When Priority Heating, Cooling & Plumbing decided to build its own software a few years ago, general manager Jessica Short hoped it would modernize their processes.
They were still scribbling credit card numbers at job sites, mailing invoices and tracking down paperwork.
Short said pricing a project took "at least a week." And it often took 40-50 days to get paid, hurting cash flow.
So Priority, which primarily handles residential new construction in southwestern Ontario, partnered with a company to build their own software and solve all of these headaches.
But Short’s hopes fizzled fast.
“We spent three years,” she said. “It was a complete waste of time.”
Communicating with the company whose development staff was based in India was a challenge. Simple fixes sometimes took a week or longer to implement.
Worse, many of the improvements that Priority sought — more accurate job costing and easy access to a job’s history — wasn’t possible because Priority was too siloed.
“We were essentially four or five little companies,” said Brandon Humphrey, Priority’s sales and service manager. “Things were getting missed. It was horrible.”
Humphrey said, on multiple occasions, a work order for a gas line to an oven at a new home was overlooked until after the house was built. “Now we have to destroy a finished basement just to get the line through,” he said. “(We lost) so much money.”
No closer to solving their problems, Priority pivoted to a new solution.
“Finally, we kind of just went, ‘We’ve got to go to ServiceTitan,’” Short said.
Headaches vanish
ServiceTitan’s Project Management feature helped persuade Priority to make the switch, because it allows companies to separate plumbing and HVAC work under the same location for accurate tracking and billing within a single job.
While that feature was a game-changer, several other headaches that plagued Priority for years disappeared. For instance:
No more siloed information: ServiceTitan established a central database for all job history and customer information, making communication between departments (plumbing, HVAC, service) possible.
No more costly mistakes: The platform has removed "so much human error," said HVAC manager Aaron Kubassek. It directs techs to complete required forms and provide accurate job information, ending Priority’s days of destroying finished basements for repairs.
Better scheduling: Humphrey said scheduling was “a huge pain point” in the old system, which was "all pen and paper" and "all in the scheduler's head." ServiceTitan provides visibility into the entire schedule, allowing managers and dispatchers to see technician locations and coordinate multi-stage jobs (like rough-ins) between plumbing and HVAC.
Customer relations have never been better, Short said.
“Automated emails, booking confirmations, (notification of) techs being on the way,” she said. “That's been the biggest thing, I think — automation.”
Another subtle perk: Department heads always have an updated financial picture at their fingertips, improving accountability.
“Now we look at them as entrepreneurs or business owners in their own sense,” Short said. “Giving them a lot more autonomy to be able to run their own departments, more transparency in the books, has only been a good thing because they all take more ownership.”
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Paying for itself
The platform’s impact on billing and the bottom line has stunned management.
No matter how complicated the project, job costing numbers are ready as fast as the next day, allowing managers to identify issues and "readjust" (e.g., switch out an installer) mid-project.
Sending invoices has been reduced from five or six days to one or less, and they now get paid in less than a week.
And that lost paperwork?
“Now it's three seconds, just click, bam, there it is,” Humphrey said. “See the full history of everything, and billing that was getting missed.
“We probably have paid for ServiceTitan just in the missed billings that we've caught."
Best of all, unlike their prior software experiment, the Priority team views ServiceTitan as an investment in the company’s future.
“I think the companies that put their head in the sand, that stay stuck in the old ways, that don't move toward automation … will get left in the dust,” Short said.
