For years, Jeff Brett was always busy on Wednesday and Thursday nights.
That’s when the founder of King Quality Roofing and Siding, a New York-area business he’s scaled since 1992, would manually calculate his profit and loss numbers and pay the bills with his general manager — until midnight.
No plans on Wednesdays and Thursdays meant no dinner dates with his wife. It meant no winding down from work mid-week. Most frustrating, it meant missing some of his son’s high school lacrosse games. “Film it,” he’d say to his wife.
The weekly metrics crunch was an arduous task, made more difficult because each King Quality branch had its own system. Some used software; others relied on pen and paper. But the time-consuming ordeal worked. By 2023, Brett’s business was already at $40 million in revenue.
But manual processes like this hindered the next stage of growth.
Then a few years ago, as King Quality was in the process of partnering with Vertex Service Partners, Vertex’s COO Jane Margolin visited Brett and his GM on a Wednesday, and was shocked when she saw the metrics marathon in action.
“What are you guys doing? You’re crazy!” Brett recalled her saying. And that’s when she first told him about ServiceTitan.
The software could instantly provide those same reporting metrics, and more, that he used to spend hours calculating.
A few years later?
“(ServiceTitan has) changed our lives,” Brett said. “That part of the business is off the table now. It's all pre-set. What's the margin? How many jobs did we sell? What was the closing ratio? It's all finished for us. We don't do any of it.
“I look back (at what I used to do) and laugh at my life.”
‘ServiceTitan takes that fear out’
After 30-plus years in roofing, Brett quickly learned that scaling was both something he wanted — and one of his biggest headaches.
“Scaling was so hard because you had to train (salespeople) so much,” he said.
In an industry where pricing and squares vary from roof to roof, Brett said it sometimes took years to train salespeople to accurately build an estimate that wasn’t priced too high or low.
“But (now), ServiceTitan takes that fear out,” Brett said.
That’s because the software automatically does the entire pricing process for his salespeople.
“What ServiceTitan does for salespeople is it trains them so much faster as experts where it took years prior,” Brett said. “Now they don't need to know how to do an estimate. They need to know how to do a roof or windows or siding. They need to know the best system — but they don't have to know how to price it because ServiceTitan does it all for them. It (presents) good, better, best options. It shows them everything. It really has been a game-changer for us.”
Brett touted recent ServiceTitan integrations and partnerships with Hover, GAF QuickMeasure, ABC Supply Co. and SRS Distribution as keys to making this whole process “so simple.”
And by eliminating one of his biggest headaches, there’s now much less friction when it comes to growth.
“(ServiceTitan) has made it simple and so easy to scale,” Brett said.
Especially in windows and siding.
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‘It’s actually easier than roofing’
For years, Brett was hesitant to scale the windows and siding portion of King Quality for the same headache noted earlier: Scaling meant training.
But soon after King Quality went live with ServiceTitan, he noticed that one of his salespeople sold a windows job.
“So I asked him, ‘How did you do it in ServiceTitan?’” Brett said. “And he goes, ‘What do you mean? It’s easy. It’s actually easier than roofing.’”
Brett quickly realized that pricing and building estimates within ServiceTitan easily translated.
Before ServiceTitan, Brett estimates the closing ratio on windows was “probably around 25-26%.” Now, Brett said the closing ratio has almost tripled to around “75% on windows.”
“We're crushing it with new salespeople who have never done this before and we can train them so easily because the pricing part of it is done,” Brett said. “It's just a matter of picking out the colors and picking out the rest of the product. How do we measure everything? It's done. It's finished using ServiceTitan.”
‘One big team’
Now that each King Quality branch is on the same system, Brett said he can easily monitor how each location is doing, or see which one of his salespeople are succeeding. He loves that every department is now synchronized under one software — from accounting to sales to the call center. He said it finally feels “like we’re one big team.”
Best of all, he no longer has to worry what day of the week it is. Recently, he and his GM were out to dinner, celebrating the top sales people — on a Wednesday night.
“And I looked at my GM and said, ‘Imagine this was three years ago. There's no way we could have done this.’”
