Tyler Kropp never went to college.
“I always say business is my college,” Kropp said, because while his friends sat in lecture halls, Kropp spent those same years working on the power-washing business he started at 17.
By 5:25 a.m., he was at his work desk, watching videos from home services influencers like Tommy Mello and Ismael Valdez as if they were his professors, applying their tips to his own business.
Kropp sold that company at 22. For his next venture, he wanted something bigger.
“I wanted something that I could sell to private equity for a strong multiple,” Kropp, now 23, said. “I wanted something with a large average ticket.”
That’s why he launched Home Run Roofing in Collegeville, Pa., in July 2024. For months, it was just him — answering phones, managing jobs, learning the sales process from scratch. Meanwhile, the software he used at the time couldn’t keep up.
Even something as simple as a close rate was hard to calculate. He and his team would count opportunities off the calendar, tally sold estimates on a whiteboard, then divide the two by hand — a number that often didn’t match what the software reported.
“This is how cavemen calculated their close rate,” Kropp said.
His professors, though, had already pointed him toward a different software solution.
“If this guy with a $100 million company is saying use ServiceTitan, this guy with a $50 million company saying use ServiceTitan, this guy with an $80 million company, it doesn’t take a genius to find the pattern,” Kropp said. “So I always knew I would end up on ServiceTitan.”
Home Run went live on ServiceTitan in May 2025. In the first year, they went from $1 million in revenue to over $3 million.
No More Hand-Holding
Before ServiceTitan, building an estimate was a group project at Home Run.
“How do I make this roof estimate?” sales reps would call and ask Kropp, appointment after appointment.
“This is the same roof estimate you made yesterday,” he’d reply. “What do you mean, ‘How do you make it?’”
It wasn’t the reps’ fault — it was the software.
“When the software is weaker, you need to micromanage more because you don’t trust that they did it right,” Kropp said. “I know I’ve lost money before on projects because I estimated them incorrectly with previous softwares.”
ServiceTitan’s spec-based estimate templates changed that.
Instead of building each estimate from scratch, a rep answers a set of guided questions — how many squares of shingles, what materials, what labor — and the template calculates pricing automatically.
“Our gross profit is right on the money every single time, so long as the sales rep doesn’t mess something up in the estimating process,” Kropp said. “It’s 99% dummy proof.”
Other ServiceTitan tools Kropp leans on:
Reporting: Kropp built a custom “sales rep report” tracking four metrics — opportunities run, total sales, close rate and closed average sale. “It’s a matter of sitting down at my desk and making a decision in one minute versus making a decision in 30 minutes,” he said.
Audit Log: Every change to an estimate is tracked by name. “Something as simple as the audit log in ServiceTitan — it tells you, ‘Hey, so-and-so added this to an estimate.’ Something that simple is massive.”
Scheduling Pro: Kropp loves that he can just text a booking link to a customer. “We actually just sold one the other day, $35,000 off Scheduling Pro,” he said. “That’ll pay for Scheduling Pro for the next five years.”
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
Still Not Satisfied
Home Run recently moved to a one-call close model. Reps no longer earn commission if they leave an appointment without closing. And it only works, Kropp said, because the estimate is airtight.
“If you come back tomorrow with a price, and you’re charging healthy margins, your close rate’s going to be single digits,” Kropp said. “You might as well throw a paper airplane in their lawn — that can be your estimate.”
Home Run’s team has also grown, from three people when Kropp went live on ServiceTitan to nine today. Gross profit has climbed by nearly 10 percentage points.
“An extra 10 percentage points goes straight to the bottom line,” Kropp said. “That could be another $300,000, $400,000 at the end of the year.”
But Kropp isn’t satisfied.
“I set these crazy, outlandish goals. I want to 10X the business every year,” Kropp said. His next target is $1 million months.
Kropp has also reframed how he thinks about what ServiceTitan costs: not as overhead, but as a cost of goods sold.
“My material bill at the supply house is expensive too, but am I going to not buy shingles?” Kropp said. “We couldn’t do the business without ServiceTitan. It’s the one place of truth. What’s the cost of not using it?”
