At Pantheon 2025, Lisa Shortridge listened from the crowd as speaker after speaker made the same, urgent point: small businesses have a short window to adopt new AI tools before larger competitors use them to pull away — for good.
"We're the small guy," Lisa thought to herself. "We have to defend against this."
Lisa is the Director of Operations and Learning at her husband’s family business — Harley's Heating & Air Conditioning, a 55-year-old, third-generation shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, with 13 team members. Matt Shortridge returned to run it in early 2024, bringing an unlikely résumé: a PhD in chemistry, years teaching thermodynamics and a background in biotech.
At the time, Harley’s revenue had slipped to around $1.6 million. The team was struggling, and his parents were ready to retire.
Matt was at Pantheon, too. That’s when he heard ServiceTitan CEO and Co-Founder Ara Mahdessian introduce Max. Max is ServiceTitan's most complete AI-powered package, built to automate a shop's entire operation — from how leads are captured and booked to how technicians are dispatched and invoices are closed.
"Can this really be the ticket to get us going?" Matt wondered.
By late last year, Harley's was in. Months later, they closed their first fully automated job.
The Job Nobody Booked
At first, Matt wasn't sure what had happened.
He was going through an equipment order when he came across a customer name he didn't recognize. Harley's had been around long enough that the names were familiar to him. He started tracing it back.
"None of us took that phone call," Matt said. "It was completely done by the AI Virtual Agent."
A brand new customer had called before 8 a.m., when the shop wasn't open. The virtual agent booked the appointment. Then Harley’s AI dispatching agent assigned it and bumped it to the first job of the morning. By 8:30, the technician was on-site.
"The first actual live person that touched that customer was our technician when he showed up on site and sold him the system," Lisa said.
From First Call to Final Invoice
Harley’s has had a few other fully automated jobs since then. Matt and Lisa love how Max's abilities flow from one step to the next.
"It is a very smooth process from first customer call through final invoice,” Matt said. “This is how a professional organization should run."
Marketing Automation: Before Max, Harley's 600- to 700-membership base required a lot of manual upkeep — such as staff hand-writing customer addresses on postcards. When Harley's ran its first automated marketing campaign this spring, pushing members to book their seasonal maintenance, the response was immediate. Harley's booked 250 appointments in three days.
AI Virtual Agent and Online Scheduling: That campaign generated more calls than Harley's could have managed alone. The online scheduling option absorbed much of the volume, and the AI virtual agent handled the rest. "I don't think we could have personally handled that number of phone calls," Lisa said.
Dispatch Agent: Before, Harley's ran on four rigid daily time slots. Anything that didn't fit piled up on a work-in list that often went uncompleted. Now the shop runs two four-hour arrival windows, with its dispatching agent handling routing and prioritization automatically. "(Our dispatching agent) has found a spot for everybody," Matt said.
With Max, technicians are completing six to seven calls a day — up from four — without adding overtime.
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Fighting Back
Harley's is on pace to hit $3 million this year — nearly double the revenue when Matt arrived. Replacement system sales have nearly doubled from this time last year. And despite dropping the plumbing division and switching to a lower-priced equipment line, Harley's is about $121,000 ahead of last year.
Max, Matt said, has delivered more than he expected.
"I was expecting a software company to sell a software, not a software company that was actually invested in our growth,” Matt said. “And that's what we've gotten (with Max and ServiceTitan).”
Matt said he’s enjoyed working in the family business and helping his parents retire. And as they’ve watched his success, he finds himself having the same conversation with them.
"I keep telling them…’The market just changed around you,'" he said. "(They) had a great business and kept it going for 55 years. It's just all these other people came into play and we haven't had the tools to fight back.
“And now we do."
