Jeff Soch's phone rang just before seven on a Spring morning in Calgary.
He'd been on a job site and was heading to the office when his service manager, Daniel, got on the line with news that was anything but routine.
"Hey, I just got a call from (our technician) Max," Daniel said. "Somebody just stole his truck."
Soch is the general manager of Naiad Irrigation Systems, a commercial company he's helped grow from two vans to more than 30 vehicles over 15 years. He knew what a stolen truck meant — he'd been through it before, five times. File a report, contact the insurance broker, wait. Maybe he’d hear something in a week. Maybe he wouldn't.
This time was different.
"I very quickly looked at my phone to check for any alerts," Soch said.
Four days earlier, his team had installed ServiceTitan’s Fleet Pro GPS device — a small green unit plugged into the F-150 truck’s OBD2 port. Soch's first thought wasn't about recovering the truck. It was about whether the thieves had found the device and yanked it.
They hadn't.
Step by step, turn by turn
Soch told Daniel to pull up the Fleet Pro dashboard and get the police on the phone.
Fleet Pro pings every 30 seconds, feeding live location, speed and direction into ServiceTitan — the same platform Naiad already used to run their shop. They had tried previous GPS providers; none stuck because the software lived separately and nobody had the bandwidth to manage it.
Fleet Pro was different. And at this moment — after a tech turned on his truck and left it unattended when he realized he forgot something inside a house — it was actively solving a crime.
Daniel was on the phone with Calgary police, reading the map like a play-by-play. The truck was heading north. Turning east. Moving at this speed, through this intersection. The police didn't have to guess. They just had to drive. For 20 minutes, Daniel guided them in real time.
The truck pulled into a gas station. Police surrounded it. They said they’d take it from here and the call ended. Soch started an incident report and fired off a note to the insurance broker, who told him it was the strangest email he’d ever received.
“They'd never gotten an email about a vehicle being stolen that was actively being recovered at the same time,” Soch laughed.
But suddenly, the notifications started again: Rapid acceleration. Harsh cornering. Harsh braking.
"I looked at my service manager," Soch recalled, "and I said, 'They just ran.'"
Watching it unfold
The truck was on the highway, headed toward Cochrane — about an hour outside Calgary. Soch relayed the location to police, then did what the situation allowed: he watched.
Fleet Pro's dashboard showed the truck in real time. On the highway, the alerts quieted — the suspects were running but steady. In Cochrane's residential streets, they picked back up. Harsh cornering. Speed through neighborhoods. Heavy on the off-ramps.
"There wasn't a ton that we really could do other than watch," Soch said.
It lasted two more hours. Then the truck went down a dead-end road in Cochrane.
"We saw the ignition turn off," Soch said.
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‘Can't put a price on that’
In past thefts, that vehicle might have been gone for weeks. Or maybe they’d have to spend C$70,000 on a new truck. But Soch was able to recover it that day, and have it back on the road the next morning.
"(Fleet Pro) absolutely justified itself just from this event," Soch said. "Being able to have that vehicle on the road the next day — you can't put a price on that."
Soch also loves Fleet Pro’s maintenance tracking feature — because prior to using Fleet Pro, a brake job that should have cost $1,000 ballooned to four times that after the wrong truck got checked off in the shop records. Today, maintenance tracking is easy. Reminders come in, service gets scheduled, bills stay manageable.
And now, there's one new rule company-wide: if you leave the vehicle, take the keys and lock it.
"It doesn't matter if you're leaving for 50 seconds," Soch said. "It's just standard procedure for us now."
This story was assisted by ClaudeAI
