For a long time, Kathy and Duncan St. Croix ran their plumbing business the way a lot of contractors do — by feel. You know when it's busy. You know when it's slow. You know when a good tech has a good week.
What you don't always know is why.
The St. Croixs own Mr. Rooter Plumbing of Greater Syracuse, a Neighborly company they've been building in upstate New York for 16 years. They have 14 employees and, over the past year, 21.2% revenue growth. They'll tell you the numbers didn't get better until they started paying closer attention to them.
"Learning how to manage our numbers," Kathy said, "and what is a booked call, what is a lead — making sure that our numbers are in ServiceTitan properly so we can manage it better."
That sounds simple. It isn't.
The call center is where it starts
For most trades businesses, the phone is the front door. Every call that goes unanswered, every lead that doesn't get booked, every abandoned call that nobody follows up on — that's revenue that left before anyone noticed.
The St. Croixs started paying attention to those numbers specifically. Close rates. Unbooked calls. Abandoned calls. They keep three CSRs on the phones and watch what each is doing.
"We keep track of their close rates," Kathy said, "and we make sure they're staying on top of that and listening to their unbooked calls."
ServiceTitan's CSR scorecard gives managers real-time visibility into incoming calls, conversions and booking rates for each agent — the same data the St. Croixs are now building their call center discipline around. When a call doesn't convert, it shows up. When a pattern emerges, you can do something about it.
Reporting to Neighborly — and to themselves
Being part of a franchise system adds another layer. The St. Croixs don't just track numbers for their own benefit — they report them up to Neighborly. That means the data has to be clean, consistent and organized in a way that holds up to scrutiny.
"We have Neighborly for their systems and the brand name," Duncan said, "and we have ServiceTitan for how to manage our business."
ServiceTitan's reporting dashboard lets owners track revenue and trends by day, week or month, sort transactions by business unit and compile stats in real time. For a franchise owner who has to reconcile their own operations with a parent company's reporting requirements, having one system that speaks to both is less a convenience than a necessity.
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Growth doesn't happen by accident
The St. Croixs are three Toolbox Live events deep now, after their latest in Glendale, Calif., in early 2026. Every time they come back, they said, they pull out something new from the Pro Products — a report they hadn't run, a metric they hadn't tracked, a feature they hadn't turned on yet.
"There's so many of them and there's so much to learn," Kathy said. "Every time we come here, we learn a little bit more."
Their 21.2% year-over-year growth is a number worth understanding. For the St. Croixs, it didn't come from a single decision. It came from learning, slowly and deliberately, what they were actually looking at.
