Dow Seifert never planned to work in the family business.
He spent years in HVAC and plumbing wholesale across the country, far away from Uniontown, Ohio, where his grandfather started Crown Heating, Cooling and Plumbing in 1960.
He came back anyway in 2017, drawn to the commercial construction business his father and uncle had grown, with a clear goal: build the service and replacement side into something that could stand on its own.
But there was a big obstacle: The company’s software.
"Two plus two didn't equal four in that software," Seifert said. Reports sometimes arrived 90 days late, or came in wrong. Replacement sales had to be hand-costed because the software's profit calculations simply couldn't be trusted.
Then there was the union.
Crown is a union shop, and that made the software's limitations exponentially harder to live with. Union payroll had to be calculated manually outside the system and re-entered by hand. Materials — Crown carries about $1 million in inventory at any given time — were tracked on paper.
And when something went wrong within the software, help was hard to come by.
It all amounted to the same feeling for Seifert, month after month.
"We felt like we were driving the bus through the rearview mirror,” he said, “rather than looking through the front windshield."
No More Guessing
After a three-year software search, Crown made its decision: ServiceTitan.
The choice came down to where the business was headed. With union labor costs climbing and construction margins tightening, Seifert knew service and replacement had to carry more of the load — and he needed software built for it.
Crown went live in the summer of 2023. The differences have shown up across the board.
Reporting: Seifert, a self-described data guy, can now build custom reports around whatever he needs. "Reports to me are the only thing you can really go by and know are true and accurate," he said. "(ServiceTitan) gives me more numbers than I know what to do with."
Revenue tracker: Before ServiceTitan, there was no dashboard showing how Crown was doing throughout the day, week, month or year. Now, every employee can see the business in real-time with ServiceTitan’s revenue tracker. “All of my employees log into ServiceTitan and see that speedometer turn at the same time every time a sales call is closed or any job is completed,” Seifert said. “It makes everybody feel more connected, in-tune, and that what they do matters."
Call recording: Crown had no call recording before ServiceTitan. Now comfort consultants listen to the original service call before a replacement appointment — then cross-reference the technician's invoice.
Projects: Crown's construction background means they think in project terms. ServiceTitan's Projects feature lets them track every phase of a replacement, from service call to sales visit, layout, fabrication, install — and see exactly where hours were burned.
In 2020, Crown’s service and replacement revenue stood at $2-3 million. Today, they’re pushing $8 million and counting.
But no feature has proven more valuable than what ServiceTitan's support team did.
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Built to Last
Crown's toughest ask for ServiceTitan was one the platform hadn't originally been built to handle: union payroll.
Workers crossing multiple locals in a day — each carrying different wage rates and benefit packages — created a level of complexity that took time to solve. Seifert's success manager and a ServiceTitan product engineer worked through the problem together, eventually cracking it through Flexible Timekeeping.
As a result, Crown went fully live with automated payroll in October 2025, reducing the payroll department from three people to one. There goes $120,000 in overhead every year.
"We were able to reduce the number of staff members we had in the office because it flowed so smoothly and we could trust the reporting," Seifert said.
Crown is projecting $23-25 million this year. But the challenges haven’t let up. Union labor churn has cost Crown three or four install crews since 2023. Costs are rising. People are leaving the union.
But “ServiceTitan has helped us combat all of the constraints that the world has thrown at (us),” Seifert said.
Crown has been around for 65 years. Seifert and his brother are the third generation. It’s a legacy he approaches with pride, fear and a deep sense of responsibility.
And with ServiceTitan, he doesn’t have to face it alone.
"I'm looking out the front windshield rather than the rearview," Seifert said. "I can see the obstacles coming rather than realize I've been tripping over them for two months. I can help protect all of the stuff that we worked super hard to grow and earn, rather than just hope and pray."
