Understanding customers and opportunities key to big growth at Any Hour

In its 60 years in business, Any Hour Electric, Plumbing, Heating & Air in Orem, Utah, has gone from a small company founded by owner Wyatt Hepworth’s grandfather to one backed by private equity.

» Want to grow your business? Click here to get a demo

In the past six years, it has tripled its size, and from 2013 to 2018 its revenue increased almost 400% -- from $10.8 million to $37.2 million.

Originally Hepworth Electric when it was founded by Dwaine Hepworth in 1961, Any Hour now has 150 trucks, 165 employees and divisions for electric, plumbing, heating, air conditioning, drains, sewer and excavations. It touts itself as “big enough to maintain every system in your home, but small enough to stay in touch with our Utah market and our local Utah story.”

Joining ServiceTItan in May of 2020 has allowed the business “to really understand our customers and the opportunities we have,” in the words of Lincoln Walpole, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Office Operations.

“The ability to enhance revenue in the field is incredible,” Walpole said of the cloud-based software for the trades.

Walpole is a former investment manager who managed $2 billion bond portfolios and hedge funds. He and Hepworth had known each other, so when Hepworth asked him to join, Walpole took the plunge into what he calls corporate finance.

His knowledge of the financial world no doubt helped him deal with investors looking to offer private equity funding to trade companies. The company accepted equity money in July of 2021, and the senior leadership team received shares of ownership in the company. That has led the company to partner with other businesses of similar interests and goals that use ServiceTitan.

“We want to continue to grow at 20% to 30% a year,” Walpole said – in short order explaining why private equity firms are interested in the trades.

With ServiceTitan, Any Hour feels it has increased the visibility that private equity partners like.

“We wanted to join the best company as far as software is concerned, to maintain the brand,” Walpole said. He added that, because ServiceTitan is the industry standard, it made it easier to partner with a private equity firm. He said the same for Intacct, the accounting software that Any Hour uses.

Where have Walpole and Any Hour seen the most impact since adding ServiceTitan? In the way it allows technicians to be in complete communication with the office, allowing everyone to understand presentations in the field, jobs and completion of work.

“The ability to build and present options on jobs is awesome,” Walpole said. “That’s been a big deal, a huge deal.”

Among other benefits cited by Walpole:

Tags. “We use tags to let the technicians know exactly what we have found on the call. We use them for opportunities, we use them for the office, knowing when jobs are completed. We have completed job time, so to speak. It really runs the gamut of different things.”

Reports. Any Hour typically runs 40 reports each day. “Across different business lines, across revenue versus gross margin, versus job costing, versus number of calls taken on the phones, versus manual calls booked on the phones. I mean, we are running a lot of reports every single day. And a lot of those are scheduled reports that just come to our different emails.”

Dispatch board. “The scheduled reporting is very nice. The ability to do various reporting across the board has been awesome. The dashboard data is really nice as well.”

Efficiency. Walpole said the Any Hour’s expense as a percentage of revenue dropped after adding ServiceTitan, and continues to drop. He added that it has been “awesome” to view revenue compared to budget. “Because we have our own proprietary stuff that we're using in Excel and so forth, that really delineates the data very, very cleanly for us. But then we also are pulling reports all the time that show any calls that we didn't book. What can we do to make sure we get those booked, following up on those to save those calls. There's a lot of different things that we're pulling out of ServiceTitan to make sure that we're cleaning up everything at all times and getting every call accounted for.”

Integration. Any Hour’s onboarding was done by itself and not in a “class” with other businesses, but it was done virtually. Walpole was pleased with the result. “We did not lose any revenue when we went live. We really hit the ground running.”

The big picture? A business that has been able to gain a better understanding of itself and more important of its market, and a business that will continue to target the 30% growth it has seen the past several years.

“I think we have seen revenue increase,” Walpole said. “I don't know how much of it is attributed to ServiceTitan alone, but I think we've been able to really dive into our customer base, really understand our customers, really understand opportunities we have, especially as far as how we manage our customer base, because of ServiceTitan.”