The walls of Network Home Services in Sydney are decorated with 30-plus quotes, but there’s one favourite passage that’s made the biggest impact on business owners Scott and Vicky Irwin.
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed…Every morning a lion wakes up, it knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death…It doesn’t matter whether you are the lion or a gazelle—when the sun comes up you better be running.”
Summed up?
“There's no point in getting up and just wasting the day,” Scott said. “If you do, someone's going to overtake you.”
That’s the mindset that has shaped Network, from starting as a small plumbing-only shop in 1987 to now boasting more than 60 technicians along with electrical and HVAC services.
It’s the mindset that has driven the Irwins to always find better ways to serve their customers and improve their residential business.
That’s how they learned about ServiceTitan more than 10 years ago, and after many years of running, it’s how Network became the first business in Australia to use the cloud-based software solution for the trades.
The wait is over
The first time the Irwins heard the word ServiceTitan was at a U.S. trades conference more than a decade ago.
At the stand was Vahe Kuzoyan, co-founder and president of ServiceTitan, talking about the software to anyone who’d listen.
The Irwins were intrigued and swapped contact information with Kuzoyan—but even if they wanted to sign up, they were told it would take awhile for the software to make its way to Australia.
Instead, the Irwins used a popular Australian software to automate aspects of their business—but it had very limited dispatching, marketing and reporting capabilities, leading to many “grey areas,” Vicky said.
Simultaneously, Scott kept hearing about ServiceTitan from his tradie friends in the U.S. and how successful their businesses had become on the software.
“To me, it was always going to change the industry,” Scott said. “This is what you need if you want to go into the future and you want to actually build something to sell something. You need a product that can get you there, and that to me was going to be ServiceTitan.”
For years, Scott texted ServiceTitan’s co-founders asking them to expand to Australia. He even reached out to Tom Howard, owner of Lee’s Air in California and the VP of customer experience at ServiceTitan, pleading his case.
The answer was always a frustrating “Not right now.”
“Every work day, we would sit there with an issue with our existing software package, and I would go, ‘ServiceTitan—it's all we need,’” Vicky said.
Finally, after years of waiting and persistence, Network got a “Yes,” becoming the first Australian business on ServiceTitan in September 2022.
‘Push a button, get a report’
Right away, ServiceTitan got rid of the grey areas.
“(On our previous software), there were things that were being missed,” Vicky said. “There were jobs that weren't completed. There was material that was left on-site. There was a lack of communication. When technicians had finished, they just weren't putting the detail in that we needed.
“ServiceTitan gave us the ability to ask those questions so they couldn't progress to the next job without actually going through those areas.”
And that was just the start.
Marketing: With ServiceTitan, Network was finally able to track their marketing spend and understand “what campaigns work, and what campaigns didn’t work,” Scott said.
Reduced debt: Customer payments became so simple that Network saw its debt “reduce drastically.”
Happy CSRs: CSR conversion rates increased because ServiceTitan’s call recording feature offered additional, relevant and more focused training strategies.
Faster, leaner: Streamlined processes resulted in fewer admin staff—or admin staff moving to more profitable positions within the company.
Average ticket $$$: With features such as call-recording, the simplicity of navigating customer history, and easy-to-present good-better-best options, Scott said Network has seen around an “$800 average ticket increase.”
The best part? All of the above is easy to track, because ServiceTitan’s reporting features allow Network to access crucial data.
“(Pre-ServiceTitan), everything had to be done manually—everything. Even down to commissions that we might pay our technicians,” Vicky said. “We had to sift through every single job and work out what sort of profit there was. It was just so minute, but it had to be done.”
“And now, you push a button, you get a report,” Scott said.
Data is king
Scott Irwin doesn’t actually use ServiceTitan all that much—but all of Network does.
That’s why his favourite part of the software is that whenever he asks any team member across any department a question, he knows they’ll utilize ServiceTitan’s data to reply with a quick and accurate answer.
“That is gold for me,” Scott said. “And I know it's not a B.S. answer. That is my favourite part by a mile.”
In the last few years, the Irwins said ServiceTitan has allowed their business to grow faster and easier, better serve their customers, and beat their competition.
“It's given us the ability to go harder because now we understand where we should be putting our investment into,” Vicky said. “It's given all of the team leaders the ability to know what KPIs they need to focus on. It gives our marketing team the ability to know exactly where to spend the funds, where to actually invest and when not to invest.”
“It gives us the data to make the right decisions,” Scott said. “And that makes us winners or losers, or has the ability to.”
Put another way, it’s allowed Network to start every day like a lion or gazelle—and run fast.
