Aaron Butler was in his second week as vice president of service at Karber Corporation when a construction VP walked into his office, dropped a stack of papers on his desk and said, "Boy, am I glad you're here to take this off of me."
It was the billing. Not software-generated invoices. Paper. The process: cross-reference a folder, check a spreadsheet, look at the paper, and if the amounts match, scratch it off. Line by line, page by page.
"You've got to be kidding me," Butler thought.
But it wasn’t just the billing that surprised Butler in those first two weeks. When he asked about any process at the Phoenix-based commercial business (reporting, quoting, service agreements), the answer was always the same: "We have a spreadsheet for that."
Butler quickly noticed that Karber had the bones of a promising service division. What it didn't have was a system.
That’s why his first order of business was to find software that could grow a business, not just document one.
Clearing the Paper Trail
Butler evaluated several platforms before landing on ServiceTitan. The pitch from competitors was familiar: all-in-one functionality. But when he dug in, the seams showed, like reporting and dispatching that required a third-party add-on and lived on a separate screen.
ServiceTitan was different enough to make the decision clear.
“When we got into ServiceTitan and started seeing all the features, I was like, ‘Why didn't I have this 20 years ago?’”
The before-and-after told the story:
Invoicing: Pre-ServiceTitan, invoices went out anywhere from five to 30 days after a job closed. Today, Butler said it’s around seven to 10 days, and sometimes billing agents are sending an invoice within minutes of a tech closing a work order.
Quoting: In the first year, Butler eliminated all external quoting spreadsheets. “We just work solely out of ServiceTitan now.” Service agreement quoting, previously tracked across multiple external documents, is the current project, nearly complete.
Reporting: Before, financial visibility at Karber was “archaic” and "kind of a guess," Butler said. Now he can slice and dice performance by trade, by office and by job type.
"Being able to see the financials and where things are going, that's how you steer the ship. That's how you guesstimate as far as where your quarter's going to end, where your year-end's coming up, and what areas of the business to focus on," he said.
From Five Techs to 26 and Counting
When Butler arrived, the service division had five technicians and roughly $1.8 to $2 million in combined service revenue. Three years later, the numbers look different:
Revenue hit $5 million in year two, $8 million last year, and the target for this year is $12.25 million.
Headcount has grown from five techs to 26, with plans to reach 36 to 40 by year-end.
Karber has expanded from its original Phoenix office to three locations, adding Dallas- Fort Worth and San Antonio, with a fourth Texas market opening later this year. Their ultimate goal is five offices.
ServiceTitan sits at the center of that expansion plan. Getting a new location up and running takes as little as one to five days: duplicate existing business units, update an address and a phone number, and the office is ready to run calls.
"I couldn't really imagine being able to do that that easy," Butler said.
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Built to Grow With You
What's kept Butler committed through three years of rapid scaling isn't any single ServiceTitan feature.
It's how the platform has kept pace.
The service team now uses AI-powered work order and invoice summaries so that every technician, regardless of writing ability, delivers consistent, professional documentation to customers. Techs have embraced the system for its ease of workflow. And the commercial capabilities that were still developing when Karber went live in October 2023 have expanded steadily.
"It’s really felt like, even through the commercial side, that ServiceTitan just kind of grew with us," Butler said. "Hopefully, we’ll have a couple hundred techs here in a few years, and I have no doubt that we'll be able to manage through that with ServiceTitan."
The running joke from those early days — "We have a spreadsheet for that" — doesn't come up much anymore.
Because Karber has a system for that.
