Jacob Schneider’s growth strategy, for years, was simple: look at last year’s revenue, set a number that felt ambitious, and do whatever it took to hit it.
“I would just pick a random percentage that I wanted to grow that year, and we’d push hard to make that happen — through brute force and ignorance, not through planned KPIs,” said Schneider, owner of Canadoor Garage Doors.
The costs behind that growth were just as much of a mystery at the Ontario commercial and residential shop.
The software they had in place wasn’t built to catch any of it. Schneider wouldn’t find out what a job actually cost until long after it was done.
“We weren’t even closing the books on a month-to-month basis,” Schneider said. “It would just be like, ‘Oh my God, why did our cost of goods sold change three months ago?’ There was a bill that didn’t have a purchase order ... and then we’d call the technician and they didn’t remember because they’re onto the next job and it’s already been a week.”
Blind spots like these had a direct cost. Schneider wasn’t pricing jobs high enough to afford the business he actually wanted to run.
“Provide good service, hire good people, train (our technicians), be timely with our response times — I wasn’t able to do that, for that price,” Schneider said.
He knew he needed a change, and found the answer on the road. Touring other garage door shops across Canada and the U.S., he noticed a pattern: the best-run operations were all using ServiceTitan.
Canadoor went live on the software in April 2022. Since then, the company’s revenue has grown 350%.
Boundaries, By Design
One of Schneider’s favorite things about ServiceTitan isn’t a dashboard or a feature — it’s the boundaries that enforce the right behavior.
When Canadoor first started using ServiceTitan, staff kept walking into Schneider’s office complaining about what the software wouldn’t let them do.
“I had people coming in saying, ‘I can’t open an estimate without attaching it to a job,’” Schneider said. “And I was like, ‘Well, we need a job. You need to log your time ... regardless of whether it’s in the office or in the field.’”
Structure like that helped reshape the business.
“It was very much like an operating system, which is what we were looking for,” Schneider said. “I can sleep well using ServiceTitan, knowing that every metric I want to know is either at the tip of my fingers, already on a dashboard or already on an automated report.”
A few ways ServiceTitan changed how Canadoor runs:
Marketing Pro: Schneider used to rely on a marketing agency’s monthly reports to guess at ROI. Now thanks to Marketing Pro, “we know exactly what we spend, exactly what the ROI is, and exactly the type of leads we’re going to get from it,” he said.
Atlas: With Atlas, ServiceTitan’s AI assistant, Schneider can build a Marketing Pro campaign from a single recommendation. If a commercial client hasn’t booked a job in 12 months, for example, Atlas flags it. “It says, ‘Hey, you should do this and here’s the steps to do it.’ And then it says, ‘Do you want me to just set it up for you?’” Schneider said. “You say, ‘Yes,’ and it goes in and configures it all.”
Invoicing: Time to pay invoices dropped from 26 days to about half a day, even as Canadoor’s invoice volume grew — with one less dedicated accounts receivable employee.
No More Guessing
There’s no more picking a random growth number and pushing through brute force. Canadoor now knows, to the dollar, what it costs to do the work — and budgets accordingly.
“In the last two years, we’ve been within 5% of budget both years,” Schneider said. “We can plan for the growth that we expect to have.”
That kind of accuracy gave Schneider room to build a dedicated training center that turns recruiting into a structured pipeline.
“Because we’ve been on budget and we know how to plan for that growth, we can now have a recruitment plan that turns into a hiring plan, that turns into a training plan,” Schneider said.
The company’s next target is $20 million in top-line revenue by 2029, and Schneider wants to get there without sacrificing margin.
“We don’t want to just do $20 million and make 15% net,” Schneider said. “We want to make 25% net.”
Even with that ambition, Schneider sometimes stops to take stock of how far Canadoor has come in the past few years on ServiceTitan.
“When I reflect now, I totally have to pinch myself.”
