Preventative maintenance doesn't get much fanfare. Andrew Epp has seen firsthand.
Epp, now an industry advisor at ServiceTitan, spent years working in and around the construction industry, including four years as a key operator at Kraun Electric. Across that time, he watched shops chase the headline number — the $10 million project, the signed contract — while quietly leaving a revenue stream sitting inside the equipment they'd already installed.
"Preventative maintenance is not sexy at the end of the day," Epp laughed.
But the math tells a different story.
He’s seen a shop do $30 million in new construction, and in some years, only net $1 million in profit. A leaner operation runs $5 million in preventative maintenance (PM) contracts and nets the same.
The difference, Epp explained, is that PM contracts don't announce themselves. They come in at $100,000 at a time, handled quietly by one person, while the rest of the team is closing projects worth 10 times that.
Naturally, the focus goes to the large, headline-grabbing contracts. Not the PM contract.
"Why don’t we celebrate this at all? Because it was invisible,” Epp said. “The irony is that when you look at what actually matters — the profit — these smaller PM contracts consistently outperform.”
The Risk of Standing Still
That invisibility is disappearing. And for contractors who recognize what's at stake, equipment lifecycle intelligence is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a requirement to compete.
Here's the risk of standing still: the contractor who finished second on your last bid already knows what equipment is in that building. They know the maintenance schedule. And while you're chasing your next new contract, they're walking back in with a proposal in hand.
"If you don't have that ready," Epp said, "they're going to come in and take it from you."
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Where ServiceTitan Comes In
The antidote is data — and the ability to act on it automatically. ServiceTitan's equipment management suite is built for exactly this:
Equipment Systems: A centralized record of every piece of equipment installed at a job site — model, serial number, service history — accessible from the field or the office.
OCR Scanning: Technicians capture nameplate data on-site by scanning, eliminating the manual re-entry that once sent crews back into buildings for days just to build a baseline inventory.
Tasking: Maintenance tasks are automatically scheduled and dispatched based on equipment type and service intervals, removing the coordination burden that makes preventative maintenance feel like a chore.
Replacement Predictor: Uses equipment age and service history to surface which units are approaching end of life — turning reactive emergency calls into proactive, profitable conversations with customers.
Epp sees this as more than feature adoption. It's an operating philosophy. The shops treating ServiceTitan as a system for running a business — not just software — are the ones building the kind of customer relationships that a competitor can't walk in and take.
The equipment is already out there. The data is waiting to be captured. The margin is already on the table.
"How do you screw this up?" Epp said. "You can't."
Unless you don't utilize the tools you have to take advantage.
