Efficiency fuels Arizona Painting's growing business

Arizona Painting, a residential and commercial business based in Phoenix and Tucson, has been voted the No.1 painting company in Arizona since 2016, and was nominated in 2023 as a top place to work in Arizona.

It has been an Angie’s List Super Service Award Winner for 12 consecutive years, and has been nominated for the Better Business Bureau’s Ethics Award.

Its work seems to speak for itself.

But four years ago, the business recognized it needed something more from its CRM software. Arizona Painting had expanded to Nevada and Colorado and was using different programs for different tasks, trying to juggle the interface between them all. If one thing changed with a customer, five different files had to be updated. Arizona also was using what it called “homegrown” technology – Excel for scheduling, a Word doc for proposals, Google sheets.

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“We were looking for a CRM program that could integrate our marketing, that could handle a customer from the beginning to the end,” said Joe Campbell, Arizona Painting Owner, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. “A lot of the programs we looked at, they wouldn’t handle the marketing, they wouldn’t handle the front-end scheduling. Some of them would do the production side of it well, but none of them really did everything.”

Which is when Campbell found ServiceTitan, the cloud-based software for the trades. The challenge for Campbell, though, was that ServiceTitan was known more for use by electrical, plumbing and HVAC businesses.

Concerns dissipated as Arizona delved into the software. Campbell found that ServiceTitan adapted itself quite well to the painting industry, in no small part because of its all-in-one approach.

“We picked Service Titan (in 2019) because it could do everything from the start to the finish,” he said. “From the first call a customer makes all the way to the collections process -- and then even follow-up and memberships and things like that.

“It was the only program we could find that could do that for our company.”

What has ServiceTitan meant to Arizona? In four years, according to Campbell … 

• Leads and revenue increase by 60%

• Team numbers increased by almost 60% to handle the growth

• The addition of live job costing in ServiceTitan alone led to a 5% increase in profit margin, which Campbell said “is a huge number for us.”

“Using ServiceTitan is something that everybody in our industry needs if they want to know how well their business is doing and how to improve it,” Campbell said.

One specific aspect that has made a difference: The company is tracking leads on a weekly basis. It wasn’t doing that before ServiceTitan.

“We talk to a lot of smaller companies, and it’s amazing to me how many are actually surprised to know that,” Campbell said. “We know what we're getting, we know what sources they come from. A lot of people are like, ‘Wow, I don't even know how many I get each week. I don't even count them.’”

Campbell listed several other ways that ServiceTitan has generated growth, revenue and leads. Among them:

Tracking a fairly significant number of crews out on jobs. “We're a little bit bigger company, and most of the software designed for painters would only handle a minimal amount of crews,” Campbell said. “That was really important to us that we could grow with Service Titan and we could grow with our crews and it would be able to handle our growth.”

Live job costing. Which Campbell called the biggest benefit Arizona has seen. “We can pull up any job we're doing and know exactly where we're at with paint and labor,” he said. “It's much easier to manage and track with ServiceTitan.”

Internal communications. “The call tracking, the call recording, it's helped us a ton because we can listen to our text recorded calls and know what was discussed with the customer,” Campbell said. “And we can get ourselves up to speed before we call that customer so we know what's going on a little bit better.”

Communication with the customer by taking best advantage of the project file. “We do use it for just communicating with the customer with all of our notes,” Campbell said. “Once they accept the proposal, it goes to our scheduling department, and they talk to them about the schedule. They talk to them about their paint colors, where they want those colors painted. We get all those details and put them into their project file, and then it's seamless. When we assign that job to the painter, they have all that information right then and there. It's word for word, exactly what the customer said, and the painters can see it and the customers really appreciate that.”

Proposals on site. When Arizona bids on a job, it goes through the home and takes photos of concerns, cracks in the wall, peeling paint, etc. “We'll attach all those pictures to the estimate,” Campbell said. “And then that's one thing we go over when we're going over the price with the customer and showing them the areas right on the pictures, attaching them right to the estimate. I think that's really helped, too, to be upfront with the homeowners about the issues their house has and how we're going to handle that.”

The integrated Pricebook. Prior to ServiceTitan, Arizona used an accounting software, emailed information and entered costs into the job cost system. “It’s a lot easier having the PriceBook integrated,” Campbell said.

Team efficiency, which has improved customer service. “I think ServiceTitan's helped (the team) a lot because they used to have to come into the office to get their job files,” Campbell said. “That required extra time, extra gas, all that. And now they're able just to get their details the morning of their job, go straight to it and know exactly what's going on. So I think it helped their happiness; they didn't have to come into the office every morning. And it also helped them, as well, because they were able to better take care of the customer because they had all the details of what the estimator told them.”

Campbell would like to see improvements in some areas of ServiceTitan, specifically mentioning accounts receivable and the way collections are handled. He’d also like to see a way the software can handle revenue numbers for jobs that spill over from late one week to early the next, which is not uncommon in painting.

But when it comes to overall satisfaction, Campbell is positive. Arizona Painting’s experience shows ServiceTitan is easily adapted to the painting industry, and can leverage growth and increase revenue and profit.