When Jason Beckley arrived at HomeFirst Services in Melbourne 18 months ago, the business was going backwards.
The residential plumbing, HVAC and electrical shop was in the red — monthly. It was difficult to track where the money was going. Customer follow-up and engagement were largely missing.
Beckley knew what a well-run home service shop looked like. He'd spent five years at Network Home Services in Sydney — one of the best home service businesses in the industry — where the model was built around the customer experience. Technicians asked about pets before arriving, so they could show up at the door with a dog bone. They turned up clean, tidy and shaven, and provided multiple pricing options to the customer.
HomeFirst, which was acquired by Network, needed all of that. The business also lacked the data to know what was actually working, and what wasn’t.
Beckley came on as general manager just as HomeFirst migrated to ServiceTitan. The software, he said, helped him implement change.
"If I can't measure it, then don't ask me to start that project,” Beckley said. “ServiceTitan definitely gives us the freedom and accountability to measure every touchpoint.”
Here’s how.
Knowing the Score
Beckley came in with a clear philosophy.
"If you can't see a number," he said, "you can't drive the culture to deliver the number."
At HomeFirst, the numbers that matter most are conversion rate and gross margin. When Beckley arrived, CSR conversion was around 45%. Field conversion for the shop’s 50 technicians hovered at about 50%. The average ticket was around $1,900. Gross margin was invisible at the job level — visible only from a monthly P&L that told him things were bad, not why.
Here are three ServiceTitan features that drove improvement:
AI dispatching: HomeFirst’s top tradies used to manipulate dispatchers to get the highest-value leads. Dispatch Pro now sends the right tech to the right job. It also cut drive times — from an hour to 40 minutes — dropping monthly fuel costs from nearly $14,000 to around $7,000.
Dynamic price book: Before ServiceTitan, HomeFirst had no way to know if a job was profitable until the monthly P&L landed. Once a job was sold, the team did it — regardless of cost. The dynamic price book changed that, giving technicians real-time visibility into whether a job is priced correctly before the first hour is logged.
Field Pro: Pre-ServiceTitan, a top tradie was converting well overall but didn't know where he was losing. Field Pro's AI coaching found the issue: he was throwing out a price without explaining the value behind it. Beckley said his techs now ask the AI after every job, "What could I have done differently? What other options could I have had? Where did I lose that customer?"
The result? Eighteen months in, CSR conversion now sits above 75%. Field conversion is around 75%. And average ticket has climbed to about $2,300.
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Back in the Black
After a year and a half at HomeFirst, Beckley feels like he understands the business.
"When you come into a business and you don't know it inside out, gut feels don't mean anything," he said. "Data and ServiceTitan are my gut now."
HomeFirst's revenue sits at $17 million, with a target of $20 million this year. The company is “back in the black,” Beckley said.
What makes the transformation stick, Beckley explained, is that every person in the business can see the same score.
"If you're not on ServiceTitan, you've got to go to four platforms — one for CSR, one for marketing, one for sales, one for profitability," he said. "Now (ServiceTitan) is just my one place of truth, which gives me structure job to job, day-to-day, week to week, month to month. We look at the numbers, they come from one place."
And it’s not just about the data.
“There is no lonelier place on Earth than owning a business,” Beckley said. “The community behind ServiceTitan — when you can go and sit and share a challenge with another like-minded business owner who is willing to be vulnerable and honest about their business — is what makes it just that little bit easier.
"It's not just software. It's about people, it's about knowledge, it's about sharing. It's about the community that comes with ServiceTitan."
