Richard Johnson spent 13 years building HVAC companies for other people. He led implementations, trained teams, and once onboarded four companies to ServiceTitan in a single year.
He helped grow one operation to $33 million in annual revenue — and then watched private equity take it in a direction he didn't like.
After his departure, he worked for a portfolio group, but he had an itch to do something for himself. He had lunch with a former colleague, one who’d been with him and watched something they’d built get away from them.
The colleague had the same itch. The conversation turned to starting something of their own, a locally owned business built on their terms, focused on treating the team and customers fairly and honestly.
His colleague's non-compete ended on Nov. 30, 2025. On Dec. 1, Viking Cooling & Heating was founded in Escondido, Calif.
Johnson’s strategy for turning Viking quickly into a disciplined operation is guided in large part by Titan Advisor on ServiceTitan, the cloud-based software for the trades.
Five months later, Viking operates in San Diego County with three trucks, a small and committed team, and a monthly revenue already approaching $150,000. A second location in Tucson is set to open in mid-2026.
Johnson had been using ServiceTitan for a decade across multiple employers, including in the software's early years — long enough that ServiceTitan once invited him to its offices to help improve the platform. He did not hesitate to bring ServiceTitan to Viking.
"I don't think any software is kind of a close second at this point," he said. "It's the most holistic software that you can have."
What Titan Advisor actually measures
Johnson thinks about ServiceTitan the way a contractor thinks about a service call — in sequence, start to finish. Titan Advisor, he found, is built the same way. The tool tracks activity across the full arc of a job, from marketing to payments and reporting, and converts the activity into a numerical score. Many ServiceTitan users, he noted, have never heard of it.
"There's a life of a job," he said, "and Titan Advisor kind of follows that — from call-taking, clicking the bubble, getting the email address, booking the call, having the technician dispatch to it. Are the alerts set up? Then it comes to price books. Are they using the price books? Are they giving multiple options? Then it comes to payment. Are we reviewing the invoices?"
At its core, the Titan Advisor score measures how effectively a contractor is implementing and maximizing the features within ServiceTitan.
And maximizing a Titan Advisor score has real-world consequences. According to ServiceTitan data, companies with Titan Advisor Scores in the top 50% averaged 26% revenue growth, compared with 19% for those in the bottom quarter.
Johnson is maximizing Viking Air’s score. He set a personal goal of reaching 200 within six months, then hit 203 within four months. That score is higher than 93% of similar businesses on ServiceTitan.
"The 200 score to me always kind of indicates, 'Hey, you're doing it pretty well,'" he said.
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Have a plan and stick to it
Viking Air’s method was deliberate. Rather than trying to maximize every category at once, Johnson followed the natural arc of a service call and used Titan Advisor as a checklist, working through each stage before moving to the next.
For anyone feeling overwhelmed by the breadth of the tool, his advice is simple.
"Focus on one section at a time," he said. "Take a bite of the elephant, one bite at a time. There's some setups where, once you get it done, you get five or six points right away."
And Viking is still scaling. Memberships — which generate their own set of Titan Advisor points — only became a Viking offering in late April. That’s more potential points. Johnson believes a score in the 240s is achievable, even without a full suite of premium add-ons.
Johnson won’t have to start over for new locations, though. ServiceTitan’s Enterprise Hub allows Viking Air to support multiple locations, using shared data, with the ability to clone configurations and log into any account within seconds. When the Tucson branch opens, it will be led by an operator who scaled a competitor's location from startup to $22 million in three years. The two locations will run independently while drawing on the same ServiceTitan foundation.
"You don't change ServiceTitan to fit you," he said. "You change to fit ServiceTitan. Once we did that, it made life so much easier."
That allows Johnson and his team to focus on the customers, the team, the next location, and the Titan Advisor score.
"The limit,” he said, “is what we allow ourselves to limit ourselves to do."
