Arctic Air Owner Learns from Podcasts, Mentors & ServiceTitan to Help Build $1 Million Business

Go with the flow, rather than fight against the current

While Wittkopf seems to be riding the tailwinds toward growth and expansion, his beginnings definitely started with a couple of sink-or-swim moments. 

In his first semester of HVAC trade school at age 18, the director hired him to work in service maintenance at his HVAC company. He did ride-alongs for one week with another service technician, who then quit and left Wittkopf to learn the rest on his own. Five years later, he was handling all of the HVAC service calls and the company was making about $100,000 a year.

That’s when he told the owner he wanted to quit and find a better job—and the owner decided he wanted to retire instead, and handed over the keys to Wittkopf.

“I had just me and one office manager who answered calls and did payroll and stuff. It was just me and her running out of a house,” Wittkopf explains. “I didn't know how to run a business. I didn't know anything about anything, other than how to service a unit. 

“And so, it was sink or swim again. And really, if it wasn't for her, I would have sunk,” Wittkopf says. 

The pair muddled through the old-school way until Wittkopf discovered ServiceTitan in 2017, and a better way to scale his commercial HVAC-refrigeration business. But at the time, he says ServiceTitan catered more toward residential home services rather than commercial, and he wanted to do things his own way.

“I made a huge mistake, which is trying to run the software on my own and trying to learn it on my own,” Wittkopf says. “I would basically fight the current of ServiceTitan. You guys have taken everyone's processes and you say, ‘This is the process. If you follow this road, you're going to be successful.’ And I kept trying to fight it like, ‘No, I want to do it this way.’

“That took me a lot of years to get out of, and to realize I needed a success manager or someone to teach me the software,” Wittkopf says. “But it did very much escalate our business.”

Doing things his way kept company earnings stagnant at about $500,000 a year through 2019, then revenue grew to $900,000 in 2020, once Wittkopf decided to follow best practices for using the ServiceTitan software. This year, Arctic Air added a residential services division, grew from three service technicians to nine, and is on track to surpass the $1 million mark. 

“Every week, I've got questions to ask my success manager, but step by step, we're getting better and better, and the process is getting smoother,” Wittkopf says. “If you do what ServiceTitan does, then everything works. All the KPIs (key performance indicators) work, everything gets cleaned up, and now you're operating as smoothly as possible. It just makes it so much easier."

And ServiceTitan also makes it easier for him to network and find mentors to learn from along the way.

“It's like a religion. Once you're on ServiceTitan, you don't leave. It's the best. You stay. And everybody's very much a community there,” he says.

How Arctic Air moved the needle with residential HVAC services

Up until 2021, Arctic Air focused most of its business on refrigeration and ice machine installation, and service for restaurants and other local businesses. Demand slowed during the pandemic, Wittkopf says, and despite a strong surge in the spring, the demand for commercial services isn’t as high because restaurants aren’t moving as many products or storing as much as they did prior to Covid.

Even so, he didn’t think adding residential services was the answer.

“The reason I didn't do residential before was because I didn't want to fight all the little guys,” Wittkopf says. “We only have one or two main competitors here, as far as guys who are doing quality work. The rest are just one-man shows, and there's 100 of them in a little truck rolling around doing jobs for $4,000. That's not worth it to me.”

Then, he noticed a common thread while listening to those podcast speakers, such as Tommy Mello, on ServiceTitan’s “Toolbox for the Trades,” and others. Essentially, the message was: “Stop being the cheapest, start knowing your numbers, and be the quality guy in town,” Wittkopf says.

“And that really just struck a chord. I was like, ‘You know what? If I'm going to get into residential, we're going to do it right, and we're not going to be the cheapest. We're going to be the premium guy in town, and we're going to do the absolute best job,’” he explains.

Wittkopf proceeded to hire a top-notch residential service manager, who serves as his lead installer, service tech, and salesperson. He also hired Ryno Strategic Solutions, a digital marketing agency for the trades, and Joe Crisara, owner of ContractorSelling.com, to learn marketing best practices. His plan? Cast a really big net to capture new residential customers, and be ready for the deluge.

“All the guys go through all his training, and we try to follow those workflows,” Wittkopf says. “We've only been doing residential work for about four months, and we're already up like 1,000 percent, compared to all of last year.”

More on how ServiceTitan helps Arctic Air grow its business

On Phones Pro

“Phones Pro is by far worth it,” Wittkopf says, even though he initially resisted the add-on because he wanted to pay a cheaper phone bill. 

With Phones Pro, Arctic Air can track and record each call, which goes a long way when trying to solve disputes over approvals or payments. The KPI reports also alerted Wittkopf to a recent drop in booking rates and higher cancellations, which he determined was due to his techs being booked out two weeks and customers not wanting to wait.

“You can look at your numbers and actually see where you're going, where you're missing the beat,” Wittkopf says. “How much money are you losing every day because these calls came in that you didn't get to? Because it knows your average ticket. It knows what that opportunity cost was.” 

And his numbers told him he needed to hire more to do more work.

“That is exciting to be able to actually see the gauges, and be able to know what you're doing is accurate, and you can study the numbers and actually see what you're doing,” he adds. “Otherwise, you're just driving blind.”

On Marketing Pro

Technician reviews have gone up tremendously for Arctic Air since the company started using Marketing Pro - Reputation Management, Wittkopf says. He can also see steady growth in the techs’ average tickets.

“You can look at every technician and know exactly how much they did in the day, and exactly their customer service, how many reviews they've gotten, and all sorts of different metrics,” he says.

Reputation Management also gives him a chance to make things right with a customer, before they leave a bad review on Google. “A lot of times, they just want to talk or figure it out,” he says. And the techs love it when they get to see glowing reviews shared in a group chat.

Wittkopf admits he hasn’t fully tapped into the features of Marketing Pro quite yet, but he hopes to build that side of the business, especially with the larger variety of marketing campaign templates now available through ServiceTitan.

“We're trying to put a lot of our money and efforts towards marketing, so I'm trying to keep overhead costs down,” Wittkopf says. “I think ServiceTitan really helps with trying to eliminate that office staff you probably would normally use, but you really don't need it. You're able to manage it on your own, and I think you can go further without more overhead.”