. We just could never explain it to somebody else per se," said Ainger, managing director of Ainger Group Roofing and Exteriors in Central Ontario. "It came down to him and I knowing, and just sort of everybody (else) trusting.
“It’s not scalable.”
Ainger Group has been in the family since 1990. Michael returned in 2019 after years in oil, gas and cryptocurrency, arriving to find the business running on handwritten paper and hand timesheets. His first move was to go digital — but after five years, digital tools like Google Spreadsheets and Procore weren't the answer.
In the fall of 2025, Ainger Group went live with ServiceTitan.
Built to Scale
Starting on ServiceTitan forced something Ainger had always wanted but never had time to do: a full review of every process. A few features driving that change:
Job costing: Before ServiceTitan, costs were buried — everyone knew what to order, but nothing was broken out line by line. “We weren't line-item specific," Ainger said. "We always wanted to do that, but having to use (the) pricebook and forcing that is just even more cost certainty."
Customer communication: Ainger Group was already ahead of most roofing companies on communication — using CRMs and timed emails before ServiceTitan. But the platform took it further with less manual effort. "The number one thing in roofing and exterior businesses is lack of communication. And that's what we've capitalized on over the last five years," Ainger said. "Now with ServiceTitan, it is a whole other level and easier and less overhead to do that."
Marketing Pro: Ainger has leaned into Marketing Pro’s Reputation Management feature, “We're seeing more reviews coupled with more pressure from our production team to close jobs out properly,” he said. They’ve also used Marketing Pro to remind customers to pay their invoices. “(In doing so), we're seeing our cashflow increase without added support.”
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The Long Game
Michael Ainger doesn't talk about revenue. He talks about EBITDA.
"You can tell me you (made) $100 million dollars, but if you made $500,000 on $100 million, man, that sucks," he said. "The driver is your EBITDA, the driver is your cost control."
ServiceTitan now gives Ainger per-job visibility to protect those margins — and it's opened up a conversation that didn't exist before: expanding branches across Canada.
"To have a conversation of deploying branches across the country, that is a ServiceTitan capability for sure," he said. "We would've never been able to even have or see how that could function without ServiceTitan."
Recently, while driving with his father — who still does sales for the company — Ainger got a reminder of how far things have come.
"He's really proud of things right now," Ainger said of his father, who founded Ainger Group in 1990 and spent decades running it on pen and paper.
"He recognizes how much the world's changed, and how today, he couldn't even fathom the things that we've been building."
